Combinatorial Creativity and the Myth of Originality | Maria Popova, Innovations

I like the LEGO analogy in the concluding paragraph of Popova's blog (to aid readability, I broke the single paragraph into two). It clarifies the point about making connections with a hands-on visual clue:

We can, however, optimize our minds for combinatorial creativity – by enriching our mental pool of resources with diverse, eclectic, cross-disciplinary pieces which to fuse together into new combinations.

For creativity, after all, is a lot like LEGO – if we only have a few bricks of one shape, size, and color, what we build would end up dreadfully drab and uniform; but if we equip ourselves with a bag of colorful bricks of various shapes and sizes, the imaginative temples we build might appear to an onlooker to have been inspired by “a ray of grace,” yet we need only look to our bag of LEGOs to be reminded from whence they came.

FYI, this article is the lead item in today's (June 7) Garbl's Creativity Connections. For other articles on this topic, see the Creativity tab at the top of this page.