Anne Laure Le Cunff & Nick Milo: How can we do Combinational Creativity?

I have to introduce someone that I'm just so excited to talk with and that I have the, the honor to be here with, and that's Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who is the founder of Nest Labs, a community of knowledge workers to be more productive and creative while taking care of their mental health. She's an ex-Googler and holds an MSc in neuroscience from King's College London, and her work has been featured in Wired, Rolling Stone, and at this point countless more. Very excited to say hello to you, Anne-Laure Le Cunff. And just before, uh, turning the mic over to you, I wanna say that, uh, it's just been a real joy to find your voice in the world of creativity and personal knowledge management. Um, your articles, your, your vibe, and the people that you've brought into your community has just been amazing. So it's just a real pleasure to be talking with you now. So hello, how are you?

I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. I, uh, I'm very grateful for our little corner of the internet, and, uh, I know we have a little bit of overlap in our community, so it's really nice that we get to chat today.

Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And so what we just did in the prior session for those who attended is something about how to take or make notes during these events. And so I do know that one thing we're going to be talking about, and maybe you want to kick this— well, we'll get there soon, but they made a note most likely on combinational creativity. Very interesting words, and I want to explore that with you. So before we dive in though, I just, I'm curious why, like, how did this all come to be? Why did you Just a little background. Why do you find yourself here? Like, what was that moment where you kind of went from, I thought my life was going to go this direction and now I'm here? Like you said beforehand, often speaking in English, that was— you weren't always sure that you'd be doing that. So how did, how did we get here? Or what stands out to you?

Yes, I, uh, started with a very conventional career. I went to prep school, business school, started working at Google in tech. My parents were very happy. It all felt really safe. And then at some point I realized that this wasn't for me, that I didn't feel like I had the space that I needed to express my creativity, to follow my curiosity, and that knowing exactly where the path was taking me didn't feel exciting enough. So I started from scratch and I went back to school at the ripe age of 28 to study neuroscience. And this is what put me on this path really, because During my studies, I discovered something called the generation effect that shows that by generating your own version of any kind of content that you are studying, you're both going to remember it better, but also understand it better. So I started a little newsletter where every week I would write about what I was learning and sharing it with— I was going to say the world, but really it was maybe my brother, my sister, maybe a couple of former colleagues at the time. But it was an amazing outlet for me to start writing online. And since then, that newsletter has grown quite a bit. I have started a private community and it has become NAS Labs, which is kind of the, the way I make a living today. So this is my journey so far. Wow.

That's amazing. And actually today I was reopening the Generational Effect. The generation effect. So was that really early on in your process and was that one of those major sparks? It sounds like you're saying it was just that idea.

Oh, absolutely. There's been a before and after, uh, time, uh, after I've discovered that concept, because before that I studied for quite a few months and I was just studying the way I've always been taught to study, just learning everything by heart and trying to regurgitate everything during the exams. And promptly going on, forgetting everything and moving on to the next thing. And when I discovered The Generation Effect, I realized that I could actually use all of this knowledge that I was taking all of this time and energy interacting with and make it more useful for me over the long term. And that it does sound obvious. And I think for many people in your community that are listening right now, maybe this is an obvious thing, but there's more to life than taking exams. So the, the Generation Effect for me was a pivotal moment where I realized that I could also create something of my own and put it into the world. And that's when I started creating and sharing my work online.

Yeah, we're going to move on to the combinational creativity because— but, but I say this with a grin because I just want to talk about how profound the generation effect is. And in fact, that, that's a really good opportunity to make a note on that as well, everyone, because I think you'll find that it might tie into— it might link into combinational creativity. It's just a hunch. I don't know for sure. We're about to find out. But I mean, that, that's— I just get goosebumps because the idea that you can learn by, by chewing on concepts, by colliding them, by, I don't know, maybe getting them to combine in interesting ways. It's just exciting. But with that in mind, let's go to the topic. What is combinational creativity?

