How did living on dirt farms in Indiana teach my parents how to run a drive-in theater? It allowed them to see the relationships between dirt, earth, land, and property. Some farmers look out, see earth, and think of it only in terms of their crops. Other farmers look out, see earth, and perceive many different possibilities -- from farming, to owning land, to building drive-in theaters. They don't limit the meaning of what they see; they're willing to change the way they think. They have faith that what they know today will be relevant in a totally different way tomorrow.
Twyla Tharp (tt@twylatharp.org) was born in Portland, Indiana. Her mother, a piano teacher, began teaching Tharp how to play the piano when she was two. A dancer, choreographer, and director, Tharp has an inventive, spirited style that combines elements of jazz, tap, ballet, and modern dance. She has choreographed for the American Ballet Theatre, the Royal Ballet, and the Paris Opera Ballet, and she has collaborated with such artists as composers Philip Glass and David Byrne, and film director Milos Forman (on "Hair," "Ragtime," and "Amadeus"). In 1985, Baryshnikov by Tharp, which aired on PBS, earned Tharp two Emmy Awards. And in 1992, she received a MacArthur Fellowship "genius grant."
Venture Partner
New Enterprise Associates
Menlo Park, California
What you really have to do, if you want to be creative, is to unlearn all of the teasing and censoring that you've experienced throughout your life. When I was chief scientist at Bell Labs, I tried very hard to rid the company of lawyer jokes. Lawyer jokes put people down, and putting people down stifles creativity. I think that society has done a pretty good job of ridding itself of anti-Semitic jokes and anti-black jokes. Now we have to get rid of other critical jokes -- anti-woman jokes, homophobic jokes, and, yes, anti-lawyer jokes.
People are always looking for reasons to tease someone, and anyone who is the least bit different is fair game. The threat of being teased keeps everyone conforming as much as possible. It also creates strong barriers to creativity. Corporations spend a lot of money encouraging people to be creative, while tacitly ensuring just the opposite. They operate with a men's locker-room mentality: a bunch of guys snapping one another's bare buttocks with a towel.
Has anyone ever told you that you shouldn't do something because it's not ladylike or gentlemanly? If you were smart, you didn't listen. But I'll bet you still wonder about it sometimes. Once in a while, you lie awake thinking about all of the rules that you've learned -- and feeling bad about having violated them. But if you're a truly creative person, you know that feeling insecure and lonely is par for the course. You can't have it both ways: You can't be creative, and conform too. You have to recognize that what makes you different also makes you creative.
Arno Penzias (apenzias@nea.com) won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering, with Robert Wilson, staticlike radiation that provided watershed evidence of the Big Bang. He was vice president of research at Bell Labs from 1981 until 1995, when he became chief scientist at Lucent Technologies. He retired in 1998 and now mentors startup companies for New Enterprise Associates, a venture-capital firm.
Author
New York, New York
In order to allow ourselves to be creative, we have to relinquish control and overcome fear. Why? Because real creativity is life-altering. It threatens the status quo; it make us see things differently. It brings about change, and we are terrified of change.
Human beings are born with a great deal of creativity, and by the age of 12, we've lost most of it. The world just slams it out of us. Our teachers and parents tell us that what comes from our imagination isn't true; it's just "imaginary." I think that what's imaginary is truer than what's "real." Adults prefer facts, because facts are limited. Like truth, imagination is unlimited, so many people are afraid of it.
Go outside at night in the country, where the sky is very clear. Then look up. Each one of those tiny points in the sky is a flaming sun. We're a tiny part of an enormous universe, which may be one of many universes. No one really knows for sure what's out there. So we use our imagination. Imagination allows us to ask big questions -- questions that scare us, and for which we don't have easy answers.
We live in a wild universe -- a universe in which the truth is frightening. My son died last December. He was only 47 years old. That's scary, and it's lousy, but it's true. Creativity comes from accepting that you're not safe, from being absolutely aware, and from letting go of control. It's a matter of seeing everything -- even when you want to shut your eyes.
Madeleine L'Engle is best known for her 1963 Newbury Medal-winning children's classic, "A Wrinkle in Time," and its three sequels. A writer-in-residence and a librarian at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, she has written more than 40 works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and theology. Her most recent book, "Mothers and Sons"
(Harold Shaw, 1999), is a collection of photographs and meditations that she worked on with her daughter Maria Rooney. L'Engle is now working on two new books.
Email
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Buzz Up!
LinkedIn
