Maurice Ashley - Thrivals 5.0

Maurice Ashley lives his passion. Through his love for chess, he not only made history as the first African-American International Grandmaster in the annals of the game, but he has managed to translate his love to others as a three-time national championship coach, two-time author, iPhone app producer, puzzle inventor, DVD creator, ESPN commentator and motivational speaker. 

He has traveled the world as an ardent spokesperson of the character-building effects of the game, going from the rough and tough streets of Kingston, Jamaica and Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up, to the crime-ridden neighborhoods of Detroit, the townships of Cape Town, South Africa and the poverty-stricken jungles of Belize, Central America. His book, Chess for Success, (Broadway Books, 2005) crystallizes his vision for the character-building effect of chess, particularly for at-risk youth, and he continuously spreads his message of living one’s dream to universities, businesses, chess clubs and non-profit organizations around the globe.

His app, “Learn Chess! with Maurice Ashley,” has been sold in over 30 countries, and he has received multiple community service awards from city governments, universities, and community groups for his work. His drive and enthusiasm always has him on the go: for the fall of 2011, Maurice toured six Caribbean nations bringing chess, books and technology to kids in the region.

Where does creative class earn the most?

Saying we need a new approach to education and learning, Richard Florida, who recently updated his book, "Rise of the Creative Class," writes that

The tectonic upheavals our economy is enduring are the result... of a deeper and more fundamental shift - the passing of the old industrial order as it gives way to the emerging Creative Economy....

Everyone agrees that education is important, but our definition of education must be broadened. Just as the United States once sank vast amounts of public and private funds into canals, railroads, highways, and other physical infrastructure to power industrial growth, the country today needs to massively increase its investments in its human creative capital."

If you've been following IdeaFestival developments this year, or better, if you've bought your all-access pass to IdeaFestival 2012 - thank you! - you know that education and its changing nature will play a big role this year. Higher education in particular is undergoing enormous change, as Richard DeMillo will discuss. A list of 500 free online courses tweeted earlier this week - you are following us, right? -  drew click after click. Thanks to technology, more and more top instruction can be had online, from learning the basics of cosmology from Leonard Susskind at Standford to studying ancient and midieval philosophy at Notre Dame. Some institutions will soon offer credit, according to the New York Times. It's no stretch to say that the best in human understanding has never in history been so widely and freely available.

That's the thing about innovation, isn't it? One never knows where and when it will occur. Having been upended by technology, educational institutions must think about their role as gatekeepers, as credential givers. And who knows what changes may be coming to health care and energy, to name two other prosperous industries. As "the old industrial order" gives way, its the smart and industrious, the lateral thinkers able to make new connections and then act their discoveries, that will benefit.

At the IdeaFestival, we specialize in new connections. 

So where does the creative class earn the most? Florida lists his top twenty cities here.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by fw_gadget

Creative introverts just do it longer

Creative people are just wired to live in the question, not answer it.

Creativity requires what Jonathan Fields describes as "a tolerance for ambiguity," which means that it's important to live long enough in the question to get beyond the initial, and sometimes hasty, response, to the second or third or fourth answer.

An introspective tendency is both good and bad. As an introvert, I'll spend a long time thinking about what would boor most people - the shape of an object in my wood shop, the singular nature of the first person experience or, recently, solving a particular problem in code and circuitry related to a discreet question nobody had thought to ask - there's a reason for that! - about how to carry out a certain automated process in "nearspace." Step two: learn how to write code and build circuits.

On the down side, the fun of entertaining many possible solutions or of finding a particularly elegant solution can come at the cost of a missed opportunity. It might be a great quality for a sculptor, less so for an attorney or an entrepreneur, which is to say that if you prefer to process inwardly, the networks are neural, not on LinkedIn.

Recently, Keith Sawyer has been critical of Susan Cain's observations in her book, "Quiet," about introversion and creativity. Sawyer argues for collaboration as the source for the novel, which, speaking as an introvert, sounds like an extrovert's description of the creative process: it surely must involve a bunch of people. Sawyer has done exhaustive research and I'm sure he's right in the sense that creativity-through-collaboration is part of a much larger mystery of the creative process in general. We all have contributions to make. Unfortunately, organizations, which increasingly depend on innovation and creativity to even have a chance in global markets, have a hard time managing that process for the same reason people do. Everyone wants creativity, but they don't want the doubt and ambiguity that can be its wellspring. Doubt is the introvert's Siren. I suspect that introverts who buck expectations and rise to positions of leadership have carefully managed that push to choose, and why so many of them excel, instead, in the lab or before a blank canvas. Alone, they have time to work through all the energizing options, to offer the best part of themselves in the process of discovery. Working in a group, they need especially loyal and patient collaborators. 

I'm not a leader. But I'm learning to complement my love of possibility by making "little bets" - that's a Peter Sims shout out - which, I've found out, can also lead to fertile and rewarding territory. It's important to get out of my head from time to time and just put one foot in front of the other.

Douglas Eby's blog post "Are Introverts More Creative?" suggest to me that some people are just wired to live in the question, not answer it. That's a good thing. I'd be willing to bet the same is true for a lot of people who attend the IdeaFestival.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Pictured above are Efren Ramirez and Jon Heder from the 2004 movie “Napoleon Dynamite." It was an inspired choice by Eby.

"Staying put means death"

"Staying put means death - it is true physically, true spiritually and true intellectually."

In this three minute video Mars scientist Nathalie Cabrol defends the importance of exploration, especially when times are hard.

The end of the video may just bring you out of your seat.

Cabrol's stirring defense of boundary-pushing brought to my mind the first line Robin Robertson's poem "Apart:" "We are drawn to edges, to our own parapets and sea-walls...."

Have a great weekend.

Wayne

String Theory for Dummies

Speaking in this Big Think video, Harvard prof. and theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall, describes string theory as the attempt to "reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity."

Lisa Randall will speak at IdeaFestival 2012.

Einstein’s relativistic theories describe gravity, and those theories have been tested and confirmed on astronomical scales. Other tests have confirmed that matter on the atomic level behaves in unintuitive ways by maintaining, for instance, an information cohesion, even when separated by wide distances. In another example of quantum wierdness, physicists can determine a particle's position, but never its momentum. They can determine a particle's momentum, but never its position. This indeterminacy is known as the uncertainty principle.

There are scales, however, at which theory can't be tested. The mathematics of string theory suggests that at those vanishingly small scales, all matter consists of vibrating strings that lend form to light and gravity, to fern and stone, to cell and symphony - and to you and me. Nonetheless, the empirically confirmed theories of the colossally large and the quantum small do not fit well together. String theory is one attempt to reconcile the two.

So when Leonard Mlodinow say's he's interested in quantum gravity, what he is really saying that he is interested in a united theory that can explain nature at all scales. Progress!

A dozen or more IdeaFestivals and I might understand the rest of what he and prof. Randall are saying.

Wayne