Well, I just love how you just linked— it's very meta— but how you just linked the generation effect to combinational creativity, because there is actually a link. So I think a good way to understand what combinational creativity is, is to look at the kind of traditional definition of creativity. A lot of people think that creativity is basically this idea of having a muse that comes and whispers in your ear ideas and gives you inspiration. And this is a very old idea because you can go back to the work of ancient authors and poets and artists. And so many of them were complaining about the fact that their muse are silent, has abandoned them, and that they have no ideas, their creativity is gone. And a lot of them in fact were using chemical substances, opium, alcohol, whatever it took to get their muse to come back. The good news for everyone listening who wants to be more creative without having to consume any opium is that you, this is not how creativity works. Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a French artist, and all creativity is combinational in nature. There's no something that just materializes from thin air. Any kind of creativity in essence is taking two or more things that already exist and combining them together to create something new. And so this is really what combinational creativity is. Um, so what's really nice about it is that it means that It can be controlled, it can be programmed, and this is something that you can do regularly. You can literally sit down and practice it instead of waiting for your muse to come and whisper those ideas into your ear. Yes.

And I guess the question with that would be, how does this concept, how should it make us feel? This idea that we combine things and we don't have to wait for the muse. Like, with the people in your community, and when you've shared this, and with yourself, what— when we understand that we're combining and not trying to create from the magical nothingness, how do— what's the feeling that that gives off to you?

Um, I actually got an email from a community member a few days ago that is the answer to your question. But she was telling me that The idea of combinational creativity gave her permission to create and share her work because it made her realize that no idea was original. And that was a big barrier for her, that every time she was creating something, she felt like, oh, someone else has created something similar at some point. It's not original, it's not new, and so it's worthless. And realizing that all creativity, all ideas are just a combination of existing ideas gave her permission to kind of join that collective playground where everyone is taking ideas from other people, combining them together, and then contributing their new ideas back to the pool that everyone can pull from and connect again together. So in terms of how it makes us feel, I think that compared to the traditional idea of creativity, which is basically passive, unpredictable, and very stressful because you have no control over it. And you keep on judging yourself for not being original enough. Combinational creativity is active. It's more mindful. And it's also a lot more playful.

Playful seems to be the keyword there. And a playground. It's like we're a child jumping back into the sandbox. And there are some other kids in there. We're all waddling around and we, we learn and we play. I love this.

Yes. Yeah.

So those are some of the benefits so far of combinational creativity, a playful attitude, this like understanding that we have permission to combine. It makes me think, just as a tangent, and you probably know about this and I, I don't and I should, where did this I don't know if you have an answer here, so I don't wanna put you on the spot, but does anyone know, or do you know where this notion came from that we have to be these original artists, the, these original?

I think, okay, don't quote me exactly on this, but I think it comes from ancient Greece and from the actual muses. Like they actually had those deities that were kind of the guardians of creativity and of ideas. And I think that's why the poets in ancient Greece were considered a separate class of citizens, because they were the only ones that had that privilege of connecting with the Muses and hearing from them, which would explain also why they were in such despair when their creativity was gone, because it did mean that they had been abandoned by by their muse.

Wow.

Um, but I think this is where it comes from. Wow.

I— whether or not that that's the case, I, I think that makes a lot of sense that it is, in that sense that if it's gone, it's just so fragile, I guess, you know, when you think of it that way, versus combining, because now we have building blocks, they're always around, and it's just let's dump them on the floor again and see what we can do. I think, I think there's more. I think there's more to suss out here. And I guess my next question would be around practical ways that you have found to do combinational creativity. Where is it happening or how, how is it practical?

