I’ve been viewing the Steve Jobs narration of the ‘Think Different’ ad as well as his 2005 Stanford Commencement address over the past few days. It’s served to inspire me, take on new tasks, and generally try things a bit differently. I’ve felt more creative than I have in recent memory.
If you’re not in the mood for a little Steve Jobs multimedia, why not try some good old fashioned text? Earlier today, Brit Morin (great Tumblr to follow) posted this wonderful quote from Jobs on how he thinks creative minds operate.
One of the biggest themes to what Jobs said in many public addresses has been to ‘connect the dots’ and to critically think about everything you do. According to him, that’s a rare trait that many of us do not enjoy. I hope you use this quote to become inspired and to start, well, thinking differently. You never know what you’ll find.
The Unformatted Text
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences.
So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
- Steve Jobs, Wired, February, 1995