Best of Week: Thinking the Right Way

In class this week we discussed Neal Gabler’s article “The Elusive Big Idea.” A quote that really summed up the main idea of the article said that today’s world is a place where “big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them...” This statement made a weird connection for me. It made me think of those academic dishonesty scenarios that we get at the beginning of every school year.

An example: Kid #1 doesn’t do their homework, and 5 minutes before class you see them with two copies of it—one blank, one with Kid #2’s name on it. They copy the answers lightning fast and get an A for the day.

This doesn’t exactly match any of the scenarios, but it’s still the same idea. It’s possible that Kid #1 just didn’t have time to do his homework, but it’s also possible that he was lazy and didn’t care. The fact that he is copying the answers shows that he probably doesn’t care what questions he is copying the answers to—he very likely hasn’t even read them. What he cares about is that he gets the homework points. Points have value.

People today are much too concerned about immediate knowledge instead of forming their own ideas through rational thought techniques. I think that resisting this common urge to simply know everything is extremely important. Pursuing original ideas should have just as much--if not more--influence on everyone's thought process. 

Connections: Mason Cooley and Curiosity vs. Creativity

The other day I came across a quote. The things you come across on Twitter can be pretty interesting:

I had no idea who Mason Cooley was, but I liked his quote so I looked him up. The first source that came up was Wikipedia. It said that he was famous for his aphorisms—another word I had to look up. Aphorisms turned out to be short quotes that express a common truth, according to dictionary.com.

In my opinion, though, this quote was more than just a generalized truth. It reminded me of the Alan Alda essay we studied in class, "Pass the Plate, Mr. Feymman." We did an activity after reading the article in which we made a "handbook for curiosity." It's true that curiosity and creativity are different things, but in my opinion, this quote connected them. I think that curiosity definitely leads to creativity.

One of the points in my group's curiosity handbook was "challenge your thoughts until you find new ways of thinking." Challenging original ideas is an important step in generating curiosity as well as being creative, which is what connects the quote to our handbook for curiosity. 

Captured Thought: Addiction

The other day, I was surfing through YouTube videos and I came across a contemporary dance routine from a show called So You Think You Can Dance. The song they choreographed the routine to was called “Gravity” by Sara Bareilles. This has always been one of my favorite songs, also by one of my favorite artists. The first few lyrics are: “Something always brings me back to you, it never takes too long.” Whenever I listened to this song, I always interpreted it as a love song, talking about how love can act like a gravitational pull.

But seeing this particular dance routine really threw me. The story behind the dance was not at all a love story; it seemed to be the exact opposite. It seemed to be about an emotionally damaged girl being tortured by some sort of evil. The dance was beautiful, but I didn’t really understand it.

Before every dance routine on the show, there is a video the choreographer talking about the meaning behind the routine—this is also the part I usually fast forward through. I went back and listened to the explanation, and I learned that the choreographer had taken an entirely different interpretation of the song. Instead of love being the gravitational pull, it was an addiction. Which, in hindsight, is pretty genius if you ask me.

For anyone who's curious, this is the link to a video of the dance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hND4LGKmqCA