Yeah. Well, you need to start with at least two ideas, obviously, if you wanna combine something together. It could be more ideas, but I'll start with the two ideas just to make it simple and practical. There are three main ways that I found are really helpful to get started with combinational creativity. So the first one would be chaining ideas. So you take them, you take those two ideas and you ask yourself, how does this first idea impact the other one? To give you an example, I I write a lot about mindful productivity, and I've started recently again doing intermittent fasting. And so chaining would be how does mindful productivity impact fasting, for example? How do you combine the two? How do you maybe build a mindful productivity schedule and a way of working that allows for you to also better manage your diet, etc.? So how does A impact be? And you could do that for absolutely anything, and it doesn't have to be linear. It could be, how does mindful productivity impact your diet and your sleep, for example? Or how does mindful productivity impact your sleep? And how does sleep impact your mental health? And you can go in all sorts of directions like this by combining those ideas and building a little chain, basically, until you start discovering interesting questions and stories that you want to to explore it further. Another one that works really well is clustering. So instead of just chaining them like this in terms of which, how does they, do they impact each other? It's looking at what they have in common, the common themes that they have together. And those are some of the most fun ones that you can come up with. Like what do creativity and mental health have in common? What do cities and living organisms have in common? What do gardening and project management have in common? So you can take two ideas and the— talking about playfulness, but the more random they are and the more different they seem, the more fun this exercise is to try and find the common points between the two. And the more random— and again, there's no real originality, but the more random they are, the more likely you are to stumble upon something that very few other people have been looking at before. Which can be really fun as well. And the last one is comparing and contrasting ideas and just asking yourself, how are they similar? How are they different? Is one better than the other? So yeah, there's a book I really like, I highly recommend called The Hidden Life of Trees. And it's the, the author, I can't remember his name, but he's the one who coined the term wood wide web, the idea that all of the plants and trees and and fungi, they're all connected together, they communicate together, they, they send signals and messages and collaborate together. And so the way they approached that problem was taking the idea of animal intelligence and plant intelligence. How are they similar? How are they different? If you take an animal brain, what does that look like for a plant? If you look at fear, the emotion of fear in an animal, what does it look like in a plant? And just comparing and contrasting crossing like this, those ideas across two different domains is also an amazing way to come up with new ideas. So those are my three main techniques. And to bring them all together, something I really like to do is build a concept map, which maybe some of your audience are already familiar with. But if you're not, it's a bit like a mind map where you're putting different ideas on paper and linking them together. What's different about a concept map is that you actually define what the links are about. So this arrow in this direction means that this idea is impacting this one in this way. This arrow in this one means that this one is stronger than this way, and you just write it down. And it's a really nice way to chain and cluster, compare and contrast your ideas on paper and kind of see patterns emerge in this way.

Love the concept map. And when you have to define the relationship, that is again being active in the process, and that's helping to make better sense of things. So it seems as though you are a fan of words that start with C. Got combinational creativity and then the 3 Cs, right? I'm sure you're quite aware of this, uh, chaining, clustering, comparing, contrasting. Um, I, and they're all just amazing. Uh, the chaining, I, I did not include that sort of question in our note-making efforts, but I'm going to implore everyone listening to add this question. How does the thing that was interesting impact the thing it reminds you of? How does A impact B? So we're going to add that prompt. That's our 6th prompt. Okay, good one here would be, how does combinational creativity, or how does this generation effect impact combinational creativity, or the other way around? I don't know, just throwing out ideas, keeping everyone on their toes. Did you ever get into CMAP tools? It was this open-source concept map. Are you aware of it?

I'm aware of it. I've never used it because by the time I discovered it, there were a lot more modern tools that were doing similar things. Yeah. I don't know if they were better because I can't really compare to, I haven't used that, but I've seen the landing page and it looked like it hadn't been updated in a very long time. So I just assumed, which I can't blame anyone for because I know what it's like in open source work and can be a bit of a thankless, you know, task to maintain all of these things. Um, but yeah, so I've never used it. I'm familiar with it.

