The World as a Stage

Take a standard 52 deck of cards and draw two cards. Can you find something in common about these two cards?

In front of this computer since hours, I’m looking for how to start this article. How the find the idea that will make it meaningful. I turn the music on and the distraction off and begin to look around me to think “outside the box”. Two hours ago I planned to write this article about the first improvisation training I did with my team. I’ve decided to train us on behavior and creativity topics. This training is about what I’m struggling with right now :

How can I have more ideas?

Here are five great books about creativity. These are very good books where you can experience different aspect of creativity: How it became a culture in a creative company like Pixar (Creativity Inc), how one person can fight to maintain it in a huge industry (Orbiting the Giant Hairball), the importance of mistakes in the creative process (The Art of Making Mistakes), how an author can make crazy idea with everyday things (H2G2) and finally in the best example of Art&Science I know, magic (Magical Mathematics).

As a Chief Technical Officer, I see my job as trying to notice as fast as possible our new mistakes and adapt. Working in an unknown environment with new technologies, avoiding mistakes is impossible. We do mistakes, all the time. Everything fails all the time. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Services However, even in this environment, we can be sometimes scared to try something new because of the fear of failure, this is a human reflex that probably helped our ancestor to survive while dangerous animals ate more risky individuals.

Here are 5 excellent books about acting. More than being only to learn how to acts, these books explore human behaviors and how to bring these behaviors on stage. Also, if you don’t perform, since improvisation is anywhere there is human communication you would be surprised how much you can learn from them. Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part # Michael Shurtleff has been casting director for Broadway, and this is his book on advice on how to succeed at an audition.

Each time I receive a 10 pages document explaining a scientific work on our data with several figures, my first reflex is to scroll and look at all the pictures without reading any text. This is no different from not reading the manual when you buy a new phone: we are smart enough to understand. This is for sure the number of beers of each type produced each year since 2000.