if you were singing the lines of someone else. he rarely acknowledge the audience or pause between songs. he seemed to be in a hurry to get off the stage. before long it all became too much. while touring in england dylan decided he was leaving an impossible life. the only talent he cared about in his ceaseless creativity was being ruined by fame. the breaking point probably came after a brief vacation in portugal where dylan came down with a vicious case of food poisoning. ..

straight at a new york city. of course, our story does not end here. bob dylan did not retire in 1965. after a few relaxing days in woodstock, just when he was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a familiar feeling. hard thing to describe. this sense that you have something to say. and so he did the only thing that he knew how to do. he grab pencil and started to scribble. once he began his hand did not stop moving for the next several hours. i found myself writing this song, the story, this long piece of comet. twenty pages long.

i had never written anything like that before, and it suddenly came to me that this is what i should do. vomit is the essential word here . dylan is describing with characteristic vividness the uncontrollable rush of a creative insight, the flow of words that cannot be held back. i don't know where my songs come from. it's like a ghost is writing a song. he gives you a song and he goes away. once the ghost arrived all still a wanted to do is get out of the way. in retrospect we concede his friend decomposition allowed in to fully express for the very first time the full diversity of his influences. and these lyrics we can hear his mental blunder at work as he mixes together scraps of brecht, guthrie, and johnson. the song is a modernist and pre modern, of want guard, and country western. what dylan did, and this is why he is bob dylan, find a thread

connecting these different voices. and as frantic first minutes of redding he found a way to make something new at of this to verst list of influences trying and together into a catchy song. when he gets to the chorus and knows it is the course as soon as he committed to paper, the visceral power of the song becomes obvious. how does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone, the following week on june 15th 1965 he brings his paper to the cramped space studio a at columbia records. after just four takes musicians are only beginning to learn their parts. like a rolling stone is cut on acetate. the six minutes of ron music would revolutionized rock and roll. bruce springsteen would later describe it as one of the most important moments of his life. the story, the reason i am telling you about bob dylan tonight is because it is a great story of insight, capturing a

moment. at times such stories can feel like romantic cliches, the sort of make believe breakthroughs that happened to archimedes and the bathtub. insights to happen. they are aged mental event. they are responsible for the theory of gravity and like a rolling stone. in recent years psychologists and our scientists have tried to understand the mystery of these moments. why these epiphanies come to us when they do. tens of their art to defining features of such moments. the first defining feature is that the answer comes out of nowhere, when we least expected, we buy our best songs we have given up songwriting. the second defining feature is as soon as the answer arrives it feels like the answer. the solution comes attached with this sense of certainty. we don't have to double check the math or read the lyrics. we know this is what we have been waiting for. at first glance it is not quite

clear how one could scientifically studied such moments because you cannot just put undergrads in the brain scanner and say have an epiphany. we are ready. that would be an inefficient way to collect data. instead what they have to do was come up with a way to generate lots of moments of insight on the fly. i'm talking primarily about the imminent northwestern. and what they came up with was a set of problems called compound promote a sissy problems. the acronym is a bit unfortunate . c-r-a-p. [laughter] i'm going to give you three words, and you have to find the fourth word that can form a compound word. with the first one together. pine, crab, and sauce. in this case the answer is apple. pineapple, crabapple, applesauce apple is the insight that pops into your head. you had a moment of insight. here is one for you. three words are age, bile, and

san. >> stone. >> of it happens that cricket is almost certainly end in sight. it pops into consciousness. you were not shy because you knew it was the answer. you don't have to make sure. you don't have to double check the words. you knew that this was it. right there we just had a collective moment of insight. now, the first thing discovered when they give students this compound remote assess the problems, a sharp spike in activity in a part of the brain called the interior superior temporal gyrus. a bit of cortex in the back of your right hemisphere just behind the year. a full that no one knows too much about previously associated with things called the processing of jokes, lights up when people hear a punch line and the interpretation of metaphors. this makes a little bit of sense. when watching romeo and juliet and romeo declares that juliet is the sun, we know he's not

saying that chile is a big fleming ball of gas. instead, we understand he is trafficking in metaphor. he's actually saying that she lights up his world the way the sun lights up hours. the way we make sense of that is not by making a list of all the things that they have literally in, because they have nothing in common. instead, we make sense by looking past the surface to similarities and looking for the underlying theme, the remote associations that they actually share. that is what it takes to understand the metaphor. a similar mental processes required whenever we tried to assault the compound remote assess the problem. we probably never use to bind, crab, and sauce and a sentence before. what this one area of the brain seems to be good at is finding that one other word which connects these three words. fines the thin, fragile thread of connection behind the seemingly unrelated nows, ideas,