Yeah. Uh, it, it's, it's really amazing how long it took to kind of improve upon that. The, the one thing that it had going for it was that it was basically an open canvas. So like you were saying, the mind map can be, it, the concept map is separate, but one of the reasons that Cmap Tools was so nice is because it was open. So you could just, manually drag things wherever you wanted to and, uh, you didn't feel constrained. And that was, that was enjoyable. I think we've, we have better apps these days, but it took a lot longer than it should have to get there, for my opinion. And, and that I think ties in overall to something that I think we're not completely there yet, which is the visuals. So we have all these ideas and a lot of them are still text-based. I mean, I'm in Obsidian every day and that's 90% text. So how can we use combinational creativity in a more visual way? We have the concept map. That's probably the main one, but are there others that you've seen?

So I would say that the concept map would be probably the most effective one, simplest one as well, because you could use tools like CMAP, but, and there are many, many other tools if you just look it up, but you can also do it on paper. It doesn't require any complicated tools to actually do it. A pen and a piece of paper. You could be on the bus, on the plane, or wherever, and just pull your notebook and very quickly start mapping a concept and combining ideas together to do a mini brainstorm on your own. That's very easy. One of my friends who wrote a book, she did it with Post-it notes on her wall. And it looks really nice too. It looks a little bit crazy, a little bit like in those murder movies, kind of the scene where the detective is trying to find out who committed the crime. But she basically has a whiteboard and she put the Post-it notes on them and then she links the Post-it notes by just writing on the whiteboard and she can just erase the lines when she wants to move stuff around. She can just kind of pull Post-it notes together. That allows her also to play with different colors for different themes. Something that I really like that she did was that she had a color coding for the level of certainty that she had around the ideas. So ideas that she was very confident about, that she had lots of knowledge about, and so that she was almost 100% sure were going to end up somewhere. In the book. She— those would have a certain color. And then some that were more like questions, things that she's heard in the conversation but maybe didn't have time to do her own research about, wasn't completely sure about, and wasn't sure they would end up in the book were on a different Post-it notes in terms of color. And she could rewrite them on another color depending on how she felt about them. But I really like that process. Takes a bit of space. If you live with other people, they may not like the new décor that you're putting in there. Living room, but I really like that too. But I think, yeah, pen, paper, using an online tool, your wall, it's really the idea is still the same, right? It's just being able to have those ideas, to be able to move them and to link them together. If your method accomplishes these things, it works.

That really makes me want to have the big whiteboard and do that. Um, I, I don't do it often enough. I've been, whenever things get hectic though, I return more to paper than ever. Usually when I have to like plan big, big things, then I want a diagram and just have a map, a physical map that I can take with me in my hand and, and work with it. How have you used combinational creativity in your work? You've done so much. We, we probably, you could talk about this for a day, but where, what are some that really resonate with you?

Well, the, the whole theme of my blog, NestLabs, is the result of combinational creativity. I basically looked at what happens if you take the best from mindfulness and the best from productivity and you combine them together, and that gives you very original mindful productivity. Very transparent, right? But my whole work is based on that, and I'm constantly pulling ideas from the world of productivity and from the world of mindfulness and combining them together. Most of my articles are the result of some sort of combinational creativity exercise. And another way that I've been sometimes using concept maps as well to come up with ideas is that there's something really nice when you create those kind of maps where you can visually see the gaps. You can visually see where not many people have explored that part of the map. And where you want to contribute in filling that gap. And so I really like doing that sometimes, just taking all of the ideas that I've written about, that I've read about, that just go through my notes, and I just create a little map and I look at the things that have been covered many, many times, and I look at the areas where it's a bit more empty. It's a bit like being an explorer, again, the idea of the playground, and I decide, oh great, I'm going to go and explore that part of the map because not many people have been there yet.

Exactly. And where did that map come from? Like, you made, you made the map.

Exactly. The, the map itself is actually, yeah, it's actually a produce of combinational, a product of, of combinational creativity. I've never— I've done that for some of my maps on Twitter, but I would imagine— it just made me realize that I would imagine that even the maps themselves, if you want, you wanted to share them with the world could actually be something pretty cool to share with people.

Yeah. It'd be, it's, it's you being the cartographer, like you, you figuring out what's on the map. Um, and then there are gaps in your, your map and you say, okay, let's go here.

