Real-izing your Dream

This page is about finding your passion, improving your creativity, and making a difference. More on creativity and design can be found on the Sustainability page. See also Green Jobs and Internships

How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love

Utne Reader lists of 150 works that fire the imagination Part 1 and Part 2has quite a few influential green thinkers.

What Is Your College Degree Worth? an interview with the author (audio) 6/11.

A new study shows that spending four nature-filled days, away from electronic devices, is linked with 50 percent higher scores on a test for creativity.

Interactive

LinkedIn (founded by College 8 Fellow Reid Hoffman) has launched a new feature this week that helps students “visualize potential career paths based on their field of study, search for relevant job opportunities, find and follow target companies matching their career aspirations, and discover and connect with people who themselves are connected to these potential career paths, companies, and key influencers.” video overview Link

Video

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (74 min youtube version). longer Google video version****

Steve Jobs' famous commencement speech from a legendary entrepreneur, co-founder of Apple.***

"Consider the Lobster" is an excellent essay on the ethics of eating animals by David Foster Wallace, bonus his fine commencement address This Is Water. (audio), (video), (as opposed to the fake one ascribed to Kurt Vonnegut (Ice 9 isn't real either, but you really should read his books).

Sir Ken Robinson has written numerous books on how to find your dream/passion. He has also done phenomenally wise and popular video talks on education and creativity: original 2006 talk **** and 2010 followup TEDtalk, CBS News segment 1/10. Newer talk.

Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web. TEDtalk. 4 min summary of book ideas

JK Rowling: The fringe benefits of failure (TEDtalk) (text version).

What is Water? by novelist David Foster Wallace, about why college matters. TEDtalk.

"Wrongologist" Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility. (TEDtalk).

Why you will fail to have a great career In this funny and blunt talk from TEDxUW, Larry Smith pulls no punches when he calls out the absurd excuses people invent when they fail to pursue their passions.

Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. (TEDtalk). Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

Bart Weetjens is developing a new approach to the land mine detection problem: training giant pouched rats to detect explosives in minute amounts which combines two of his passions TEDtalk video.

The Proof is a really intriguing (really!) story about proving Fermat's Last Theorem.

Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success TEDtalk.

7 Skills students need for their future. Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group has identified what he calls a "global achievement gap," which is the leap between what even our best schools are teaching, and the must-have skills of the future: * Critical thinking and problem-solving * Collaboration across networks and leading by influence * Agility and adaptability * Initiative and entrepreneurialism * Effective oral and written communication * Accessing and analyzing information * Curiosity and imagination. Powerpoint.

Famous failures: "If you've never failed, you've never lived." (short video).

Making Money From Doing Good Noam Kostucki is a social entrepreneur who co-founded Seeducation & SeedPro through which he has coached and trained thousands of people from numerous organisations. He is passionate about education and believes everyone can make a positive contribution to the world while making money at the same time.

Big Think: The seven essential life skills: Focus and Self-Control, Perspective Taking, Communicating, Making Connections, Critical Thinking, Taking on Challenges, Self-Directed, Engaged Learning. (not an endorsment: tell us what you think)

How to Communicate Your Ideas

Structure of Great Talks TEDtalk

How to Pitch Your Ideas TEDtalk.

How to Stand Out. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. TEDtalk

Google talk by presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the net -- presentationzen.com -- shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote.

Audio

The 21st Century Skills Movement seeks to reform education to better prepare students for success in the modern workplace. Those skills include creativity, innovation, critical thinking, communication and collaboration. KQED Forum 132/10

Books/Text

Barbara Sher helps people identify and follow their dreams. Wishcraft is online for free. She has made several very fine PBS programs sample.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson, see video above). Also Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. Tim Harford three principles/examples (video) Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. (TEDtalk). Audio interview.

How writing improves creativity

Roger von Oech is a very good writer of popular books on creativity. Explorer, Artist, Judge, Warrior: Merriam-Webster defines serendipity as the “faculty of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the smartest researcher on creativity. His best known work is Flow. here's TEDtalk video on Flow ***

How To Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life by Gregg Michael Levoy.

Julia Cameron: The Artist's Way (1992). It's not about how to paint or write or dance -- it's about how to nurture the part of you that's afraid to paint or write or dance. Cameron's pathway to creativity is through health and fulfillment, not purgatorial pain. Brenda Ueland: If You Want to Write (1938). Shining with the visionary high-mindedness of the old American avant-garde, this classic on unblocking your inner writer recommends watchful laziness, cheerful egotism, and flat-out joy.