associations. when you need a big breakthrough in the struggling with a very hard problem you're probably going to need some remote association. you will probably need to bind together ideas that seem completely unrelated, completely disconnected. that is where the interiors imperial tempura of gyrus comes to. the importance of this cortex and the back of your right hemisphere. second thing they discovered this when they heard people of 2neg machine, it's like wearing a big, bulky shower cap that measures the waves of a trustee pouring of of your head. and what did discovered in conjunction with the scientists at the university college of london, they could predict up to eight seconds in advance whether or not someone was going to have a moment of insight. so think how spooky this is. they could look it your each u.s. your wasting your time. you should just go home.

sit here flailing all day and won't have an insight. tickets a brace yourself. in about seven and a half seconds their is a pretty good chance he may have an epiphany. crucial question, what this predictive signal is. it turns out to be something called alpha waves. like most things they've remains mysterious, but there are closely associated with states of relaxation. reliably induce an outpouring of of the waves, things like taking a warm shower, going for walks on the beach, taking a nap on the couch and the sun, drinking a beer in a chair and watching television. whenever it is you do that puts her mind at ease and gets you to stop thinking about work much chances are involved the production of of choice. the reason relaxation is so important to is that when we are not relaxed and we are focused, when we are vigilant, out here, it's consumed by the noise of the world. we are obsessed with the problem. the problem itself, running like

a broken record. the wrong answer which is a big block sitting right at the front of consciousness. a common wrong answer is street. we can't get past three. and so as a result the problem seems impossible. a world, we are relaxed, taking a shower, shampooing our hair. alpha waves. finally turned the spotlight of attention inward. that is when at long last we hear that quite voice coming from the back of our heads from the interior superior to borrow gyrus whispering the answer. apple. apple. maybe the answer is been there for hours or days or weeks. we just didn't give ourselves a chance to listen. no, there is something a little counter intuitive. most people assume that when faced with the difficult problem what they should do is drink a triple espressos, chug red bull, do whatever it is they need to

do to stay focused, chained themselves to their desk, continue staring straight ahead. but this research suggests that is the exact wrong thing to do. instead, when we hit that block and the problem seems impossible, that is under should take a break; vacation, and drink a beer, go for a long walk. the answer will only a arrive after we stop looking for it. one of my favorite quotes from albert einstein. creativity is the residue of time wasted. we all have to get a little bit better and wasting time. now, i wish i could stand up here and tell you that the way to solve every creative problem was to take a lunch hour. that relaxation was a universal cure and that alpha waves were always the lot -- right approach, but that would be bad advice. as was famously observed and the creators have a vested interest and are believing in a flash of

revelation. the so-called inspiration shining down from heaven as a ray of grace. this is often . in reality all great artists and thinkers are great workers. to prove his point, he described beethoven's music, books which stuck into the composer's painstaking process of inventing a melody. it was not uncommon for beethoven to get through 70 different versions of a single musical phrase before settling on the final one. make many changes and reject and try again until i am satisfied. the lesson here is that even beethoven, the cliche of artistic genius, constantly refine ideas plus struggling with music and so the duty shown through. let's not sugar coat. this rejecting process is not fun. the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. nevertheless, such a merciless processes often our only way

forward. we keep on thinking and paying attention because that next thought might be the answer. so what defines this kind of creativity? it turns out to be largely defined by as psychological trait called great. g-r-i-t. when elected people on the far right side of the bell curve, at the creators like bob dylan, pablo picasso, steve jobs, at first glance it is not clear what makes them so special. give them an iq test and they will look pretty normal. often not smarter than the rest of us. give them a battery personality test. often not quite clear what makes them unique because they are pretty standard personality types, maybe a little more open to experience, but that is about it. and would argue, what defines these productive creators is these people we are also jealous of, they are prettier than the rest of us, more persistent and more stubborn. they simply refuse to quit.

i am reminded here fjk rolling who suffered through 12 rejections from publishers but kept on writing about this wizard in coffee shops when her little baby daughter napped. that's coming to me, defines great. now, the best way to explain the importance is a story about supermarket cashiers. in the early 1980's a psychologist decided to figure out which cashiers in the supermarket, which cashiers were the fastest. came up with this simple test that took ten minutes to complete. it gave people a basket full of items. take that as many of these items as possible in the next ten minutes. the maximal test. motivated to go fast. they want to perform well. you whole motivation. you want to see what people are capable of. what their cashier talent consists of, and i core nation.

