May 27, 2015
If you read one thing today, make it this text by Isaac Asimov on Creativity. It’s a short essay about his thoughts on what we humans need to come up with creative ideas.
This quote i liked particularly because it resembles something i thought about a lot lately.
Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.
To feel guilty because one has not earned one’s salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either.
What would it be like if we all would have a basic income that is not coupled to any work at all? And the “work” we would still do was unpaid for? Would we really fail as a society because no one would want to work anymore, as some might think? Would no one ever clean a toilet again? Or would we be able to come up with much better and more creative ideas and solve problems in ways we would never even possibly imagine otherwise? I’m pretty certain the latter is more likely to be true.
But thats for another post. The text by Asimov has so many quotable parts, so better go ahead and read it in full.
Isaac Asimov – On Creativity
