John Cleese on Creativity

There’s a great summary of this over at Ewan McIntosh’s blog, but my favorite part of the talk is around the 9 minute mark when he gives one the most profound insights I’ve heard about knowing if you’re good at something:

“To know how good you are at something requires the same skills that it does to be good at that thing. Which means, if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely hopeless at it. And this is a profound discovery. That most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they’re doing.”

I’m actually still trying to wrap my head around that.

[Via]

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3 thoughts on “John Cleese on Creativity

  1. [...] Kung Fu Grippe, the awesome blog of Merlin Mann; he got it from Tape Noise Diary who got it from Broadcasting [...]

  2. [...] a paragraph at the bottom of the article that provided hat tips (acknowledgements) to Merlin Mann, Jay Cruz, and [...]

  3. [...] reminded of that talk John Cleese gave in which he said “that most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, [...]

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