he gave this simple maximal test, ten minutes to hundreds of cashier's. get the standard bell curve of human performance. some cashiers were much faster than others. some could check out a lot more items in this ten minutes. he thought about that. okay. i figured out which of the fastest. i found a way to measure the check us speed of supermarket cashiers. then he kept thinking about this problem and realized that at about this time electronic scanners are being introduced in supermarkets all across the country. well, if i got access to scanner data : not need to give this maximal test and take their time i could look at the data and see which cash used to get the most people over the course of a few hours or a day or week. he got access to the data. another bell curve of human performance. some cashier's check at a lot more people and a lot more items over the course of the typical working day. then he had the bright idea to

see if there was a correlation between these two bell curves. what he discovered, to his shock, the correlation was essentially zero. was statistically indistinguishable from nothing. there was virtually no correlation between on the one hand this maximal test, ten minute test of cashier's and on the other hand this measure of typical performance, how these cashiers' did when they did not think anyone was watching which is known as the typical maximal distinction. i would argue it is a pretty important problem. why? we live in a world obsessed with maximal test. the iq, s.a.t., determines in large part which college we compare to. we assume that when you want to measure someone's potential, there any talent, you give them a short quiz. in so many situations in example after example we often find that these tests failed to predict what really matters, which is performance in the real world, performance when it counts. the example of how the maximum

test fails comes from the nfl, which is this carnival of maximal tests that every player in the nfl draft has to go through. the 40-yard, vertical leaps, bins presses, the short version. and the assumption of nfl teams, a very reasonable assumption. players to do really well will do better in the pros because they have more any physical talent. better athletes. well, last year the university of utah decided to see if this was true, see if the come on predicted anything about performance and the pros. what they discovered is that the nfl, was a gigantic waste of time and money. that nearly every test failed to predict anything at all about performance in the pros. the sole exception was the 40-yard-for running backs. every other one told you nothing about typical performance. now, the reason they so often fail to predict what matters is because of what they can't

measure, and that is character traits like grit. the great is a new character trait first identified by a psychologist at penn. it really represents two separate things. the first is how committed you are to a gold. have you always wanted to write that novel, become an actor, solve this scientific problem? tuna, is that something that has long abscessed you? the second thing it tries to measure is when working toward that goal how stubborn are you? when you suffer through the inevitable failure and frustration, is that assignees should try something new or double down and work even harder? those of the two things that great attempts to measure. first pioneered at west point because they had this problem that every year during the first six weeks of west point, which are really tough, long runs, like a poorly, hair shaved, squishy citizen tartans soldier, 5% of first-year cadets had

dropped out and they have been trying to preach retention. nothing predicted it. it turned. she identifies, it's everyone this survey. you can take it on our website. the first test that allows them to predict retention and they have been using it every year since. since gone on to show that in so many different fields, so many different domains, 12 year-old stabbed at the national spelling bee the teachers to teach for america, great is just about the most productive variable you can look at. if you're trying to predict which 12 year-old will when the spelling bee, it's not the one with the highest i.q. with the best grades. it is the prettiest one. particularly important when it comes to creativity. creativity is never easy. if it were easy that a deal with already exist. would have already been invented, the book would have already been written. let's of failures, lots of grass, lots of iterations. it is never easy. woody allen has this great ."

creative success, 80 percent of creative success is simply showing up. well, great is what allows you to show up again and again. so far i have been attempting to describe these two distinct forms of creativity which depend on very distinct mental processes and the brain. the more practical lesson is that different kinds of creative problems into from different kinds of creative thinking. how to adjust our thought process to the task at hand. when should we daydream and take warm showers and when should we drink another cup of coffee? what requires relaxation, and what requires great? the good news is that these human mind is a natural ability to diagnose the problems, assess the kind of creativity that we need. these assessments have been eloquent name. they're call feelings of knowing they occur whenever we suspect that we can't find the answer, if only we keep on thinking about the question. one of my favorite examples is