Yes.

I, I think it's a worth worthwhile metaphor. Sometimes I think the map is, you know, I think everyone here probably has heard the phrase. The map is not the territory. Sometimes I think, well, it kind of is. It kind of is though, if it's our reality. Like, if the map is our reality, it's— it's— yes, it's not the territory. A rock, I can say rock, but that's not, you know, rock. I don't want to go too philosophical, but sometimes I think the maps we make become our reality.

Yeah, I don't know. I agree. No, I agree with you. Uh, I think This is actually a really helpful metaphor. As long as you remember that your map is not fixed and that you can expand it, and in that way your territory, your own, you know, access to your own territory becomes bigger basically. The more you expand that map, the more you go and, you know, have fun in these little unexplored areas, ask questions. You know, kind of like being comfortable with the unknown and seeing that as an opportunity to create something new. In that case, it's good to remember that the map is not the territory, but also that it doesn't really matter in practical terms because your map is your current territory and all you can do is expand that map so you can expand your territory.

Yeah, that's pretty awesome.

Philosophical. Yeah.

What about your tools? What are the tools, physical or digital or apps, whatever it is, what are the ones that you're using where you're really practicing combinational creativity the most?

I would say that it depends on which stage I'm at in the process. I very often start from just my note-taking system. I do everything in Roam. There are lots of different tools that achieve similar things, and so I think it doesn't really matter which tool you're using, though some of them make it easier to link your ideas together. This is one of the reasons why I like Roam, because it makes it very easy to create those links. But I kind of do my gardening in Roam. I'm just looking for ideas, connecting them together, and, you know, looking for inspiration. Then sometimes I'll switch to paper once I noticed an area that I think is interesting and I'll do a quick concept map. Doesn't take very long, you know, maybe like 10 minutes, but just to have an idea of what I have in my notes, what are those gaps that I want to explore. And then I'll go back to Roam to do a little outline of the content that I want to create based on the ideas that I found by combining them, chaining them, etc. Which happens more in a visual way on paper for me. And once I'm ready to actually create the article, I leave Roam because it's not a really great writing experience and I just go to Google Docs like most people. And this is where I actually write, but there's a lot of back and forth. It's not a very linear process because sometimes I'll start writing the outline and realize that, oh, here's a gap I didn't see with the concept map actually. So maybe let's go back to this and explore a little bit more. Or sometimes Sometimes I'll have an idea and I'll find that there's everything I need in my note-taking system already, because this is something that I've probably been interested in for a long time, or sometimes it's something very new and I need to do a lot more research. So there's this kind of method to the madness, but it's, I think from the outside, it would probably look a little bit messy. But I think this is part again of the playfulness of it. I don't try to apply a very rigid system to my creative process. I really try to make space for ideas to emerge, for creativity to happen, and I really follow my curiosity. This is really the compass that I'm using to decide what I'm going to write about next.

It's really similar because we say a lot of the same phrases, and when I hear something that you say, I think, wow, wow. It's really in the air. It's really in the air. It's in the zeitgeist, so to speak. And it's just cool hearing things like ideas emerge. And then something else though is that the process, because I always think, well, I'll start on paper to get off, you know, like get out the noise, then I'll go digital. But you're actually saying, well, some, you know, I go digital, like see things, but then I'll take it to paper, concept map it. And it's not always linear like you said, but then you can go back. And then yeah, Google Docs for the final output. Do you, for your newsletters, is it, do you go in Google Docs or do you maybe just go right into the newsletter form?

For the newsletter, my newsletter is mostly, you know, kind of like a collection of everything that I've produced that week, whether it's articles or tweets or podcasts that I've done. So I write it directly in my email service provider. I'm using ConvertKit. And so I write everything in there because the only real bit of writing that I do is just the introduction of the newsletter. And that's maybe 4 or 5 paragraphs at most. And it's mostly about what I've been thinking this week. There's no additional research going on there. I'm not trying to produce new ideas at the stage of writing the newsletter. So If I've had, if I've done everything right that week, normally it's more of a matter of pulling all of these things that I've created that week and putting them together in the newsletter. So I did directly in there.

