Mark Twain On Creative Genius

Hey there, it's James Taylor here keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends.

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This week, I'm in the east part of the United States, actually the Northeast of the United States. I just came to New York City yesterday. Today, I'm actually in Montclair, which is in New Jersey, just across the bridge across the Hudson. And this place is famous because it was the place where Thomas Edison, the great inventor, of the light bulb, and lots of other things were. He had his studio's workspace here, they have a memorial just very close to here, as well. And this week, I'm going to be traveling all across the Northeast part of the united states all across different parts of New England, visiting the homes and the workplaces, of some of the greatest inventors, innovators, thinkers and writers in history, so follow me along but today I'm here in beautiful Montclair, gorgeous part of the world very nice part of the world I've never been to before. Early, I was meeting with the co-author, Elaine Pofeldt, who I'm co-authoring a book with just now. And then tomorrow, we're going to be starting to wind our way around, up through New England. So follow me along.

Mark Twain on the Lone Creative Genius Myth

I'm here at Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut, and had an incredible tour around seeing his place here that plays the room that used to do his writing is creating his thinking is reading. And something I just kind of saw which I wanted to kind of share here was this idea that people think creativity is this thing that has to come from nowhere, it comes out of nowhere. But actually, Mark Twain said a really interesting thing about kind of plagiarism and taking inspiration from others. And he said substantially, "all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the gardener with pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that originated them, whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed and characteristics of freezing".

See what Mark Twain actually said was he said, "When a great orator makes a great speech, you're listening to 10 centuries and 10,000 men, but we call it his speech. Really some exceedingly small portion of it is his but not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle to some degree and we call it his but there are others that have contributed." So when you think about seeing a great speaker on stage is not for him or her are 1000 other people 1000s of years of history behind that speech. So I'm going to turn around a little bit more to see this incredible place I'll put some footage as you can see all these incredible places come as to look like come here to Hartford and Connecticut and check out the Mark Twain house.

Mark Twain Creative Genius