Time Capsule #145
Fear, creativity, and playing your part.
Greetings everyone,
Happy Thanksgiving!
Another late post this week — will try not to make a habit of this.
This week’s newsletter at a glance:
Embracing fear.
Is maximizing creativity bad?
On playing your part to perfection.
Enjoy!
If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
—Carl Jung
✏️ Embracing Fear
Fear is the greatest obstacle to growth and progress. Fear of failure, fear of opinion, fear of responsibility: it is fear that keeps us from being what we could be, from fulfilling our potential.
It’s possible to turn your relationship with fear into one that is stimulating and productive, instead of inhibiting. Instead of fleeing from it, walk into it. If what lies on the other side will help you grow and reach your goals, the fear can be a sign that you should take the leap, even when you don’t feel ready. I think that is a really important lesson that I needed to learn in order to make progress in all areas of my life: feeling unprepared or unqualified for a certain decision or a certain role is actually a blessing. It means that there is space and opportunity for you to grow into the vacuum, to become prepared and qualified. A tinge of fear can actually be a sign that you are on the right track and constantly challenging yourself.
Not all fear is to be feared.
sapientia potentia est
Wisdom is power
💡 Food for Thought
Good literature doesn’t tell you what to think, it just poses the questions.
🔗 Sunday Best
Is maximising creativity good? The importance of elaboration and internal confidence in producing creative ideas
Citation: Goran Calic, Elaine Mosakowski, Nick Bontis & Sebastien Helie (2022) Is maximising creativity good? The importance of elaboration and internal confidence in producing creative ideas, Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 20:5, 776-791
While knowledge management researchers acknowledge that individuals transition from generation to implementation of ideas, these transitions are not fully understood. The current article focuses on idea elaboration – defined as the transition of an idea from an individual’s mind to one that is expressed in a work context – as a critical step towards creative output – the number of creative ideas an individual generates.
Several related hypotheses were explored with a psychologically realistic simulation of creativity. A total of 100,000 trials of the creativity task was simulated to examine the relationship between creativity and creative output.
Results suggest that low degrees of creativity combined with the elaboration of conventional ideas may lead to a greater number of creative ideas.
Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking
Citation: Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory, and cognition, 40(4), 1142.
Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.
The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster
Citation: Weick, Karl E. “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster.” Administrative Science Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1993): 628–52.
The death of 13 men in the Mann Gulch fire disaster, made famous in N. Maclean's (1992) Young Men and Fire, is analyzed as the interactive disintegration of role structure and sensemaking in a minimal organization. Four potential sources of resilience that make groups less vulnerable to disruptions of sensemaking are proposed to forestall disintegration: improvisation, virtual role systems, the attitude of wisdom, and norms of respectful interaction. The analysis is embedded in the organizational literature to show the need to reexamine thinking about temporary systems, structuration, nondisclosive intimacy, intergroup dynamics, and team building.
What wisdom and what virtue there is in judging oneself truly and in remaining oneself! You have a part that only you can play; and your business is to play it to perfection, instead of trying to force fortune. Our lives are not interchangeable. Equally by aiming too high or by falling too low, one misses the path to the goal. Go straight ahead, in your own way, with God for guide.
—AG Sertillanges
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See you next week.
Alex