I need to get to that point right now. I'm doing too much creative work in also ConvertKit and it's not the funnest, but they're all, that's an another interesting area I'd actually like to explore how the medium the environment affects the message or the content. Because if, if, if you say something on Twitter, it's going to look different than when you're writing an article at Nest Labs.

Absolutely. I was actually talking about it on Twitter recently, how someone was saying that they recently started writing in Google Docs and they loved it. And I was telling— I was saying that I, I write all of my Nest Labs articles in Google Docs, but for my PhD, I have to use Microsoft Word. Which is horrendous. And it's funny how I feel like it also impacts the way I'm thinking and writing. I tend to be more calm in Google Docs. My sentences are shorter, is just like less verbose, whereas the environment of Word makes me feel like I have to talk like a researcher. I have to write long sentences. It has to be complicated. So it's more effort for me. And very often I end up downloading my articles from Word, uploading them to Google Docs to do the final editing. Just to shift that mindset and go into Ness Lab's writing kind of mode. And then obviously for Twitter, just because you have those restrictions in terms of length of the content, the fact that if you want to write longer things, you have to break it down into discrete units of ideas. Like if you do a thread, each tweet has to encompass one idea. That also makes you probably think in the more bite-sized structured way. So this is, yeah, this is why I would probably see a difference between people. I know some people write their threads outside of Twitter and just copy paste them afterwards, whereas others write directly on Twitter. And I don't know what the effect is, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a difference in tone and the way those tweets are presented in the end, depending on where the tweets were actually crafted.

Yeah, there definitely would be. I'm absolutely sure of it. If it's in Twitter, it's going to be punchier, shorter, more like declarative. And then if it's, if it was done in a journal, like if you're writing in cursive, I don't think you're going to be making the same statements and exclamation points and that sort of thing. So just a couple more questions and I think we'll open it up in a few minutes to the questions and then we'll be done everyone in about, wow, I can't believe it, 16 minutes. That's all we have. So we'll be done at the 50-minute mark, 50-minute mark. So I have two, I think two more questions I wanted to get to is what can you do with ideas that you generate through combinational creativity? And you've probably already, you know, they do become outputs, but is that what you're doing mostly? Like outputting them, sharing them, or how would you describe your, the ideas that you create through combinational creativity, which is probably everything, but yeah.

Yeah, obviously in my case, the most obvious outcome is all of the articles that I'm creating. I used to publish YouTube videos as well, which I'm not doing anymore because I had to sacrifice some things when I started the PhD, can't do everything, but I was also using that for YouTube videos, tweets, but also even if you don't have a blog, even if you don't have a newsletter or podcast or an active Twitter account, you can use the ideas that you've generated with combinational creativity in all sorts of different areas of your life and your work. So you can use them in conversations. You'll find that the more you connect ideas together, the more you'll also kind of like use that muscle. And when you talk with people and they say something, you'll be like, oh, that reminds me of this, because you're so used to looking at the world in this way now where you're constantly chaining and clustering and comparing ideas that this is going to naturally happen during conversations. So one outcome is that you're going to be a lot more fun at dinner parties, which is great. And then another one is just at work, it may not be especially in the online creator world, one of the most obvious things, because many of us don't really do these things anymore. But if you're putting a presentation together at work, you can come up with a new interesting angle, a new way to look at a problem, a solution that is more innovative because you combine two ideas that were not the obvious ones that everyone was looking at. So that can also be used when you're solving for problems at work. Or even on personal projects. It's really just a great way to think about ideas in general. And ideas are not only in the realm of online, you know, the online creator world, they're everywhere, right? So anywhere you think ideas are helpful, combinational creativity can be helpful.

And that kind of segues into this last one is it doesn't sound like this is something that has to be done by yourself.