when a word is on the tip of your time. a very frustrating mental moment. walking down the street and see someone. may be a distant acquaintance from high school or a remote friend on facebook. you know that you know their name, but you just can't quite place it. is always tells me. i hate it. it is also kind of profound. how do you know you know something if you don't actually know what? why are you so convinced that memories somewhere in here, you can't actually remember. this returns as to these very mysterious dealings, the tip of the time sensation. as annoying as it is, it is a hunch reminding you. if you just keep on searching for that name eventually you will find. eighty's somewhere inside your head. when it comes to creative problem-solving, feelings of knowing are really important. numerous studies have demonstrated that when it comes to problems that don't require

inside, the doe require one of these big remote associations, these epiphanies, the mind is remarkably accurate in assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved. reeking glance at the question and know that the answer is within our reach if only we put in the work. the end result is a free and motivate to stay focused. what makes these feelings even more useful is that the contest with the sense of progress. first demonstrated by janet metcalf. she had people working on various creative problems, whether or not they felt like they were getting closer or warmer to the solution. when the subjects were working on problems that were to be solved in moments of insight, they reported no increase in warmth until the answer suddenly appeared. it went straight from freezing cold to burning not. there was no feeling of knowing. in contrast, the problems that did require inside were typically answered only after people reported a gradual increase in want, which reflected their own sense of

progress. now, what is impressive and kind of amazing is that people were able to assess their closeness to a solution without knowing what the solution was. this ability to tax delayed progress is a very important part of the creative process. and we don't feel we are getting closer to the answer we have hit the wall, so to speak, we probably need an insight. in these instances we should rely on the right hemisphere which excels at revealing this remote associations, focusing on the problem will be a waste of mental resources. we will simply stare at our computer screen and repeat our failures. instead, find a way to relax. the most shrek thing that we can do is forget about work. however, when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we are getting closer we need to keep on struggling. we should continue to pay attention until it hurts, rely on those muscles. before long that feeling will become actual knowledge.

so far i have been talking about individual creativity, how we invent and how we should invent. i would like to spend my remaining time focusing on creative collaborations. these kinds of collaborations are becoming more important. best demonstrated by the work of bin jones, an economist at northwestern. data mind more than 20 million peer reviewed science papers of the course of the 20th-century. go back to the decades after world war two. the most important papers, the home run papers were almost always the product of a single author, a lone genius to all by themselves saw farther than the rest of us, shifted the paradigm . think of einstein, darling, people like that. fast forward to the 1990's and that is no longer the case. teams, co-authors, big, big

academic collaborations are now almost always responsible for the summer and papers. this trend seems to be accelerating by about 20 percent every decade. the reason this trend exists pretty simple. our problems are getting harder. all of the low-hanging fruit is gone, and many of the problems that remain exceed the capabilities of the individual imagination. we either learn how to work together or we fail alone. no, this raises the obvious question. how should we work together. when is the best template for group creativity. there is a lot to say on this subject. i can tell you. don't brainstorm. it is a very bad idea. i can tell you about sinking of the input of outsiders, these people who are able to see more because they know a little bit less. but today i would like to focus on a single theme, is successful group collaboration. the importance of spaces that bring a diverse mixture of

people together, physical spaces that bring us together. one of my favorite examples of this is the pixar studios. designed by steve jobs when he was the head of the innovations studio. the original plan called for three separate buildings. they bought this pitiful parcel of land. three separate buildings. one would be for animators, one for computer scientists, and one for everyone else and writers, directors, editors, so on. steve jobs took one look at these plans and said this is a terrible idea. instead, he insisted that there be only one big building. they actually had to keep the old factory that was on site. it's not enough to put people in the same building. you have to force them to interact, for sentimental. he carved up this beautiful a tram and started putting everything important to in the atrium, mailboxes, coffee shops, cafes, the gifts or.

he realized, even that is not enough. he built people a beautiful cafe in serves delicious food. the food is quite delicious. but, you know, computer scientists would still just talk with computer scientists and animators would have lunch with animators. they still would not be forced to share knowledge. the success of a company like pixar which consists of all these different cultures depends entirely on whether or not these different cultures contract, whether or not the animators are seeking to learn every day from the computer scientists and vice versa. so he had his big idea. only two bathrooms in the entire studio, and this is a big studio he put those bathrooms in the atrium. and at first everyone thought this was the worst idea. you know, it takes five minutes if you're walking from and tend to get to the bathroom. people thought this is so inefficient. and spending in our everyday walk into the bathroom. there has to be a more efficient way. now you talk to people and you

hear these bass from epiphany stories over and over again. the great conversation they had while washing their hands or the unexpected encounter that led to this new idea that they just wanted to the stranger while in the hallway walking to the bathroom. it is the human friction that makes the spark. ingenious, all about maximizing the human friction. now, there is some nice empirical support for this. it comes from a study led by isaac cohen here at harvard. sifting through 35,000 peer review papers by other harvard researchers mapping of the location of every single co-author. the physical location matters. when co-authors were located closer together their papers tended to be of higher quality, at least as measured by the number of subsequent steps -- subsequent citations. the best research was consistently produced when scientists were working.

