How to sculpt an environment that optimizes creative flow and summons relevant knowledge from your long-term memory through the right retrieval cues.
Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. (Even Buk himself ended up sticking to a peculiar daily routine.)
Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful.
Okay, I’m listening. Prove it.
And Popova does. Just please skip right on to her full piece as it is a simply absorbing piece that flies so quickly that it disguises just how much information is in there.