Of all the things that make human beings unique, one that gets overlooked — literally — is the shoulder. It turns out that the shoulder altered the course of human evolution by giving us survival skills we never could have imagined without it.
— G.K. Chesterton — Writer
— [Nassim Taleb]: — Author, Distinguished Professor
At times, when pressure mounts and you have to meet impossible deadlines, you set creativity aside and take the easy way out; you revert to cliches, breeziness, and other cheap tricks. After awhile, it becomes a habit and your integrity as a writer wavers. You become a hack. While the exact formula for creativity remains elusive, learning when, where, and how you are in the various stages of the creative process will help you get “in the zone” when you need to, and with practice, bring inspiration within your reach to get you out of that dreaded mediocre rut (or rot).
There are generally five stages in the creative process: First Insight, Saturation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. The duration for each phase may vary, depending on the person, the idea, or the material.
There’s a ruinous misconception that a Ph.D. must be smart.
This can’t be true.
A smart person would know better than to get a Ph.D.
“Smart” qualities like brilliance and quick-thinking are irrelevant in Ph.D. school. Students that have made it through so far on brilliance and quick-thinking alone wash out of Ph.D. programs with nagging predictability. Let there be no doubt: brilliance and quick-thinking are valuable in other pursuits. But, they’re neither sufficient nor necessary in science.
P.S. Not just good advice for people in grad school.
Goal-setting, planning, organizing and accountability structures are often touted as the big solution to demotivation and the silver bullet that will get you creative and productive again, but notice that it’s only a useful strategy for dealing with some types of demotivation. With many other types of demotivation, goal-setting, planning, organizing and accountability structures will only make your demotivation problem worse.
I think four factors explain most kinds of performance.
- You are motivated
- You’re assigned a task you’re both confident in and challenged by
- You are well led and working for someone who respects you
You are working with people you trust
The surprise is how rare in most people’s working lives are all four at the same time. Or even three of the four.
Here are four amino acids that particularly work to improve energy and mood:
(All the dosages below are based on Julia Ross’s recommendations in her books, which I highly suggest reading before embarking on an amino acid therapy program. Remember it is always best to start with a small dose and increase as needed.)
“Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well,” Hamming says. “They believe the theory enough to go ahead; [but] they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory.”
This is perhaps the most important advice from among Hamming’s many suggestions. The path to excellence requires this balance between confidence and doubt, and though this balance is challenging, it’s tractable so long as your recognize what you’re facing.
