#43 Honesty Hurts, Hearts and Heals

In this follow-up to the what of creativity, Arnold Beekes covers the how, starting from the fact that our creativity is suppressed from a young age, so the first step is allowing yourself to be creative again. He lists what you need. A question, meaning what you are researching or trying to make visible. A lot of different dots, the topics that inspire you, which don’t have to relate to your question, and he gives the example of Alexander von Humboldt and Jules Verne, whose novels drew on Humboldt’s descriptions. Time, because deep insights take time to digest, and he describes reading a book on human nature and needing a few years to feel in his body that we are foremost emotional beings and not rational ones. Patience and sleeping on an idea for a night or a few. Falling in love with the problem, not the first solution. Space in your head, because with a closed hand you can’t receive anything. Iteration, checking whether you’re still excited by what you created. Chaos, since structure can come at the end. And removing expectations, stigma, status, money and ego, plus the pressure from inside and outside. The episode closes with an everyday beauty story from a vineyard in Sacramento, California, where researchers installed 25 barn owl nest boxes to deal with a gopher and vole infestation. By the following year 18 breeding pairs had moved in and fledged 66 young, and over three breeding seasons the owls consumed an estimated 30,000 rodents. Arnold cites a cost of about 34 cents per rodent for the nest boxes against about eight dollars for trapping, with no poison building up in the food chain.

In this episode, Arnold Beekes splits creativity into two sessions, starting with the what, with the how to follow next time. His definition is that creativity is connecting different dots in a different way and adding something new. The dots are the topics and subjects you are interested in, which is why curiosity and reading widely matter: with two dots there is not much to connect, with 37 it becomes easy. He gives brain fitness and brain athletes as his example, built from the fitness industry and sport combined with brain health, psychology, self-help and spirituality. He then names three more things creativity needs. The first is being present, because distraction makes you lose your line of thought and your intuition. The second is boredom: when you get comfortable being bored and don’t reach for your phone, you leave room for new ideas and insights. The third is accepting reality, since what you resist persists, and in fight or flight your brain is focused on safety and cannot reach creativity or long-term thinking. His suggestion is to accept reality and build something better, which is what he is doing with the better for all collectives, because if you co-create a much better way of learning, living and working, the existing reality fades. The episode closes with an everyday beauty story from St. Mary’s Basilica in Minneapolis, finished in 1914 and in a $50 million renovation with an Easter deadline. While washing the ceiling from 15 floors of scaffolding, workers found gold stencil work hidden under flat paint across a whole archway, and ultramarine blue panels with gold fleur-de-lis in the corners, with no record of either in the building’s documentation. The gold stenciling will be fully restored before Easter.

In this Question and Quote episode, Arnold Beekes asks: which activities in your real life make time disappear and leave you feeling more like yourself? He suggests starting a list, anything from cooking a meal to walking a dog, talking with a friend or reading a great book. He stresses “real life,” meaning not three hours of scrolling, and says to keep the list for a month or two without rushing. Once you have five or six activities, look at what the list tells you and how it makes you feel. The quote is “If you think that there is a quick fix for major problems, be sure that the fast food mentality has taken over your life. The only instant gratification is from daily learning and effort.” Arnold links it to a culture of instant gratification, quick fixes and dopamine hits. He shares an example from when he lived in Budapest, where a university hosted weekly talks by the ambassadors of the main Middle Eastern countries. He went wondering why a few weeks and some clever people couldn’t solve the conflict, and came away realising it is far more complicated than he thought, with history and religion behind it as well as emotion. He values giving people a stage to share their point of view, since the ambassadors also listened to each other’s talks.

In this episode, Arnold Beekes looks at what happens when we use AI heavily, as work shifts from humans using software to humans managing autonomous agents that do the writing, searching and image creation for us. He cites a number of studies and surveys to make the case that outsourcing your thinking weakens it. He refers to an MIT study on using ChatGPT for writing tasks, which reported significantly lower brain activity and learning, with AI users showing the weakest neural connectivity compared with people using search engines or their own thinking. He also cites US reading results, where only 35 percent of high school seniors were proficient at analysing complex themes and arguments in 2024, and a rise in the share of American adults who struggle to paraphrase or draw inferences from a longer text, from under 20 percent in 2017 to nearly 30 percent. He adds that teachers and professors tell him students at every level can no longer write, think critically or remember what they read, and mentions a study of X-ray specialists in Poland whose skills declined after relying on AI. His point is that the brain works like the body: if you don’t use it, you lose it, like a limb that has been in a cast for six weeks. His advice is to think for yourself first, whether it’s a blog, a plan or a structure, and then use AI as a tool to improve or clarify the result, so you work with AI and stay in control, not work for it. The episode closes with an everyday beauty story from Oregon, which has recorded five consecutive years with zero pesticide-related bee deaths. It began with a mass bee die-off in a parking lot in 2013 that led to a pollinator health task force, followed by the Oregon Bee Project from 2018 training 12,000 people on reducing pesticide risk, and the Oregon Bee Atlas cataloguing all 567 bee species found in the state.

In this Question and Quote episode, Arnold Beekes asks: what motivates me? He is looking for your intrinsic, inner motivation rather than the external kind. Most people use the word as if someone else has to do it, like a boss motivating an employee. Arnold thinks that is impossible and that it reinforces not living your own life. To live your own life you need to know what motivates you. Is it money, fame or status, which many people think bring lasting happiness but don’t, or is it helping others, doing something good for the world or building something beautiful? He notes that beauty is disappearing from our cities and communities, so build something that is beautiful. Don’t look at other people or depend on what they want, look inside, between the ears. The quote is “If you don’t add any newness into your life old habits will determine your outcomes and these habits will govern your future.” It echoes the saying that if you do what you did, you get what you got. If you want to change your outer world, your life, work or relationships, you have to change something inside yourself, because hoping for something else without changing anything won’t change the results. His closing question: what old habits would you like to shed and replace with new ones?