creativity – Chad Comello

Code of Ethics for engineers (and everyone)

Not sure where I found this on the interwebs, but I immediately fell in love with it—not for the engineering and robotics aspect, but for how it can be used for any creative work:

Let’s call these the 10 Commandments of Creative Work. Just replace “robot” with your art of choice:

1. Be industrious. Build, test, repeat.

2. Follow Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

3. Ask questions. Always.

4. Try things you’ve never tried before. There are many solutions to one problem.

5. Don’t fall apart if your robot does. It’s a chance to begin again.

6. Keep tinkering even if you’ve run out of ideas. Building will bring you more ideas.

7. Save your best ideas in secret notebooks.

8. Read lots of books about other things. Things that are not robots.

9. Pay attention to dreams.

10. Remember: the best robots are the ones you haven’t thought of yet.

Reading Brene Brown’s Rising Strong, this quote surprised me:

Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being.

Fully agree. But I expected the first sentence to end with wisdom, not practice. Probably because my bias, whether I like it or not, is toward matters of the head. This is a blessing that can become a curse when I fail to externalize ideas and knowledge through some kind of outward expression.

It is counterintuitive that sending knowledge from the head to the heart is not the direct route it appears. To become truly meaningful, it must take the long way. Perhaps that’s why creativity is so challenging yet so rewarding.

Then again, there’s the Ron Swanson perspective: