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Creative people, dressed in black, use skinny, white Macs. That's the
rule. The rest of us plod along with un-cool, not-so-innovative Windows. I'm here
to throw that rule out the window.
Windows offers
much, much greater opportunity for personal creative development. The operative word
here is opportunity. Windows is anything but a creative product, but
because it performs
so poorly, it forces users to invent innovative workarounds.
Websites such as
Annoyances.org devote themselves to helping Windows victims beat Windows
into submission—to make Windows applications do what users want them to do
and stop doing what they insist on doing.
I know the trend in creativity training says that positive support, soft
pillows, pastel walls, and brightly colored toys foster greater creativity.
But creativity flourishes anywhere. See
Jewish Creativity in the Holocaust.
Necessity is the mother of invention and tribulation is the mother of
motivators. Consider the Apollo 13
scene in which the ground crew is forced to hobble together a life-saving
device with available spacecraft parts.
"We've got to find a way to make this... fit into the hole for this...
using nothing but that," explains a ground-based technician as he dumps the
parts on a table. Not only that. They've got to do it without a touch-feely
creativity guru treating them to ball tossing and pampering them with New Age music and yoga exercises!
Awarding the creative crown to Windows amounts to giving
Tomás de Torquemada a Nobel Prize for innovative torture devices. We
really shouldn't encourage either. But if creativity can flourish anywhere, why
not choose a comfortable environment with supportive people? Both torture
and tenderness work, because it is the nature of people to be creative.
But if you want torture, try working with columns in Microsoft Word. To
get Word to do what you want, you'll have to throw every last bit of your
creative muscle into it—a real Right Brain Workout!
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