in other words, our most important new ideas don't reply on the screen but from idle conversation, too many people sharing too small a space. i think there is little surprising about this. you go back 15 years. people constantly declaring that depth of geography. thanks to all these wonderful new tools, e-mail, skype, video chat that we no longer need to live in cities, we no longer need to commute to office buildings. we could all live in the excerpts, nuys, green lawn and telecommute. so much easier. that hasn't happened. instead, the opposite. cities are more valuable endeavor more people are moving to cities. one of my favorite factoids is that since the invention of state attendance at business conferences has nearly doubled. when we can interact and share

information remotely we have this intuition that we have to meet in the flesh. we have to have those incidental conversations, those random encounters. all these on-line tools, not against them. they are wonderful. i use them all the time. we are about maximizing efficiency creativity is about serendipity which still requires accidental encounters in the flesh. ..

those defensors. one of my favorite boings -- companies and cities. he enjoys from a certain perspective companies and cities look very similar, right. they're large e glom rations of people. big clusters of people. west point at the companies and cities exhibit one very interesting difference. which is that cities never die. cities are indestrectble. you can nuke a city and comes back.

fortunate 100 company the huge multinational firms that we can't imagine life out. it's 45 years. they die all the time. 25% of what explains the difference. why are companies so fragile? that's one explanation. [laughter] west takes a sloitly different tactic. what he found is that as cities get bigger, they exhibit the this very interesting trend called super linial. everyone in that city becomes more productive. they make more money, they invent more patent, more trademarks. when people move to bigger cities and when the cities get bigger they become more productive. this is one of the big trends driving urban decision. 80% of the world will live in big metropolitan areas.

when we are around other people we have random conversations while waiting for coffee, all the spill overs every once awhile all the bumps add up. they lead to a good new idea. companies exhibit the opposite trend. as companies get bigger, they exhibit sub linear scaling. everyone in the company becoming less productive. less profit per capita. less profit for employee. fewer trademarks per employee. over the long run it's a dangerous trend. you keep on getting bigger. wall street says so you to get bigger. grow the bottom line. you get the bigger fixed cost. you're coming up with fewer new ideas with every new employee. you become more and more dependent on the older ideas.

why are cities super linear. why do they make us smarter and more creative? why do companies do the opposite. companies get in the way. they erect wall, they file knowledge. they tell us to brainstorm. they emit the -- micromanage the creative process. and that's a bad idea. that interferes with the ram come joss les and conversation that lead to good ideas. cities on the other hand, are the free wheeling chaotic places. they don't try to interfere. they let us do a thing. mayor isless powerless person. we have the bumps.

we have the friction. ceo get paid millions of dollars to manage us. the thing about the creative process, it can't be managed like that. the advice is simple. when in doubt, imitate the city. in closing, i'd like to point out that the imagination as really always seemed like a magic trick of matter, which is probably why we've blamed our best idea on the. ed the good news by finally understanding what it creativity comes from where new ideas come from we is can have a few more of them. we can make ourselves a little bit more creative. we must be honest. the creative process will never be easy. no matter how much we know about neurons and cities. can't be summarized in a subtitle. if were creativity that easy bob

dylan won't be that face mouse. the most essential tal let remains the most mist tiers you. the -- imagine the inspieshed by the every day world. by the flaws and beauties. we are able to see beyond our sources to imagine things that only exist in the mind. there was nothing, now there is something, it's almost like magic. thank you so much for your time and attentions. i thank you for coming. i have some time for questions. thank you very, very much. thank you. [applause] thank you very much. [applause] two microphones for the question and answer period. please raise your hand if you have a question and wait for the microto come see you. we'll take our first one. >> hi. you make very excelling arguments and you're really funny. good evening. regarding brainstorming, i

