John Cleese on Creativity

The master of Silly Walks delivers a lecture on creativity. This is not a comedy skit. He is being serious, although in a pretty funny way.
In our business of Showmanship creativity is of utmost importance and pondering the fundamentals of the process is an important part of our toolkit. Cleese outlines some very practical things to improve your chances for creating good work. Not as much things to do as a setting and a particular mindset.

I found this lecture on the brilliant blog Open Culture and then found that Maria Popova over on her superbly curated site, Brain Pickings. Both of these sites are very worthy of following.

From Brain Pickings:

In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines “the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative”:

1. Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)
2. Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)
3. Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)
4. Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)
5. Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)

Now that you have a fair idea of what his main points are hear it from the man himself.