Have you ever wondered why some scientists seem to generate research-worthy ideas on cue while others struggle to come up with just one? It’s as if they both went to the same game arcade, but the creative scientist has unlimited funds and a Japanese gacha machine, while the struggling…
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Can Childhood and Personality Affect Our Scientific Creativity?
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Four Little Shifts to Notice Your Scientific Creativity
Our days can be a stream of never-ending emotional busywork and social obligations. Meetings, emails, and time-sensitive demands from others fill our digital inboxes. Requests for help, guidance, feedback, and involvement overflow our emotional inbox. On top of all that we’re supposed to be able to achieve “flow”: a timeless,…
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Rule of Three for Insight-Driven Science Decisions
Scientific insight often starts with a simple question: Is this idea worth pursuing? But when we’re staring at a half-formed thought, a scribbled note, or a spark of curiosity, it’s hard to know whether we’re looking at a breakthrough or a distraction. The problem is simple: we need…
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The Just Cause Driving The Insightful Scientist’s New Mission
The Insightful Scientist is now officially a business! It’s been a long journey to get to this new phase. Our headquarters are located in one-of-a-kind Hawai’i. But we couldn’t be more excited to evolve from a personal website to a new organization on a mission to help researchers…
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Cultivate What Matters to Nurture Scientific Insight
There’s a moment in every scientist’s life when we realize that our discovery efforts feel harder than they should. We declutter our schedule, reduce distractions, reorganize our workspace, and try to eliminate every obstacle we can find. And yet, nothing changes. The breakthroughs don’t come. The insights don’t land. The…
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Build the Micro Habit of Capturing the Real Story
We don’t realize how much of our thinking we lose until we try to tell someone else how we came up with an idea. The harder we try, the more the details get swept into a simplified 2-minute story that sounds logical. The messy truth – the real chain of…
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Wear the Hat That Solves the Problem to Leverage Scientific Creativity
Scientific discovery stalls when you stay in one lane. Instead, use scientific creativity to expand your intellectual movement so you can reach the off-ramps where breakthroughs actually live. Researchers love tidy labels. Experimentalist. Astrophysicist. Theorist. Biologist. These labels feel safe, like guardrails that keep us from embarrassment or overreach.…
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Being a Patron of Science is a Powerful Research Habit
The “powerful patroness” – a person who steps in at just the right moment with a gesture that gifts us momentum – is a necessary companion to the Master-Apprentice approach in science. The phrase came to me years ago when I realized how much of our scientific path is…
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The Illustrated Scientist
Images fuel science even more than math does. It might not feel like it, but it’s true. For one thing, humans started drawing pictures long before they started drawing equations. Capturing what we see, so we can look at it again later is something we take for granted…
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Ready to train your discovery skills in 2026?
I know, it’s been a hot minute since I posted on InSci! I’ve dedicated a lot of time to teaching. But wow has working with my students been a game changer for me. I’m finally ready to start crafting what I know into tools and trainings for others to pursue…