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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Creative Acts for Curious People summary
Sarah Stein Greenberg
How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways
23 mins
Table of Contents
Creative Acts for Curious People
Summary of 8 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 8
Design is a problem-solving approach involving observation, thinking, feeling, and action.
Imagine going to the gym every day – but each day, you only work out one side of your body. After a few weeks, one side is strong and muscly, while the other side stays weak. This may sound absurd, but it’s happening in educational training.
In school, most students are taught to focus on two of the skills necessary for creativity; thinking and observing. And not so much on the other two; feeling and doing. But just as you need to work out your full body for balanced physical strength, you need more than one set of skills to have impactful creative action.
That’s why Stanford University’s d.school is dedicated to instructing students on how to integrate all of their creative skill sets into the problem-solving process.
The key message here is: Design is a problem-solving approach involving observation, thinking, feeling, and action.
Every year thousands of people take to the d.school’s classrooms to be taught by faculty working in fields from medicine to education and philanthropy. They explore unconventional tools for learning and how to think like a designer.
The d.school views design as a dance between learning and problem-solving to improve people's lives. Its mission is to teach students how to develop completely novel solutions to complex problems. This way of thinking about design was pioneered by the Hungarian painter László Moholy-Nagy in the 1940s, who viewed design as an “attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness.”
These days, in an era marked by constant flux, learning to be resourceful and inventive is more important than ever. As the world continues to adapt to unprecedented technologies, climate change, and more recently, a global pandemic, environments are constantly shifting.
This means you’re constantly relearning the world around you, and redesigning your life accordingly. Some have to reshape their family’s daily routine, while others have to reframe a whole educational system. No matter the scope or size of your challenge, once you tune into how your different abilities come together, you’ll have more creative confidence.
Just remember that none of the skills required for creative action – thinking, learning, doing, and feeling – occur entirely separately from one another. In the next blinks, you’ll find out about some of the d.school’s methods for strengthening all of your creative muscles together.
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What is Creative Acts for Curious People about?
Creative Acts for Curious People (2021) collects insights about creativity and design taught in the classrooms of Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner School of Design, also known as the d.school. In addition to essays about the mindset and skills required for creative action, it offers over 80 practical exercises used by instructors from dozens of fields including medicine, education, and nonprofit to help improve your ability to solve problems, whether personal or on a global scale.
Who should read Creative Acts for Curious People?
- Anyone who wants to boost problem-solving skills
- Leaders seeking to improve teamwork
- Creative practitioners from any field
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