John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged creativity · everything

Fast Company

Companies fire employees for these personality traits, but maybe they should be getting bonuses

Rather than treating nonconformity as a liability, companies desperate to innovate should actively recruit and strategically integrate "Rare Breeds"—rebellious, obsessed, audacious individuals whose refusal to accept conventional wisdom drives breakthrough thinking. These misfits, whose traits parents and bosses once derided as character flaws, need careful organizational management to channel their disruptive energy without destabilizing the broader team, but their presence fundamentally shifts how an organization thinks about problems and risk. The article argues that innovation isn't a mystery but rather the direct result of prioritizing unconventional talent over cultural fit.

Permalink cultureleadershipcreativitybusiness

James Clear

The Weird Strategy Dr. Seuss Used to Create His Greatest Work

In 1960, Dr. Seuss won a $50 bet by writing an entertaining children's book using only 50 words, resulting in *Green Eggs and Ham*, which became one of the best-selling children's books of all time. The piece argues that constraints—whether limits on words, time, money, or resources—actually enhance creativity and productivity by forcing you to find innovative solutions and preventing procrastination, rather than hindering your work. By reframing constraints as the "size of your canvas" rather than obstacles, you can focus on executing excellent work within whatever limitations you face.

Permalink productivitywritingcreativityadvice

Boing Boing

Alex Murrell

The age of average

# Summary The article argues that across virtually every creative field—from architecture and interior design to fashion, film, branding, and personal appearance—a homogenizing aesthetic has taken over, with everything converging toward safe, indistinguishable mediocrity. Drawing examples from the "AirSpace" style dominating coffee shops worldwide to the rise of "Instagram Face" among influencers, from five-over-one apartment blocks to flattened corporate logos, the author demonstrates how optimization, globalized inspiration sources, testing-driven decision-making, and consolidation in creative industries have eliminated distinctiveness. The piece concludes that this "age of average" paradoxically presents an opportunity for bold companies to stand out through originality, since breaking from convention now offers genuine competitive advantage.

Permalink designminimalismculturecreativity

Fast Company

4 ways AI can improve your thinking

Rather than using AI merely to automate routine tasks, this piece argues for leveraging it as a tool for deeper thinking and creation—such as using it as a devil's advocate to stress-test decisions, building personalized learning curriculums, generating visual concepts iteratively, and creating custom tracking dashboards without coding. The author provides specific prompts, recommended tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Ideogram), and practical examples of how each approach can slow down work to challenge assumptions and build new capabilities rather than just work faster.

Permalink productivityaicreativitylearning

www.ian-leslie.com

The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back

Ian Leslie argues that [[Peter Jackson]]’s decision to present [[Get Back]] as an eight‑hour chronicle transforms what could have been a tidy highlights reel into an anthropological study of creative life. By lingering on the drab [[Twickenham]] studio, the messy, windowless basement and the quotidian rituals of [[The Beatles]] — flaccid toast, mugs of tea, cigarettes, hangovers, lunchtime routines and offhand jokes — the film compels us to attend to microscopic social signals: looks, smiles, a sigh. That patient, sometimes boring attention produces intimacy; as viewers we start to inhabit the band’s rhythm and feel their small joys and tensions with unusual intensity. Leslie suggests that this banality is the mechanism through which genius is revealed, and that prolonged reportage can reawaken creative urges in audiences and collaborators alike.

Permalink musiccollaborationdocumentarycreativity

perell.com

50 Ideas That Changed My Life

This is a collection of fifty conceptual frameworks and decision-making principles spanning economics, psychology, physics, and strategy—designed as mental models to improve thinking and life decisions. The ideas range from logical concepts like Occam's Razor and opportunity cost to behavioral insights like preference falsification and mimetic desire, arranged to illustrate how understanding systems, human nature, and hidden patterns can reveal overlooked opportunities and avoid common pitfalls. The author presents these as guiding principles that sharpen critical thinking by revealing what's counterintuitive, hidden in plain sight, or systematically ignored by conventional wisdom.

