Philippe Petit, who walked a high wire between the Twin Towers, has written a book called Creativity: the Perfect Crime. I haven't had a chance to read it yet but I found an interview with him at the Wall Street Journal blog.
Why does he compare creativity to a crime?
"You have to feel free and we know freedom is a hard thing to get. There is a feeling of rebellion in any act of creativity for me. That’s why the title of the book is The Perfect Crime.”
What stops most people from being more creative?
"What I think tailors the creativity of most people are the rules that we learn from the age we are very small – in school, our parents. It’s not to say that schools and parents give bad advice, but instead of encouraging your creativity, I think – because I suffered in school – they give you a lot of rules. Unless you break those rules you’re not really going to create."
Don't expect a typical book about the nature of creativity--he says he fowns upon those kinds of books (surely not mine, Creativity Now, published by Pearson...) and his is a collection of sketches and personal dialogue about his own creative process.
Here's a little taste:
"Born into the confines of rigid parenting, repressive schooling and the narrow-mindedness of a country busy manufacturing 365 types of cheeses, quite early I started to rebel against authority. I was not very good at following. I had to distance myself from the norm, to venture along solitary paths, to teach myself.
At six, I taught myself magic; at fourteen, juggling; at sixteen, wire-walking. In the process, I was thrown out of five different schools. Regardless, I would never have let my schooling get in the way of my education.
Observation was my conduit to knowledge, intuition my source of power."
He sounds very French, doesn't he?...I've ordered the book and will post a review of it.
