Joel Liu's Library tagged Creativity →  View Popular, Search in Google

Consuming more than you create -
Effective people tend to create a lot of content. Content can mean a lot of things - but the rule is always the same, create more than you consume. Ineffective people, on the other hand, spend the majority of their time consuming the fruits of others' labor. They are consummate lurkers.

Watching your own vanity metrics -
Everyone suffers from some level of vanity. A need to be liked. The Internet feeds that need, keeping popularity at the forefront of any online identity with lists of 'Friends,' 'Followers,' 'Connections,' 'Re-Pins' and even the 'Like' itself. Ineffective people tend to feed on these popularity metrics, whereas effective people recognize that these are shallow indicators. Effective people focus more on engagement and strength of relationships; they create quality content to solicit engagement from others, or seek out interesting people and proactively engage them on their own terms.

From a Steve Jobs interview: There's an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: "For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you." As I'm going to be 30 in February, the thought has crossed my mind.

Distractions.

The internet[1] being the major one, occasionally video games or books. Somewhat unpleasantly I seem wired to seek new distractions whenever I don't have one currently occupying my mind.

I've been thinking of forcing myself to spend half an hour each day without stimulus, just thinking and writing on a paper notepad to get around this.

Scientific American has an article An Easy Way To Increase Creativity,  which describes the recent paper about the effects of psychological distance on creativity.

The SciAm article is worth reading.  Students were asked a series of brain teaser questions.  One group of students was told that the questions were invented at their university; the other group was told they were invented in a far away university.  Thinking that the test came from far away somehow raised the creativity of the subjects.  They answered more questions correctly.

Note carefully your answer.  Most likely, your first 6 or so answers are of one category of animal (e.g. farm), and the remaining ones are from another category of animal (e.g. zoo animals).

Even dementia patients can name a lot of animals-- "cow, pig, horse, sheep, umm, cow, no wait, ummm...." but what the demented can't do well is switch to another category.  They get stuck in the same box, looking around in there for more answers.  They don't lack fluency, they lack flexibility.

Bobby and I are amazed. Having spent 10 years carving out lives as professional grad students, we've been oblivious to the rising tide of worker despair. I remember seeing a Covey infomercial several months back; it seemed harmless enough. Watching employees become automatons spouting Covey's catch phrases at every opportunity was the funniest thing I had seen on television in quite a while. But now, as the man in the corner begins weeping, Bobby and I realize that larger issues are at hand.

  MacLeod, an advertising executive and popular blogger with a flair for the creative, gives his 26 tried-and-true tips for being truly creative. Each point illustrated by a cartoon drawn by the author himself. 

I have worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I enjoyed and felt very good about because I sometimes could partially succeed. For example, experiments on the coefficient of friction on highly polished surfaces, to try to learn something about how friction worked (failure). Or, how elastic properties of crystals depends on the forces between the atoms in them, or how to make electroplated metal stick to plastic objects (like radio knobs). Or, how neutrons diffuse out of Uranium. Or, the reflection of electromagnetic waves from films coating glass. The development of shock waves in explosions. The design of a neutron counter. Why some elements capture electrons from the L-orbits, but not the K-orbits. General theory of how to fold paper to make a certain type of child's toy (called flexagons). The energy levels in the light nuclei. The theory of turbulence (I have spent several years on it without success). Plus all the "grander" problems of quantum theory.

New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people  characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or  schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more  creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more  heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access  their creativity.

It's a very common error: people imagine that programming is not a creative endeavor. Instead they believe that programming is a constructive endeavor, that it's something analagous to building a bike shed and the challenge largely consists in capturing a set of "clearly defined, domain rules"