Max Marmer

Captures ideas when you have them. If you don’t, these creative insights will try to flee and bringing them back is a sweat inducing struggle. Creativity is often romanticized but really it’s just making connections between disparate ideas. And it’s actually far easier to be creative when you say to yourself ‘What are some connections here?” than when you say to yourself “be creative” — In fact most times we can’t be funny, happy or productive by saying to ourselves, “C’mon Max, be happy” or “be productive” yet I know many people who do that. This approach doesn’t work because we are focusing on the wrong things. Those words, (there’s a name for these but I don’t remember) sit on top of a compelx pyramid where the leverage points seem frequently to be found somewhere in the middle. On the pyramid of funny, humor is not found at top of the pyramid: just telling yourself to be funny; or at the bottom fo they pyramid: analyzing the details of situations with mathematical precision. But is instead found at the inbetween point focusing on irony, surprise and a good story arc.

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Do you agree with this pyramidal model? What are other phenomena that exhibit leverage points falling in the middle?