From: houle@nmt.edu (Paul Houle)
Subject: Re: goal setting as a way of life
Organization: New Mexico Tech
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 23:25:41 GMT

In article <LAUB.92Aug17003743@laub.Software.Mitel.COM> laub@Software.Mitel.COM (Boniface Lau) writes:
>>>>>> On 16 Aug 92 20:21:30 GMT, tyadav@athena.mit.edu (Tapesh Yadav) said:
>
>Tapesh>  The principles that work for learning anything, IMHO, also
>Tapesh> work for learning about human beings. And like music scores,
>Tapesh> there are humans so dissonant that they are not worth
>        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Tapesh> exploring in detail.
>        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>I am not so sure.

	This depends.  There are some people out there who do a lot of harm
to the people around them,  and one would be better off not knowing them.
At one point I had a very rigid value that "It is very wrong to reject people",
but I found out that this policy can have very high costs.  It brought me
into contact with people who (a) hurt me and (b) limited more productive
social opportunities.  Since then I've tried to identify these people ahead
of time and very definitely ~not~ let certain people in.  By filtering
people at the front door,  I can even feel safer and be more intimate with
the people I do let in.

	Regarding the people who write books on creativity,  I was looking at
a book on "creativity" at the library when one of my friends showed up and
started railing about how reading books like that is a waste of time.  Through
time I've come to see that he's right.  One of the major blocks to creativity
seems to be worrying about it too much.  The people who worry about it (
who presumably are the ones who write the books and who read the books)
generally would lack it themselves,  so they would go and use the same tired
examples like the nine dots problem and the girl/crone ambigous picture.  So
far as testing people's thought processes goes,  I often keep track of
mathematical problems where I used interesting thought processes and then
observe people trying to solve them.

	One good one (that also has been around quite a while in the
recreational mathematics circuit) is a problem that separates people by their
mathematical training.  People who are up to senior level math (in college)
tend to solve it in minutes,  while people who are just taking calculus
generally take days if they solve it at all.

	The problem is that,  given an idealized beam balance,  where one
can place unknowns and weights in either pan,  select four weights of
integral mass (i.e. 4, 11, 15, 20 (but that doesn't work)) such that by
using various combinations of the weights one can balance any unknown
weight of integral mass varying from zero to 40.  I was given this by a
friend of mine who was a freshman who had gotten the problem from somebody
else.  My friend had struggled with it for several days without making
progress.  Although I remembered reading about similar problems in the past,
it took me about three minutes before a thought popped into my head that
crystalized a straightforward solution.

	Being creative to me seems to be mostly a process of maintaining
a certain internal state.  NLP and relatives aside,  good ways of doing
this are (a) keep active (if you are writing or solving a math problem,
keep writing something even if it isn't that great or keep trying specific
examples if you aren't making progress towards a general approach) and
(b) when levels of frustration,  anxiety or whatever get too high,  do
something to manage them that works for you.  Typically this means taking
a break and maybe drinking a cup of coffee,  going to the video arcade,
riding a bike,  or switching to a problem that is more tractable (maybe
even watering the garden.)  Both of these principles seem rather simple,
but I've seen many people get stuck staring at a blank page or computer
screen,  which is the ultimate killer of creativity.

	One viewpoint about creativity is that people who are more creative
have fewer inhibitions than those who are more creative...  And those
inhibitions are what is keeping them staring at the blank page.  At one
point I thought that simply releasing these inhibitions would be a good
thing,  but I'm not so sure now.  The connection between madness and
genius and writers and alcoholism points out some of the costs involved
in lowering inhibition.
-- 
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