Why Windows Makes You More Creative
By Peter LloydCreative people, dressed in black, use skinny, white Macs. That's the rule. The rest of us plod along with un-cool, not-so-innovative Windows. I'm here to throw that rule out the window.
Windows offers much, much greater opportunity for personal creative development. The operative word here is opportunity. Windows is anything but a creative product, but because it performs so poorly, it forces users to invent innovative workarounds.
Websites such as Annoyances.org devote themselves to helping Windows victims beat Windows into submission--to make Windows applications do what users want them to do and stop doing what they insist on doing.
I know the trend in creativity training says that positive support, soft pillows, pastel walls, and brightly colored toys foster greater creativity. But creativity flourishes anywhere.
Necessity is the mother of invention and tribulation is the mother of motivators. Consider the Apollo 13 scene in which the ground crew is forced to hobble together a life-saving device with available spacecraft parts.
"We've got to find a way to make this... fit into the hole for this... using nothing but that," explains a ground-based technician as he dumps the parts on a table. Not only that. They've got to do it without a touch-feely creativity guru treating them to ball tossing and pampering them with New Age music and yoga exercises!
Awarding the creative crown to Windows amounts to giving Tomás de Torquemada a Nobel Prize for innovative torture devices. We really shouldn't encourage either. But if creativity can flourish anywhere, why not choose a comfortable environment with supportive people? Both torture and tenderness work, because it is the nature of people to be creative.
But if you want torture, try working with columns in Microsoft Word. To get Word to do what you want, you'll have to throw every last bit of your creative muscle into it--a real Right Brain Workout!
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.