Tina Fey reveals the secret creativity technique she learned from Lorne Michaels at the moment she needed it most: when deciding whether she’d play Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.

{{"uhhhh... uhhhhhhh.... mmmmmuhhhh..." That's what it sounds like when my team is waiting for me to say what I'm thinking. Especially when we're working on a creative challenge, or trying to articulate insights, sometimes I feel like I just. can't. quite. say it…

Arthur Koestler defined creativity, “The collision of two apparently unrelated frames of reference.” Collisions, or connections more broadly, often get the spotlight when it comes to creative thinking. But what enables unexpected connections?

The gist of the origin of the Post-It Note, is that a 3M engineer found himself daydreaming during a particularly boring sermon and, by making an unexpected connection between a seemingly-irrelevant technology and an irritating private-life annoyance, stumbled across one of the most widely adopted new product innovations of the last 50 years.

As it turns out, apparently there's an empirical foundation for the daydream-to-insight loop…

Do you know Claude Shannon? He conceived a little thing called the "bit" (which is also called a "shannon," in his honor) - yeah, that kind of bit. One expert, when pressed to describe his influence on the information age, said, “It’s like saying how much influence the inventor of the alphabet has had on literature." I've been blown away to discover how far ahead of his time he was, and just how unique not only his contributions, but also his methods, were. At just twenty-two years old, he wrote a twenty-five page paper that "would ultimately become known as the most influential master's thesis in history."…

One of my favorite tactics to tap into the subconscious mind is to nap into the subconscious mind. Edison's "thinking chair" continues to provide both amusement and inspiration. Remember, this is an empirically proven strategy for problem solving...

"The secret to doing good (work) is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

-Amos Tversky, would-be winner of the Nobel Prize, father of behavioral psychology

To me, the unspoken key to Tversky's sentiment is knowing when to "waste" hours; certainly, not all wasted time is created equal. Sometimes folks dawdle when they should be working. But a deliberate diversion, strategically employed, becomes something much more than a waste: it can usher in a breakthrough. Einstein had his violin. Edison had his naps. Franklin had his Junto. Watson and Crick had their coffee. Tversky and Kahneman had their joke-filled-walks…

I may end up doing a short series on the fantastic "A Technique for Producing Ideas" which is, page-for-page, the single greatest guide for the practice of generating ideas that I have found. In it, James Webb Young give voice to what every individual pursuing a creative end has experienced: sometimes it feels like the answer will never come. He explains that hopelessness is every bit as important a step in the creative process as any other…

Noodling on yesterday's post about Einstein's productive diversion, I found myself wondering: when is diversion NOT a waste of time? When is it the good kind of procrastination, and NOT the bad kind?

When, if you will, does one have permission to seek diversion?…

We've all been there: struggling against some challenge, banging our head against the wall. The ideas aren't coming. Maybe it's a work problem, or even a personal challenge…

In case you missed the post from Thanksgiving Day (and who can blame you? Certainly not this guy, who allowed a guest post from a science fiction writer who died nearly 30 years ago), I wanted to underline one portion in particular, as it has special bearing upon an idea I mentioned earlier in the week: the rules of engagement that Ben Franklin laid out for his Junto. I’m more and more persuaded that such gatherings are an indispensable tool for individuals seeking to drive fresh thinking in their own unique context…

There’s solid research that suggests that Thomas Edison and Salvador Dalí were onto something when they determined to “nap into their subconscious…”

It is broadly established that creativity is a function of unexpected connections. As legendary researcher Arthur Koestler once said, "Creativity is the collision of two apparently unrelated frames of reference." It's a well-documented phenomenon that many scientific breakthroughs and inventions have come from outside the field, as both Dave Epstein mentions in "Range" and Steven Johnson mentions in "Where Good Ideas Come From" (both highly recommended, and both will be on my reading list, whenever I get around to publishing that...

I've been thinking more about the challenge of "escaping the tyranny of reason," and was delighted to come across an example of a noteworthy innovator. Thomas Edison was credited with over 1,000 patents and is widely viewed as one of the most influential inventors of the last century. Twyla Tharp recounts an amazing anecdote about his idea generation process in "The Creative Habit"…