http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_mclaren_authentic_creativity_vs_karaoke_culture.html

Unfortunately, I first read your headline as “how to ruin your life as a creative professional”. Eeek.

Would debilitating alcoholism count as a habit that could affect my career?

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the numbers of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

Especially good are the points about managing the relationship with employers/clients, always a struggle for professionals who do work for which clients can’t really understand the process.

Certainly, it’s better than this year’s commencement speech at my university. We somehow ended up with the CEO of ExxonMobil as our speaker.

More importantly! BIG UPS to JC for recalling Old Man Murray’s “Start-To-Crate” rating system, as hilarious a skewering of game idioms as anything ever. How I miss Chet & Erik’s delicious bile.

You’re telling me to stop masturbating, aren’t you.

Feels really strange to see this mentioned on boingboing.

I’m a little saddened by our society that does not inspire its younger generation to run their lives as analytical scientists or mathematicians or even engineers. As someone who grew up literally worshiping Spock and his ideology (logic above all else), it saddens me when people do not speak about obsession. The need to work your ass off and put in crazy hours to prove that one theorem. To dedicate yourself to a cause.

Now, arguably, one can have creativity in every field, mathematics included. My advisor in grad school used to grade physics and math papers on the elegance of the solutions. Often times, I suppose coming up with an elegant (and often times compressed solution) needed creativity.

However, at the end of the day, the only way you *could* be creative is if you lived and breathed that one thing – that one obsession. Grigori Perelman comes to mind, as the perfect example of such elegance and beauty.

And let’s be honest, anyone can draw, write, or compose music. Poorly, perhaps, but they can do it nonetheless. But not anyone can do math. And while art may be good for the soul, math and science math are what move civilization forward.

I wish someone would give a commencement speech about the importance of logic and an analytical mind. The need to separate emotion from human decisions to truly make a difference. The importance of focus, and the ability to dedicate yourself and obsess over a problem until you can find a solution.

Because, to quote H.L. Mencken, “The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret…. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.”