Originals

1. Originality is what everybody wants, but there’s a sweet spot. If it’s not original enough, it’s boring or trite. If its too original, it may be hard for the audience to understand. The goal is to push the envelope, not to tear the envelope

   Originals

2. The most important thing you can do, is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.

   Originals

3. The personality trait most associated with an interest in the arts is called openness, the tendency to seek out novelty and variety in intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional pursuits

   Originals

4. False negatives are common in the entertainment industry. Studio executives passed on hits ranging from Star Wars to E.T. Pulp Fiction. In publishing, managers rejected the Chronicles of Narnia, the diary of Anne Frank, Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Flies, and Harry Potter. The Xbox was almost buried at Microsoft, the laser printer was nearly canceled at Xerox for being expensive and impractical. The author of the initial report on the Seinfeld pilot felt it was on the border between “weak” and “moderate”.

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5. As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes. Test audiences are no better than managers at predicting the success of new ideas: focus groups are effectively set up to make the same mistakes as managers. The truth is most pilots don't test well. Audiences don't have enough experience: they simply haven’t seen a lot of the novel ideas that landed on the cutting-room floor. There is one group of forecasters that does come close to attaining mastery: fellow creators evaluating one another’s ideas. When artists addressed one another’s performances, they were about twice as accurate as managers and test audiences in predicting how often the videos would be shared. Compared to creators, managers and test audiences were 56 precent and 55 percent more prone to major false negatives.

   Originals

6. On average, the combined forecasts of all 120 circus managers were no better than a typical single creator’s predictions. Instead of attempting to assess our own originality, we ought to turn more often to our colleagues. We are drawn to peer evaluations because they provide the most reliable judgments.

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7. Shapers are independent thinkers: curious, non-conforming, and rebellious

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8. Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists

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9. It is when people have moderate expertise in a particular domain that they're the most open to radically creative ideas

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10. Highly creative adults move to new cities much more frequently than their peers in childhood, which gave them exposure to different cultures and values, and encouraged flexibility and adaptability

    Originals

Up to 10 passages are published from each source.