Oh, definitely not. It's— you can do it on your own. It works on your own. And if you don't feel like you have yet a community to do that with, you can start on your own, but it's even more fun when you do it with other people. And it can be on Twitter, just sharing those ideas that you're generating, or even asking people saying, what do you think happens if you combine this and this? Or how do you think this idea impacts this other one? So you can even collect answers from other people rather than just working with your own. You know, in communities. I know, you know, in your community, Nick, for example, lots of people who are passionate about linking their thinking. So trying to find a little tribe or at least one thinking buddy that you can bounce ideas off with can be a really, really good way to increase even more the power of combinational creativity, because it's again, all about combining them together. So the more ideas you have in that playground, the more ideas you can play with, the more creative you're going to be.

Yeah, I love that. And that kind of is what we're all doing here. So all, all 263 of us, we're right now forming a sort of, um, pressure cooker, an environment where we can— a fun pressure cooker, a playful pressure cooker, but it's concentrated. And that's actually a really important component to a lot of the creativity. If, if our our ideas are spread out and it takes us 2 miles to get to the next one, where we're not going to be able to make a connection as easily between them. But if they're in this, on the same concept map, then, then sparks can fly. And, and I, and I hope that this has provided that environment for, for everyone listening. It has for me, for sure. Like, you know, my, the mind's on fire making all sorts of connections and just really good stuff. I think we should open up for Q&A. If you're down for that, Anne-Laure. We have 10 minutes.

Let's do it.

All right, so here's one, and I'm happy to see that Rodney's already responded, but what is the generation effect in one or two sentences?

Go, Rodney. You even linked to the Next Labs article. Thank you so much. Um, so yeah, it's, uh, it's basically, uh, as, as I said at the beginning, really the idea that By creating your own version of a piece of content, you're going to remember it and understand it better. And by creating your own version, it can really be as simple when you're taking notes to not just write whatever you just heard, like whether it's you're taking an online course or you're having a conversation or you read something interesting, just rephrase it in your own words. And that would be really the simplest version of this. And then you can take it to another level, which is what I did with creating full blog posts about ideas in my own words. Again, videos, podcasts, whatever you generate basically is going to help you remember and understand the content better. That's the generation effect.

Wonderful, wonderful. All right, let's see. Lolita, how would you take into account acknowledging the source of an idea? When creating your own, a.k.a. not risking plagiarism when in the process of putting things in your own words or creating your own idea? Thanks.

It's fine. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by William Inch. He's an English writer, and he said that originality is undetected plagiarism. So this is, I think, really the only way to do this is just to kind of link to the original ideas. And you'll see that if you go on my blog and any kind of blog writer or content creator that's honest about the fact that their creativity is combinational is going to have references to where they found the inspiration. And it's amazing when you read that kind of content because it's like breadcrumbs. You can click on the links and see, oh, that idea came from here. Oh, but that idea is also the result of the combination of two other ideas. And it's a little bit like falling into a Wikipedia black hole. You just find, like, fall into that black hole of combinational creativity where you see how other people have connected these ideas together. So if you want to join in on the fun and be connected again in that big playground, just make sure that you link back to the authors that have contributed ideas that you've used and combined together to create your own content.

Yeah, I think that's, that's really important to think of it in that way. I, it, I wrote down something that you said there, and I think I would, I want to add this to my permissions list. I keep a list of permissions to kind of push back against some things that society makes us think, but this one that you said, it's okay, or basically to rephrase it, it's okay that your creativity is combinational. Like it's okay.

Exactly. This is really good. Yes. Uh, I'll, uh, yeah, I'll, I'll probably reply that to the, the email that I got from my community member that was talking about the same word that she used. You just used, right? It gave me permission. Combinational creativity gave me permission to create and share my work.

Yes, absolutely. All right, so I'm sifting through. Got some shoutouts that, um, Gray really enjoys your newsletter, one of the highlights of the week.

Thank you.

