“Creativity is the ultimate personal freedom.”
— Scott Barry Kaufman
I host a weekly radio show on SiriusXM 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton, called Work and Life. We publish edited versions of my conversations as free podcasts. I invite you to listen to the episode (embedded below) that is my conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive psychologist who studies the messy minds of creative people. He is Scientific Director of the Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center and professor of Positive Psychology at The University of Pennsylvania. At Penn he teaches the wildly popular Introduction to Positive Psychology. Scott is co-author of Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, host of The Psychology Podcast, and co-founder of The Creativity Post.
In this episode we talk about Scott’s inspiring personal and professional journey, including how he went from being a student with special needs to earning a Ph.D. from Yale. Scott challenges listeners to focus less on productivity and more on cultivating creative capacity by stepping outside your comfort zone, daydreaming, and committing to your passions — harmonious but not obsessive passions, that is. He describes the method of active, open-monitoring meditation, provides guidance on how to use it, and explains how it differs from traditional mindfulness techniques.
Originally published at medium.com