Surf’s up: April 14, 2008

We have a bumper crop of creativity-related links this week; everything from inspiration for late bloomers to some very special puppets (just keep reading…)!

1. Need a boost when you look at your resume or creative output and feel like you have more years than works behind you? Go read this list posted at the Creative Journey Cafe about 10 famous creative late bloomers.

I’ve mentioned Julia Child’s late start (learned to cook at age 37; wrote her first book at 49 and didn’t have her own TV show until her 50s) to people before, but I had no idea that Al Jarreau, Stan Lee or Laura Ingalls Wilder came into their own artistically so late in life (late 30s through mid-60s).

Artists with staggering talent often get off to a fast start quite young, but maturity and persistence are the keys being productive at any age.

2. The good folks at Idea Champions have posted a great list to their blog, The Heart of Innovation, “100 Simple Ways to Be More Creative on the Job.”

The tips are all one-liners, but they inspire further thought and action. I’m especially thrilled by their suggestions to take a daily brainstorming walk and to assign a “fun fairy” to each business meeting!

If you’d like to join the conversation, the bloggers are promoting a contest based on the same theme as this post. Just visit the post and hit the comments button. Prizes will be given for most intriguing suggestion, funniest tip, tip most likely to start a revolution, tip that the bloggers most wished they had thought of first, and the suggestion offering the biggest bang for the buck.

3. The Morning Porch features a daily microblogging post by writer/photographer Dave Bonta, who also macro-blogs at Via Negativa.

Reading Dave’s beautiful tweets about what he sees and hears from his front porch first thing in the morning made me think: perhaps Twitter/microblogs have use as practice in poetry? Haiku? One-sentence journaling? Such sites provide an exceptional challenge to pare your writing down to the bare essentials, certainly.

4. The Mindhacks.com blog had a fascinating post recently about releasing creativity in a decaying brain.

The blog post links to a New York Times article and a study published in the journal Brain about patients suffering from fronto-temporal dementia, who can exhibit breathtaking leaps in creative expression, even as their ability to do such left-brain-dominant tasks such as adding single digit numbers or remembering the definitions of words declines.

The post is a thought-provoking look at how the brain facilitates creativity, and how creativity can be stimulated even under the most unlikely of circumstances.

5. BONUS! If you need a little play therapy to get your creative juices flowing, the Mindhacks blog also has a great post pointing the way to some howlingly funny little psychoanalytic finger puppets produced by Uncommon Goods. Your digits can role play Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Anna Freud or a couch.