Thomas says, I feel this strongly and love this fusion. Combinational creativity in food and in cultures have produced some of the beautiful things in the world, both biological in the combination of genes, artistic, scientific, et cetera. Kids are naturally playful and without limits, combine things that adults would sometimes would never think of.

I love this.

Less of a— yeah. Oh yeah. Less of a question, but more of a vibe. Yeah. Yeah. No, play off of it, please.

Oh no, no. I, I, I love this. And, and actually I, I think this is really nice. It doesn't mean that because something is natural, it's good, but in this case, you do find that combinational creativity is something that you find everywhere in nature as well. And I absolutely agree with you. Um, some of my My favorite restaurants are also fusion food restaurants. I think about my favorite artists, like I really like Stromae, for example, and his songs are talking about depression with some very dancey vibes. And it's taking those two things that would normally feel really weird together, but they work because he just went ahead, didn't wait for permission, and combined them together. So I absolutely agree. And you talked about science too. I do think that a lot more discoveries would happen if scientists were not working as much in silos and if there was a lot more collaboration between different disciplines and if we were taking inspiration from different areas of research, combining them together and see what lies when you look at that overlap. So yeah, I know it wasn't a question, but I really like this. So thank you for sharing, Thomas.

Yes, we need this though. You know, I look at the, the aughts, not the aughts, but the teens, 2000s, and '10 to '19, however you want to look at it. And I really thought, uh, Cal Newport's idea of deep work and how we need to honor our attention was sort of the thought of the, the decade in many ways. I think going into the '20s— I, I know I'm simplifying things— going into the '20s though, I, I think it's really ideas around combinational creativity and being able to cross disciplines and genres and our thinking that way, because we have systematic problems to solve. Yolanda Gibb, who's speaking later, would classify these as wicked problems. We're not going to solve them if we're only focused on this particular tiny field. We need people who can make the connections, who can combine and talk to each other in combinational ways. So all of us here have almost a responsibility to practice this. Absolutely. We have a couple more, couple more, and feel free to play off. I, I don't ever mean to jump in. Um, Danny Hatcher, who is speaking on Friday, what does creativity mean? What does it look like, feel like? How do you identify it?

This is such a big question. I feel like people have spent thousands of years trying to answer that question. I'll give it a try. I don't pretend that this is the definitive answer to such a big question. But to me, and sorry if this is going to sound very philosophic, but to me, creativity is when I feel most alive in the sense that I'm not just here existing and passively experiencing whatever is going on around me. It's when I feel like an active maker of the world. I feel like I'm shaping the world around me. I'm contributing something, and the world is slightly different for me being in it versus than me not being in it. So it's very philosophical, but at its core, I think it's about being an actor in the world, whatever that looks like to you, whatever you create. Whatever you contribute. It's about making and shaping the world.

I really like that, being an actor. Once you get off the seat in the stands and jump into the arena, then you're being creative. Final thoughts or things? How can we learn more? I mean, at this point, I feel like everyone here probably knows you and where to find your work, but What would be some next steps where people can go to next? What would you prefer? Your website?

Yeah, the best way to make me happy is to subscribe to my newsletter. So you can go to newsletter.nestlabs.com and sign up there. I send it every week and I talk about mindful productivity, creativity, and a lot of the things that we talked about today. And if you want to reach out and ask questions, the place where I'm most responsive. I reply to everyone, which I probably shouldn't, but I do on Twitter. So if you have any questions, any things you're curious about, just follow me there, send me a message. I'm a bit too active there, but a good way to reach me.

That's impressive that you're able to respond to everyone. Well, that's great. So in the link in the chat, there have been links, and the last one is there from Dan. So that is, that is where you should go. Definitely subscribe. It's really nice to always see your, your newsletter. And with that, we're going to give a virtual invisible round of applause to Anne-Laure.

Yeah.

I mean, you can see mine, but everyone else is doing this too. Thank you, Anne-Laure. Thank you. This was amazing.

Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Yes, it was. We'll have to do it again sometime, but In the meantime, we'll say goodbye. Bye, Anne-Laure. Thank you so much. Bye.