Today's liberal arts institutions are anything but liberal and hardly acknowledge, let alone honor, the arts and the role of creativity.

There's something to be said for education and the arts, specifically 'liberal arts education,' which has mutated to a grotesque degree from its original conception. When it comes to education, curiosity shouldn't be a guilty pleasure. In a way, failure-or at the very least allowing for the possibility of failure-is what takes arrogance out of the creative process, which allows it to become just that-a process-rather than a rigid, preconceived blueprint that takes us just where we expected to go and nowhere else. Which is something the creative ego has a hard time allowing. This sounds like a worn cliché, but is in fact quite hard to do for many creative people because it means we need to learn to be uncomfortable and, possibly, terribly wrong. Finding new, better, smarter ways of doing or thinking about things means letting go of the old, of the familiar, of our comfort zones. Creativity is cartography for the land of ideas-mapping new, better routes for how things fit together in the broader context of culture and society.Ĭontrary to how much of the creative industry operates-from the notorious artist ego to the award-lined shelves of prominent designers-true creativity and innovation require the dissolution of the ego, which in turn necessitates the admission of the possibility of failure. It's a kind of pattern-recognition that is only possible if one has a broad, cross-disciplinary view of culture, constantly probing how different pieces fit together. Mostly, a creative life is one of perpetual and indiscriminate curiosity about the world and its many facets. To consistently allow yourself to be uncomfortable, to be incompetent and, in the process, to learn. In a way, it means to be intellectually restless. It is completely contingent upon the depth, breadth, and diversity of these cognitive micro-resources-the more pieces we have, and the more disciplines they span, the stronger, richer, more impactful our creative output will be. Ĭreativity is simply our ability to combine all the existing pieces in our head-memories, ideas, knowledge, inspiration-into incredible new things.

What follows, in her own words, is Popova's take on creativity, curiosity, and culture. According to her twitter profile, Maria Popova is 'an interestingness curator & semi-secret geek obsessed with design, storytelling & TED.' The editor of Brain Pickings-a website that covers design, music, anthropology, ecology, politics, religion, and anything and everything in between-Popova has also contributed to WiredUK, GOOD, and.

Maria popova figuring