From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you're an artist, you start with catharsis. You have to express your own feelings. I genuinely believe that if music comes from your heart and soul, that people will hear that and will be able to connect with the truth of it.
In improvisation on instruments, I feel creation is going a new path with every note, somewhere you haven't been before. You discover things, you're the adventurer in music. That leads to new songs and nice adventures.
You couldn't design a situation more hostile to human learning than a typical school. We learn not to be creative, because everything is about turning us into good factory workers. That's why these systems were created: to make us into factory workers who produce more stuff, more money, more stuff, more money.
Despite the absence of personal computers, tabletop games, board games, and card games filled this void. To me, the opportunity to govern a simulation of adulthood was immensely appealing, fostering significant cognitive and strategic development even in my youth.
This essence is an inner necessity that yearns to be expressed. When you allow this essence to shine through, it rejuvenates you. It fosters creativity, energy, and imagination. However, when you suppress it, feelings of depletion, exhaustion, and burnout take over.
I was 5 years old when I went to see it and when I came back, I remember thinking 'that's exactly what I'm going to do, I want to be a film-maker, I want to make people disappear, reappear, sing on screen and make beautiful love story.' That was the moment I decided, and I haven't looked back since.
If you truly immerse yourself in a role, it's akin to spontaneously adopting an accent – suddenly, you find yourself expressing thoughts that seem to emerge from an unexplored facet of your personality. This latent potential has always existed within us.
We are all creative beings, but we're brought up being told not to colour outside the lines – but why? It's OK to be different…. It's more than OK to be different, and we need to encourage that.
I'm 65 years old, and one of the things that amazes me is the number of people who work to get to a certain level of success in showbusiness, and then quit to go play golf?! There is nothing else I would want to do in this world.
Business problems are idea problems because like most other problems we face, they do not have one answer. The reality is, for any of the problems we face, there are a thousand possible answers.
Invention has to be about the dream, there's an ingredient which you can't put in a business plan- it's intangible- but I saw it, it was there.
Songs are these magnetic creations of words and music, in very short form. A song needs to hit you in less than a minute and sometimes it can be an incredibly solitary, emotional experience where it's just you and the imagined relationship with that singer.