haven't read the part yet where you disprove it. i heard you on npr, but i my experience in the corporate brainstorming was that the it was the beginning collaboration, i mean if you sit there and put things on the board and leave, yeah. but if it's the beginning of a way of doing am beans or having an ambience of creativity or openness. there's some clap ration. would you comment on that? >> it's a good point. if one views brainstorms as a moral booster as a way to put it foster a more communal on bee yans in the office. in favor of. it. if it's a feel-good technique. that's great. too many people use brainstorming as an idea generation task which is how it was originally pitched and sold. brainstorming was invent by an ad executive don draper of the day. the serious of best selling

business books, he outlines amazing new group creativity technique called brainstormings. two simple rules, whatever you do you don't criticize. the imagination is meek and chief. it will clam up. it won't be able to free associate. quantity over quality. according to osbon, the two simple rules they were the best way to generate new ideas in group. now, as i try to point out in boot. book the evidence on brainstorming is clear it has means of getting good ideaen 0 right board doesn't work. that people in study after study come up with better ideas when they work alone on the problem than what they come together and brainstorm as group. brainstorms turns thelessness of some of our parts. it doesn't work gets us back to the rule throw shall not

criticize. that constructive criticism is good for us. that it unleashes the imagination. when you bring together groups and you have one group engaging brainstorming and other engage in what she calls debate and decent. you encourager those to debate and consent. these have the subjects do stuff like come up with traffic in the bay area. those in the condition come up with more idea and the idea are better. the reason debate and decent seems to be a good thing from the perspective of the imagination is that, you know, when we're just free associating by ourselves and all ideas are good ideas there is no sit yifm. schism. we tend to skim along the superofficial. most of our free association are pretty -- if i ask them to free associate on the color blue.

the first answer will be green follow by ocean and sky. if you're creative you might get to pants. but our free association are boundly language and it's full of cliches. when people in are in a group which is engaging in debate and decent. they dig a little bit deeper. they're fully engaged listening to other people. they're awaib. and that's a good thing. that means we're going to come up with better ideas and take advantage of the fact we're not working by ourselves we're work in a group. as a means to get people to spend time with each other. that's great. as an idea generation task, i think it needs to be replaced. >> we have a second one other here. >> thank you. my name is daniel. what is your opinion on the merges of [inaudible] especially in the bay area.

how do they foster creativity or -- how can may maximize? >> i think it is a great idea. hay build on a long standing tradition until silicon valley and bay area. one of the jeffrey found in the data mining in the cities silicon valley has for decades ever since the end of world war ii has been an creative place. back when the san jose region was apricot farms. he was collecting. he doesn't know how to explain it. one of the explanation is that you know, san jose has been great at fostering good horizontal bringing together people from different companies, different do mains to, you know, have beers and cafes and like the home group computing club is a classic example. the club where steve jobs convinced the laws to launch apple. and they brought their early prototypes of the first apple computer to the computer clean up and slice slice -- when

2k078s to i think they do the same thing at the accelerated pace. one of the lessons one gets when you're trying to figure out why do some entrepreneurs what's the secret sauce successful ones. what separates them from the less innovative ones. one of my favorite studies of down by martin the issuologist at price ton. he tracked graduates who had gone on to start their own companies. what he found with the entrepreneurs the entropic social nesh. a diverse group of friends. if they were a dpiewter programmer, do they hang out with other computer programmers who went to stanford. they made time to spend time with microbiologist who came from somewhere else. lek trail engineers -- used different acronyms. those with entropic diverse

networks were three times were innovative than those with predictable networks. how much money they made from the patents. one things they do is that they force us to mingle with people from all sort of different places who know different things and expose us to lots of different ideas. jobs has the great live of creativity is connecting things. some of the connections are going to come from other people. it's so important to seek out diversity and intent yule diversity. >> we have one up here. thanks. i wanted to maybe follow up on the previous question about brainstorming. and that's, if you could say maybe something more about the emotional environment because what i have heard is that if this do not criticize part of brainstorming, is a about

reducing the fear level, because you can engage in dissent and debate but if there's a level of fear or intimidation or authority that cuts it off. >> yeah. you know, this is a real problem. and, you know, don't think there's a neat answer to this yet. i saw this firsthand at pick czar. it is a famously critical place. they're about interration. they begin most of the days sort of what they call the colleagued meeting. they review footage from the days and weeks before. the large group can be five to fifty people. they proceed to deconstruct it. to find ways to make it better. it's not a classic brainstorming session. it is about criticism. finding the flaws and fixing them. and that's often a difficult process. sometimes you're going to get the feelings hurt. sometime that's going to involve be being a little bit scared. i don't think there's any company master the approach yet. they try to use the approach they called plussing.

