Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
What does it mean to have a canon? In English studies this is usually a body of texts that it’s assumed most serious scholars have read deeply and which somehow embody whatever characteristics or themes are deemed most relevant to a given perspective (e.g., a Western canon, a Shakespearean canon,…
Every good story needs an arc: a master strategy that drives all the action from start to finish. Something that, for the writer, guides every word written with the knowledge that an outcome must be obtained: the arc must begin and end. It cannot run off to infinity. Are not…
Many people, on occasion myself included, may think isn’t all this talk of discovery strategies just smoke and mirrors? Isn’t it just a re-packaging of work done decades ago? I ask myself this all the time. Of course, the answer in some cases is necessarily yes. Many great minds have…
When I first started reading and thinking about how to actively, meaningfully, and systematically foster the frequency and pace of discovery in my own work I was of two minds. In psychology there is a line of thought which compares a child with a scientist, albeit with different degrees…