John Cleese on the Origin of Creativity

There is a better post on this great talk than I can produce. Check it out on Deric Bownds' Mindblog. You might also check out the source on Open Culture.

There is a lot of good stuff in the talk, but I especially like the latter part in which Cleese says that knowing whether or not you are good at something requires precisely the same skills you need to be good at it, so people who are horrible at something tend to have no idea they are horrible at all.

It is interesting that he equates "taste" (in the sense as knowing whether something is really good) with a skill, implying that it can be learned and is not simply an innate ability. That is probably why so many Nobel Prizes in science have been won by former students of other Nobel Prize winners; they learn to distinguish really good ideas from not so good ideas at the feet of their masters. They may also learn to work hard following up on the good ideas at what my mother-in-law used to call "the same low joints".