Recommended Articles

Traveling and creativity are endlessly fascinating topics; particularly traveling alone (which I have come to have a love/hate relationship with) and the dynamics of creativity on an interpersonal level.

Here are snippets from a few articles that have caught my eye recently:

1. O'Hagan, Andrew. "Yes, Please | Party of One." The New York Times 09 May. 2013

The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone. The writer’s life is more openly narcissistic than most, yet it takes a true connoisseur of self-involvement, a grand master in the art of selfishness, to experience the world’s delights as they are meant to be enjoyed: through one pair of eyes, via one set of ears, with the perfect use of your own nostrils, tongue and touch. I believe that traveling alone is the last great test of who you are in a world where everyone aches to be the same.
I mean, you meet people. But you also meet yourself. That is the beauty of going it alone.

2. Shenk, Joshua Wolf. "The Power of Two." The Atlantic 25 Jun. 2014

For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us, its shadow obscuring the way creative work really gets done. The attempts to pick apart the Lennon-McCartney partnership reveal just how misleading that myth can be, because John and Paul were so obviously more creative as a pair than as individuals, even if at times they appeared to work in opposition to each other. The lone-genius myth prevents us from grappling with a series of paradoxes about creative pairs: that distance doesn’t impede intimacy, and is often a crucial ingredient of it; that competition and collaboration are often entwined.

3. Andreasen, Nancy. "Secrets of the Creative Brain." The Atlantic 25 Jun. 2014

I’ve been struck by how many of these people refer to their most creative ideas as “obvious.” Since these ideas are almost always the opposite of obvious to other people, creative luminaries can face doubt and resistance when advocating for them. As one artist told me, “The funny thing about [one’s own] talent is that you are blind to it. You just can’t see what it is when you have it … When you have talent and see things in a particular way, you are amazed that other people can’t see it.” Persisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or for scientists, can be a lonely path—one that may also partially explain why some of these people experience mental illness.