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The Psychology of Creativity
Through a series of interviews of creative people, “Creativity” by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interrogates the similarities between the character traits of creative people, and common threads of how people approach creative work.
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Making Creativity a Habit
Tharp, an accomplished and celebrated choreographer, draws on her career to share stories, prompts, and ideas about how artists can make creativity a habitual part of their lives.
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Creativity and Flow
I came to Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, thinking that I already knew what it was. A fairly dense, though canonical and oft-cited academic work on the psychology of the “flow state”: that rare, almost reverent state of creativity in which the practitioner is totally immersed in what they’re doing. In this “flow state,” as I…
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Seth Godin’s provocative call to just ship it
I recently finished reading The Practice: Shipping Creative Work: the latest book from Seth Godin. In case you haven’t heard of Godin, he’s the marketing guru that famously publishes short thought-provoking blogs daily, and sends those blog posts as emails. In the book, Godin sets up the idea of creativity as a deliberate practice, one…
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Thoughts on creativity from John Cleese
I picked up John Cleese’s newest book, Creativity: a short and cheerful guide, on a whim. I’ve started blogging about creativity, so it seems like a handy thing to read a book about the topic from a master comedian, right? The subtitle “a short and cheerful guide” does not overpromise. At just over 100 pages,…
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Creative leadership, the Pixar way
I’m a huge fan of Pixar films, and six years ago, while heavily pregnant with my second son, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit their studio. The campus is incredible; secluded and beautiful, with a good balance of small spaces to encourage focus, and large common areas to foster collaboration and…
Tess Needham
Creativity enthusiast
Tess Needham 