Failure, Rejection and Doubt can be the Fuel for Creative Thinking
Somewhere in first-century Judaea, a wealthy man prepares for a long journey. Before he leaves, he summons three servants and divides his fortune among them: five talents to the first, two to the second, one to the third — "to every man according to his several ability," as the King James Version puts it. Then he departs, apparently without leaving a forwarding address.
Descartes proved you can't picture a thousand-sided shape, and promptly demoted imagination to the mind's cheap seats. From Aristotle and Kant to brain scans and brick tests, this post argues he got it backwards: creativity is what makes us human.
The brain cannot leave raw information alone. Given a scattering of dots, it draws lines between them. Given noise, it hears a voice.
A story, which opens Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, is where I want to start, because it captures something a fourteen-month due-diligence process is structurally incapable of noticing about itself: it can be flawless and still be answering the wrong question. Logic needs the “gut” to decide…