Permalink productivityphilosophycreativityadvice

www.vox.com

How to look at art — and really see it

Most people feel disconnected from art because they approach it passively, spending mere seconds with each piece and treating it as something to decipher rather than experience. The piece argues that "getting" art requires building a regular habit of museum visits and engaging actively with works by connecting them to your own memories and experiences—recognizing that meaning emerges from the triangle of the artwork itself, the artist's intent, and the viewer's response. Rather than seeking one correct interpretation, viewers should embrace discomfort, sit with unfamiliar emotions, and look for personal reflections in art, understanding it as an interactive process of imagination that transforms how we see our everyday lives.

Permalink artculturecreativitymuseums

Moss and Fog

The Design That Shaped How We Live: A Visual Guide

This is a curatorial guide to design across ten categories—from kinetic sculpture and minimalist product design to typography, furniture, toys, and accessibility features—arguing that the best design often works invisibly to improve how people interact with everyday objects and spaces. Drawing on historical figures like Alexander Calder, Dieter Rams, and Andy Warhol alongside contemporary designers, it demonstrates how small, intentional decisions about form, color, and function can shape millions of lives. The guide emphasizes that meaningful design requires patience and rigor, whether it's making a chair, simplifying a interface, or cutting a curb to include wheelchair users.

Permalink designarthistorycreativity

calltoidea.com

pattle.github.io

The Simpsons in CSS

I can't provide a summary of this content. What you've shared appears to be HTML markup showing a list of Simpsons characters with CSS styling options, rather than a saved article with an argument or report to summarize. If you'd like me to summarize an actual article, please share the text or content of what you saved.

Permalink designartanimationcreativity

Fast Company

10 Paradoxical Traits Of Creative People | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on 91 eminent creative people reveals that they are defined by complexity—embodying ten seemingly contradictory traits simultaneously, such as being energetic yet restful, smart yet naive, playful yet disciplined, and humble yet proud. Rather than following a single formula, creative individuals succeed through resourcefulness and an ability to adapt to any situation while maintaining passion for their work itself. The defining characteristic across all creative people is their capacity to enjoy the creative process for its own sake, which sustains them through difficulty when external rewards alone would not.

Permalink leadershippsychologycreativityentrepreneurship

www.ted.com

Webcam Toy

CSS-Tricks

The Shapes of CSS

This article catalogs CSS techniques for creating various geometric and complex shapes using only HTML elements and CSS properties like border-radius, pseudo-elements (::before and ::after), positioning, and transforms. It demonstrates how to build everything from basic shapes like circles and triangles to more elaborate designs like stars, pentagons, pac-man, speech bubbles, and locks—showing the creative workarounds developers used before modern CSS shape tools became available. The piece is now somewhat dated given the evolution of CSS shape properties, but served as a comprehensive reference for CSS-only shape creation in 2018.

Permalink designcreativitytutorialcss3

Marginal REVOLUTION

Is Creativity more like IQ or Expertise? — Marginal Revolution

Robert Baer argues that creativity is domain-specific rather than a general ability like IQ, pointing to evidence that even Torrance's own creativity tests showed near-zero correlation between verbal and visual versions, suggesting they measure different skills entirely. This matters because schools have widely used supposedly domain-general creativity tests to select students for gifted programs and teach generic divergent-thinking exercises that fail to develop actual creative capacity, which requires deep engagement within specific domains. Baer contends that fostering creativity requires either breadth across many domains or focused training within a single domain—but not the content-free approach currently dominant in education.

Permalink psychologycreativityeducation

www.krop.com

www.inspirefirst.com

Artworks by Patricia Ariel | InspireFirst

Alan Sailer uses a custom-built flash system and a pellet gun to photograph the exact moment of impact on various objects, capturing high-speed collision dynamics that would normally be invisible to the human eye. The technique requires precise timing to freeze the explosive moment when the pellet strikes its target, revealing dramatic patterns of shattering, splashing, or deformation.

Permalink designartcreativity

dribbble.com

The Great Discontent (TGD)

The Great Discontent

Mira Nakashima discusses her stewardship of her father's woodworking studio and philosophy, which emphasizes allowing the natural qualities of wood to dominate the design while maintaining careful attention to proportion and structure—an approach detailed in her new process book.

Permalink designwoodcreativityinterview