which is criticize an idea you can't tear it down. you have to find a way to make it better. they borrowed it from improve. the yes, sir in technique. that helps. it's one way to reduce the fear level. and yet, it's not panacea. you're going to have moments when you probably lose some ideas to that inevitable anxiety. you don't want to get cries criticized. there's a lot of work that remains to be done in how to replace brainstorming how to replace a corporate culture that isn't intimidated. so i'm trying to honest. i don't think there's a clear answer yet. that said, i mean i do think we also need to be honest that creativity requires tradeoffs. it would be great if we could go into a room and no one's feelings would be hurt and we would be effective. it would be great if we could be creative and not walk ten minutes to the bathroom. one of the things pixar

sometimes you're going get to get l feelings hurt. one of the favorite quotes from the director of toy story three. too many companies they're obsessed with not failing. they equate success with the absence of failure. the secrets of pixar. we know that pixar knows that creating anything worthwhile is going to involve lots and lots of failure. that's a great bob dylan lain. pixar fail as fast as possible. how? well, by identifying those failures quickly. that's where criticism becomes essential. the goal of the group so not minimize fear. the goal of the group, the reason people come together. the reason they collaborate is to identify those failures to interrate those failure, repeat that process for four and a half years. maybe in five years, and end of it you have a good 90 minute

cartoon. it's going to involve unpleasant moments too. >> we'll take one last question here. >> hi. i've heard it said that the u.s. educational system is good at fostering creativity compared to other countries. i'm wondering for you think that's true. if so, how does it? what's good about it? and also, what could be improved ? >> in general, i'm set skeptical of the big general asians of which are good and which aren't. especially trying to trace it back to the educational system. there's so much to learn. we don't know how to measure creativity. that's why if we isolate steve jobs in a brain scanner or bob dylan. we'll be befuddled. you look at albert einstein and his brain looks normal. it's tough to make the cross

cultural generationlations. in terms of the whether the u.s. education system is good at tbosserring creativity, i'm not sure i go there, unfortunately. i think that -- i think we're good at killing it. you know, the good news about teaching kids craft is that kids are born creativity. that we are all born, you know, just wanting to draw. wanting to put the mind on the page. to express what's in sides of here. you hear the reference to the fifth grade slump. kids lose the interest in respondent contain use creation in drawing, painting and, you know, writing poets and short stories. that's because it seems to be because it's about the age they realize one can make mistake. you can draw the wrong line opt page. you can. bush the wrong place. what they're putting on the page doesn't live to the expectations. i think we have to do a better

of focusing on fourth and fifth grade. saying we have to focus our energies here and make sure we don't kill creativity. it's not lost during the transaction. that kids continue to innovate in sixth the grade. that's one thing we have to do. i think we have to in terms of how we should change our educational system. you have to expand the notion of what productivity likes like. we have the narrow vision of you know, what it means to be a good thinker. that's focus. that's the to stare straight ahead. stop staring, focus, focus. many tasks and situations focus is essential, but when it comes to creativity, i think we have to be honest. it's going to involve lots of waste the time. it's going to involve lots of daydreaming and talking out of turn. the hard problem, of course, is how to incorporate that into the classroom.

i would not want a bob dylan in my classroom. that would make life a lot more difficult. but i think if you address it in fostering creativity, in coming up with a culture that is more craft. we have to learn how to embrace people who think differently. there are interesting studies on adhad which is a disability and many instances deserved to be treated. when you look at high functioning people with ad dwrks and adhd. they are more likely to be become creativity achieves. it's true at the whole range of the spectrum. people live with low laden ambitious. they are the descrabted. they can't help but look up when the air come on. they can't but help by ease drop. they summed away by over here and here. we tend to see it has a liability. it's harder to focus harder to

concentrate. it is work done by harvard in trorn tow. he found that the people with the low laden ambition are seven times more likely to be creative achievers. his explanation when you're a little bit of distractable. most of the times the distractions are going to be a waste of time. you're going see it and hear it and bring it here. there will be no relevant qebs. your job, this is where it helps to be mart is get rid of it. one of those distransactions, the you gravitate you can't help but take into thability it's going to lead to a new good idea. i think one of the things we have to do as the society as a culture is really there is no single way we should be thinking. that sometimes what we need to do, is day extremely. is simply stear at the window. that is when the best idea will arrive. thank you so much for listening.

