John Cleese on Creativity

Reposting this John Cleese lecture that Merlin posted because some assholes had it taken down off Vimeo. (I was on the road, so I didn’t grab the hi-res copy, but I did download this YouTube version, so…) I watched it twice last week — both times before I was scheduled to give a talk.

Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating.

Before, I’d only seen this lecture of his , which I quoted in STEAL: “We don’t know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we don’t get them from our laptops.”

John Cleese is brilliant. In this talk on creativity he lays out a structured way to get good ideas before you switch into getting things done mode to make them happen.