Last week I read a couple of paragraphs beautifully describing the roots of creativity in an article written by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times a propos of something completely different and yet related: the building of a mosque close to the World Trade centre site in NYC. You can read the full article here:
First he cites Newsweek: “To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).”
And then Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy who said “One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other. Intuitively, you know this is true. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist, scientist and inventor, and each specialty nourished the other. He was a great lateral thinker. But if you spend your whole life in one silo, you will never have either the knowledge or mental agility to do the synthesis, connect the dots, which is usually where the next great breakthrough is found.”
Take these statements together with Norman Doidge’s book about the plasticity of the brain and how learning new skills develops new real estate in your mind and you have all the reasons you’ll ever need to grow in fresh and unexpected ways.
If you like being creative that is… 