thank you so much for coming tonight. thank you so much. [applause] non-fiction author or book you'd like to see featured on book tv? send us an e-mail at book tv at c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/book tv. if we look at the 18th century, journalism started off in the country in 1704 as a very, piewny, and unimpressive kind of imbrices. the first newspapers were very small, had circulations in the dozen and maybe in the low hundreds. they were intimidated by the other institutions in that society especially church and state. and compared to them, these up up newspapers were not at all important, and, you know, very much under the thumbs. but what you see over the next course of the decades is a process by which the newspapers

become increasingly political in what they focus on, and they get to be bolder and bolder for reasons i go into in the book. so that by the 1760s and 1770, they are in full throat expressing themselves on all kinds of political issues of the day on independents from bit tan or reconciliation with the mother country. if we break, what kind of government should we have? all the huge questions. and the press becomes quite -- it's often the products that are people are reading are often produced anonymously or by people who don't want to be known as political partisans. and that's the -- the nature of the press that the founders were familiar with. that press was very local, it

was small scale, and it was very pan lemic. most of those newspapers had very little what we would think of as original reporting, you know, of non-fiction material. the staff had generated. it was not in the cards. as we see, you know, a return to a more pan -- it's not something that, you know, is unanticipated or doesn't fit into this constitutional scheme. who invented reporters? because we tend to think of reporters and journalists as sin noms. that was not -- >> the not at all. it it wasn't until 1830s again here's in new york city. another really inventive journalist named ben day created the first penny press newspaper. sold it for a penny a copy.

so he was going way down market. trying to reach the broadest possible audience. to do that he needed to fill it up with surprising amazing things everyday. fires, news from the police stations, dockings of ships anything like that he could find. he wore himself out trying to fill the paper, and so he hired the first time reporter, a man named george wizner, who was a regretly on secure figure in american journalism history. i'm going to try to do something about that. >> when did journalism become a business? that is, that the period you're describes in the colonial period, it doesn't sound like -- how it did it support itself then? >> most of those newspapers were created by people who were really in another trade. they were printers.

and in order to keep their print shop busy, in order to bring their customers into the shop to pick up the papers, so they could sell them some stationary on the side or sell them a book while they were in there. they came -- they hit upon the imrd of a newspaper as perfect device. it expires every week, and later every day was the once the pace picked up. and so most of those first enterprises were sidelined of someone who would we would think of as a job printer. someone who is hope to printing all kinds of stuff from anybody who had business. and then it's really around that revolutionary period, certainly the early federal period where you see that sideline disappears and the newspaper itself become the real focus. the first daily paper in the country is founded in 7183 once the cities get to be a certain density and there's enough commerce and population, then in

that early part of the 19th century they get going and take off in 1830s. that's when it's fair to say from the first time that journalist is a business. >> yes. it's clear by then. yeah. >> you can watch this and other programs online at book tv.org. coming up next on book tv. nikki haley recounts her life in political career. he was elected the first female governor in 2010 in north carolina. her parents immigrate to the u.s. describes her childhood as a prejudice her family faced. it's about forty five minutes. [applause] >> thank you, arthur. it's a privilege to be here. i noticed at this time yesterday, you were on the view being questioned by joy. hopefully we can elevate things a bit.

>> quite the experience, i will tell you that. >> exactly. it is a privilege to be here in part because it's a wonderful book. arthur touched on your personal story. i brought with me two of my daughters today. because i think it's so important for all of us to be able to spend times with strong competent leaders and because i think that your experience really puts the lie in my ways, to the notion that there's a republican war on women somehow. but, i want to start with a story you tell in the book about your run off and in the general election when you were running for governor. and you talk about one your opponents attorney general mcmaster. and the extent to which you're battle was over with him in the early stages in the primary. you called him and told him you admired his fight, which is a phrase i loved. what i liked is how he began introduces you at the campaign

events. you describe it in the book, you say henry would introduce me if i was headlining a con center. qoalt, as the poet tom petty would say, with his voi rising you did can stan her up at the gates of hell and she won't back down. i thought you could start by talking about where your spirit to fight comes from. and your spirit to stand up and do what's right. >> everything good about me i got my parents. everything negative about me came from other places. but i will tell you, you know, i started every speech, i continue to say i'm the proud daughter of indian parents that reminded us every day how blessed we were to live in the country. we came, i was foreign in a -- i was born in a small southern town. 2500 people. my father in a turban. the small southern