Ainissa Ramirez, in her recent TED Book, Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, makes an impassioned call for a recommitment to improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in our schools and throughout our society. The post below is an excerpt from the book's Introduction... "Now imagine that knowledge is a multisided box. When we teach children to simply memorize material so they can pass tests, we give children access to the knowledge on only one side of the box. So when life tosses this box up (as it certainly will), it may not land on a side that is visible and accessible. In this case, the kids don’t have access to the knowledge.

The end-result answers are not the only things that kids need to know. They need to learn to navigate the course of acquiring knowledge—essentially, to get to the answers by being curious and coming up with a lot of questions, a lot of whys. They need to get accustomed to learning from different directions, playing with concepts, and figuring out how to ask the whys in order to gain access to knowledge. This process is more important than having the knowledge itself, and it is why we must step away from memorization and get back to figuring things out in a variety of ways. This is one of the most important skills of the 21st century. My training as a scientist allows me to stare at an unknown and not run away, because I learned that this melding of uncertainty and curiosity is where innovation and creativity occur. Science has taught me the power of persistence and patience, and also has shown me that failure is a friend. My curiosity fuels and motivates me more than any shiny bobble could, and my ability to understand and think gives me a love and admiration for the planet matched only by my esteem for artists and saints..." More (short video on nano-materials).

Eric Kandel, author of The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, points to the work of the psychologist Jonathan Schooler, who has studied the history of "letting the mind wander." Schooler argues that big ideas "seem to come not when people are hard at work on a problem, but when they are sidetracked: going for a walk, taking a shower, thinking about something else." (short video).

Sam McNerny on creativity: Here’s the important part. If creativity is the ability to connect two unrelated ideas to produce a novel idea with use then we should strive to be what I term “epistemic chameleons.” An epistemic chameleon is an academic version of the most interesting man in the world (the one from the Dos Equis commercials). He shifts from one domain to another seamlessly and is good at applying what he learned in a textbook to the real world and vice versa despite the subject matter.

== General Ideas on Design and Creativity == (see also Sustainability

A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939

Gamestorming is a technique of using game dynamics (role-playing0 and visual thinking to create new ideas. Website. book, More, including visual notetaking. UCSC owns an electronic copy (available to campus only).

Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, his TEDtalk video. Higly recommended*** summary.

John Cleese of Monty Python on creativity (video).

Jonah Lehrer's apparently plagiarized, so read at own risk new book (review and trailer), Imagine: How Creativity Works, audio interview and excerpt (full text interview) podcast

IDEO, the hottest design firm around, has a Social Impact design group that has created a free downloadable Human Centered Design Toolkit, a free innovation guide for NGOs and Social Enterprises. You can search their projects. Method cards/app. Examples: clean water and hearing aid (video). As a creative director at Ideo, Paul Bennett reminds us that design need not invoke grand gestures or sweeping statements to be successful, but instead can focus on the little things in life. TEDtalk video. IDEO's Tim Brown on creativity and play (TEDtalk video). TEDxSanJoseCA - Chris Waugh - Can we Use Design to Make Life More Interesting?.

One of the greatest musicians/producers around Brian Eno, developed Oblique Strategies, a set of cards to jumpstart ideas. he is also one of the driving forces behind the LongNow ten thousand year clock.

Seven Tools for Thinking, edited extract from Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett. alt link.

Bruce Mau has been inspired by nature, wants to redesign the world, and he may well rock yours. Another profile Interactive version of his "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" Here's a text excerpt. Here's a downloadable complete version. Video compilation. Longer interview.

Yves Behar has produced some of the new millennium's most coveted objects, like the Leaf lamp, the Jawbone headset, and the XO laptop for One Laptop per Child. (TEDtalk video).

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. (TEDtalk video).

Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design (CS547) video Exmple: April 23, 2010 Ed Catmull, President, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios: Recognizing and Addressing Blocks to Creativity

Dean Kamen, inventor of Segway, speaks about creation of prosthetic limbs. TEDtalk video. He has also created an amazing power source and water distiller for Third World countries TEDtalk video.

Tony Award winner Julie Taymor (The Lion King) asks the question, “Why do we do what we do?” Taymor proposes ways to answer this lifelong question through the story that inspired her work on The Lion King. Through anecdotes both historic and personal, she illustrates the power of presentation, and explains how and why innovation requires focus, sweat, and a new perspective. (video)