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john cleese on creativity

If you’re wondering, “Who in the world is John Cleese?” then you were probably born after 1980.  For the rest of us, we remember him from Monty Python.  Brain Pickings, a wonderful web resource/curator of interesting facts, has an old video of Cleese talking about the creative process.  Here are the five main points:

  1. Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)
  2. Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)
  3. Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)
  4. Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)
  5. Humor (“The main is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)

What do you think?  How do you approach the creative process?