Creativity is either a blessing or a curse---that much is perfectly clear. If you are lucky enough to attract the attention of some foundation or organization, dedicated to recognizing and furthering the cause of your creativity, they will ultimately do all they can to set up hurdles and generate red tape, designed to stifle expression and incinerate the vary creativity they had expressed an interest in. It is, then, mostly about living on other people's terms; accepting their editorial preferences and generally watching your talents wither on the vine. All this may require more creativity than you can muster...

Some of us appear to have a faculty for analysis, from an early age. With others, the learning curve is arduous-even painful. For the rest? They may as well pound sand. Nothing IS easy: it requires little or no thought and no action. Everything else, especially that which is worthwhile, is difficult.

It's a bit difficult to blog a response to a show with no book, thesis, or proposals. Here is an open to philosophize that is probably best left unanswered. However, I won't follow that advice as these are questions that confound me, and I can answer if only for myself.

I used to think there was a choice in life—free will to decide one's path along with the opportunity to pursue whatever fork presented itself. I no longer believe this is the actual state of things.

That doesn't mean life isn't worth living. Or that justice isn't worth dispensing. Without free will, there is still purpose.

If you have children, start there. If you don't let me offer the binding thought that drives my current view, sync. Sync confounds, challenges, and pushes my life.

If you are married, start there. If you aren't, then begin wherever the heck you are, but let me warn you now, don't have kids and don't get married. Synchronizing one's life to children and relationships are two monsters that are impossible or, at best insurmountable.

As the student in this show asks – and Ken and Josh answered – nowadays, it is hard to create new objects, actions, and ideas. There is, as the hosts suggest, much goodness in tinkering with the old ones. Less and less like Einstein or Hume, or Nietzsche, it is likely that students who create today and build careers and live beyond our words will do most of their creation in teams.

Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton uprooted our world view individually and in lockstep by syncing with the Islamic thought and medieval priorities in what amounted to teamwork stretched over a century creating the Copernican revolution. The pace of current creativity is meted out in quarters, days, and minutes (maybe even seconds for some.) The change in world view will be equally great.

Whatever you do, we are thankful for this team of scholars who set our heliocentric lives straight. This is the promise of tomorrow's creativity and teamwork. A deeper path is needed to give us any future whatsoever that resembles the opportunity and wonder that the renaissance handed over to the modern world.

There is a way to harness this synchronicity, and that way is to know your limits and those of your team. Don't take the most complicated path; take the challenging but attainable path that is before you. Focus on your thoughts and match them to the world, lecture, or blog post you read. Synchronize and push yourself. The world is your classroom; your interest is your major; the humanities is your path. Whether you take humanities classes in school, take a job to pay your bills, or wander somewhere else, we have created a human world; and, it is anthropocentric for the time being at least.

In the western world, the metacognitive aphorism is 'know thyself.' In eastern thought, it is 'respect your elders.' In between, there is 'be one with creation.' Sync to this. You can't go too far wrong. Between these is your path to a creative life.

Tim:
Your final two thoughts sum it up nicely. Creative lives emerge in all sorts of endeavors.:art, literature, music, science---the list is longer, even if subdivision is possible. We find our paths; find forks in the road and take them. My friend in South America might have become a physicist. He ended up in neuroscience instead. So, one path is aborted, while another is born and thrives. How's that for metaphor?