#associating

Does anybody else listen to music or watch something while you’re doing something else and then your brain just forever associates that song/show/content creator with the activity you were doing or the food you were eating, and then whenever you watch/listen to the thing again you just crave to do/eat the thing again? Because it happens to me so often.

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.”

Imagine having grown up in a strict household where associating with males was strongly discouraged and dating was just plain forbidden. Sure, there had been resentment on occasion, but you just rolled with it as your normal and focused on other things. Your education, platonic friendships, being an overall awesome person…