Red...

Beautiful Sunday...came across this barn in the middle of nowhere...loved the color...

Quiet day today...picked up the lastest issue of Scientific American Mind while out at Barnes and Noble...definitely one of my favorite magazines. I read an interesting article on creativity...here are four skill sets to foster creativity:

"There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I've found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is "capturing" - preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize for work based on an idea about cell biology that he almost failed to capture. He had the idea in his sleep, woke up and scribbled the idea on a pad but found the next morning that he couldn't read his notes or remember the idea. When the idea turned up in his dreams the following night, he used a better capturing technique: he put on his pants and went straight to his lab!

The second competency is called "challenging" - giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas.

The third area is "broadening." The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections - so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things.

And the last competency is "surrounding," which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become."