Yesterday I wrote, ”Think about life like a dualism with two active forces, and together they will move your life like a rolling ball. The forces create a dynamic that gives development.”
Today I stumbled upon this interesting article, ”The Truth: Creativity Comes From Blending Dissonant Goals Into Radical Harmony” by Fabio Sergio, and I felt like ”WOW, this article is about that dualism as a creative force for development that I wrote about yesterday!”
Successful creative thinkers see opposites and apparently contradicting goals not just as a potential for dissonance, but as an opportunity for dynamic harmony.
But it’s also an article about intuition contra actions based upon analysis and plans.
Is innovation the result of the prophetic reflections of lone creative geniuses, or instead the fruit of the collaboration of a group of talented contributors working together? Does innovation come from pushing out ideas that start as flashes of individual insight, or from taking the time to learn what users want?
And somehow that made me think about my mother, Runborg (1918–1997). She had an interesting way of getting things done. People probably thought she was kind, funny, and maybe charming, but I don’t think they considered her intelligent or logical. That was an error of judgment… She had a clever mind, but it worked in a way most people didn’t expect. You might interpret her behaviour as whimsical or confusing, and then she acted like lightning from a clear sky, doing the absolute right thing. It was remarkable to watch!
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| This is my mother, Runborg, on her Birthday maybe 1984? |
My father, Nils (1916–2004), had a more structured way of thinking. He learned things step by step, very methodically. When he was young, he played chess with his friends and told many stories about the ”chess king of Gotland.” I think he had the nickname ”Chasse May” (but I’m not sure, and it’s too late to ask my dad). Chasse had a vivid memory and could play chess without even looking at the board. In fact, he could play with two people at the same time without looking at any of the chessboards.
Anyway, my father introduced my mother to chess, and they had a lot of fun playing together. When I was a teenager, many people played chess with my parents in our summerhouse. It started out as fun, but then it changed to complex challenges. My mum was the only woman playing when neighbours and friends came to play. I think that these men expected my mum to be a piece of cake to conquer. They might have read books by Bobby Fischer or spent hours thinking about smart moves, but they didn’t count on my mum’s surprising behaviour. She didn’t think like she was supposed to. She didn’t respond to their moves as they had planned. She shook their ability to think with seemingly illogical moves, and then suddenly she made her really smart moves and BANG – their king fell dead… Do I have to say that these men got furious? They wanted revenge, revenge and more revenge. My dad just smiled and enjoyed being married to that strangely clever woman.
She followed her own mind, and she often used it to make life happier for both children and lonely elderly people. She didn’t follow the conventions for interacting with others, but she was sincere in her wish to make people happy and to add some adventure to ordinary life. Sometimes she could be very distant as a mother, and as her daughter, I could be disappointed when she didn’t listen, but then she would suddenly tune in and, with sharp precision, say the absolute best things. She never learnt how to raise kids from books (well, she tried to when my big sister was born, but it didn’t turn out well, so she stopped). It came naturally to her, and the older I get, the better I understand how great a mother she actually was.
When I was about 4 years old, we lived on the Swedish mainland, but my mum and I travelled to Gotland in March because of my grandmother’s birthday. My mother planned to buy a lamb fur coat and brought 200 Swedish krona for that reason. (I can’t believe that she expected to buy a lamb fur coat for only 200 sek, but I guess they were really cheap in those days). At the party, she met an old man who had some land, and my mother became interested in buying it. He hadn’t really thought about selling and asked what she would like to pay. ”Well, I guess I could pay 200”, she said, and because none of them had a clue about the value of land, they agreed that she should come and inspect the land and maybe buy it the next day.
Then my mother got worried and called my father. Maybe the old man was trying to fool her? Was 200 too expensive? My father couldn’t believe his ears. Buying land for only 200 Swedish krona? He answered, ”I don’t care what that land looks like, buy it!” And so she did. When she sold that land about 15 years later, many zeros had been added to the price… Imagine that my mother could make such a smart move just by, eh, accident? I think that’s impressive.
I think that I am a mixture of my parents’ two types of intelligence. I have that logical, analytical thinking like my father, but now and then I surprise myself by doing things without knowing exactly why, and a lot of times it turns out to be a very smart move.
Though I think that I have a connecting intelligence that I have had possibilities to develop more than my parents could, partly because of the internet, but also because I have a big network – I know a lot of people, and that means that I am presented to more ideas that I can connect with each other.
As a professional working in market communications, I use a lot of my logical and analytical skills, but it’s my gut feeling that tells me whether I have come up with a good solution.
So, how can we become more innovative and creative? Well, if you ask me, I think you need the ingredient ”surprise”. Without the element of surprise, the result will only be what was expected. Right?
