Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.
Alan AldaRead
If you know what you're looking for, that's all you'll get - what's previously known. But when you're open to what's possible, you get something new - that's creativity.
Interpretation
Being open to possibilities fosters creativity, while focusing only on known outcomes limits you.
This quote by Alan Alda emphasizes the importance of maintaining an open mind in the creative process. When individuals restrict themselves to what they already know, they only encounter familiar results. In contrast, being receptive to new ideas and possibilities allows for the emergence of innovative and original concepts, which is the essence of creativity.
In practice
In a workshop on innovation, using this quote can encourage participants to embrace new ideas.
Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.
Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself.
Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.
I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn't know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.
I was in a taxi the other night, and we started talking about life and the taxi driver goes, 'Chaos and creativity go together. If you lose one per cent of your chaos, you lose your creativity.' I said that's the most brilliant thing I've heard. I needed to hear that years ago.
I think that in order to struggle you have to be creative. In my life, creativity has been something that has sustained me; it awoke my spiritual struggle.
Never say no to an idea - you never know how that idea will ignite another idea.
This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
I have a lot of confidence, but little Self-Esteem. This has given me a tremendous creative spark because it forced me to keep proving myself.
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