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Laws of Creativity: �The Essential Guide
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Eponymous rules, maxims, and dictates to inspire your creativity
Volume I // Winter 2020
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“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”
Dr. Seuss
Laws for creative competitors.
Creativity crosses boundaries like never before. Work in marketing? Thanks to the internet you’re also a technologist. Develop software? You’re also a copywriter. Founding a company? Congratulations, you have to do literally everything. In other words, technology lowers barriers to enter a market—but it also raises the market’s expectations. So competitive advantage isn’t the tools you use. Competitive advantage is the way you think. It’s the way you synthesize learnings from every discipline. That’s why we made this guide.
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Multidisciplinary wisdom for a multidisciplinary world.
Inside, we’ve collected eponymous laws from economists, historians, authors, doctors—and at least one cartoonist! Each law was created independently, and each law addresses a different topical area, but we’ve grouped them together in ways we hope influence how you think about making creative decisions—no matter what kind of business you’re in.
One last note: Inclusivity is a competitive advantage.
While researching the laws to include in this guide, we noticed something: there aren’t a lot of laws named after women or people of color. We included the best examples we could find, but frankly the pickings were slim. The world should do better. Are you aware of eponymous laws named for women or PoC? Or, want to suggest your own? Tweet us @articlegroup. Let’s make something beautiful and inclusive together.
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Contributors
1.0 Making creative decisions
2.0 Communicating with others
3.0 Leading a team
4.0 Books for further study
C O N T E N T S
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Making creative decisions�
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The most creative ideas are the simplest and most inclusive.
Gall’s Law
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked
Derived from John Gall’s enjoyably snarky book General Systemantics (1975, PDF), which is premised on the idea that any complex system will work poorly or not at all.
Keep it simple, stupid.
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Related: The Laws of Simplicity, Occam’s Razor, KISS Principle, Le Chatelier’s Principle, The Airplane Rule
Section One // Making Creative Decisions
Pediatrician 1925-2014
Hebb’s Law
Neurons that fire together, wire together
Derived from Hebbian Theory, the neuroscientific claim that brain neurons strengthen their associations from repeated stimulation during the learning process.
Change your process to change your output.
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Source: The Organization of Behavior
Related: Hick’s Law, Humphrey’s Law
Section One // Making Creative Decisions
Donald O. Hebb Psychologist 1904-1985
Chekhov's Gun
Every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed
Often interpreted as a description of foreshadowing—“never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off”—Chekhov’s advice is really about simplification.
Remove superfluous ideas.
Section One // Making Creative Decisions
Anton Chekhov Playwright 1860-1904
Section One // Making Creative Decisions
The Bechdel Test
Does a work feature at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man?
Named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the Bechdel Test (also referred to as the Bechdel-Wallace Test) is a reminder not to portray women by their relationship to men.
Inclusivity is creativity.
Cartoonist b.1960
Buridan’s Ass
Should two courses be judged equal, then the will cannot break the deadlock
Buridan's Ass is a dramatization of a hungry and thirsty donkey, who—when offered hay and water—can't decide. So he dies of hunger and thirst.
Avoid analysis paralysis. Get off your ass.
Related: The Paradox of Choice
Section One // Making Creative Decisions
Philosopher 1301-1359
Dawkins's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty
Author illustration
Obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity
Coined in Dawkins’ book A Devil’s Chaplain, the law suggests that writers too often resort to “postmodern meta-twaddle” to make their shallow ideas seem profound.
Help others understand you.
Section One // Making Creative Decisions
Evolutionary biologist b.1941
Sturgeon’s Law
Ninety percent of everything is crap
Theodore Sturgeon is an underloved American sci-fi writer from the rough-and-tumble golden era who absorbed experience like a black hole. In defense of his genre as art, he formulated Sturgeon’s Revelation, later Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”
Make a lot. Most doesn’t matter. Some will.
Section One // Making Creative Decisions
Donald O. Hebb Psychologist 1904-1985
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Communicating with others�
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Excellent communication requires redundancy and empathy
Wiio’s Laws
Human communication usually fails except by accident
Formulated by Osmo Wiio in 1979 while serving in the Finnish parliament, Wiio’s Laws are a humorous corollary to Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong, will.
Communicate more than you think you need to.
Section Two // Organizing yourself and others
Economist 1928-2013
Miller’s Law
To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of
Formulated by one of the 20th century’s most esteemed psychologists, Miller’s Law reminds us to think not only empathetically but divergently.
Look to where people are pointing, not at their finger.
Related: Principle of Charity, Steelmanning
Section Two // Organizing yourself and others
Psychologist 1920-2012
The Streisand Effect
An attempt to censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing that information more widely
In 2003, Barbra Streisand attempted to censor photos of her Malibu mansion, thus making everybody aware of her Malibu mansion.
Don’t try to hide.
Section Two // Organizing yourself and others
Singer and actress b.1942
Cunningham's Law
The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.
Named after Ward Cunningham, who developed the first wiki but didn’t patent it because he didn’t think anybody would pay for it.
Provoke great ideas.
Related: Godwin’s Law
Section Two // Organizing yourself and others
Programmer b. 1949
Hanlon’s Razor
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
Variously attributed to everyone from the poet Goethe to sci-fi author Heinlein (pictured) to some guy in Scranton, PA (Hanlon), Hanlon’s Razor is a reminder that most people aren’t as evil as your persecution complex would lead you to believe.
Assume they’re dumb first.
Related: The Jargon File of early hacker culture slang
Section Two // Organizing yourself and others
Author 1907-1988
Section Two // Organizing yourself and others
Sagan Standard
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
Made popular through Sagan’s 1980 TV show Cosmos, which available on YouTube in glorious 3x4 aspect ratio.
Get the data.
Related: Hitchen’s Razor
Astronomer 1934-1996
Brandolini’s Law
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it
The bullshitter is unconcerned with the truth, making their objective less about countering facts and more about producing indifference.
Ignore people who waste time.
Related: Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, St. Augustine’s Lying, The Four Colors of Lies
Section Two // Organizing yourself and others
Software developer
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Leading
a team�
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Patience, patience, patience.
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Parkinson’s Law
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
First coined in 1955, Parkinson’s Law can apply to any creative activity where incubation time affects quality in unpredictable ways.
Experiment with deadlines to alter creative outputs. �
Section Three // Working with a team
Cartoonist b.1960
Historian 1909-1993
The Matilda Effect
Men always get credit for women’s inventions
First described in 1870 by a pioneering woman who then became the victim of the phenomenon she described.
Give credit where credit is due.�
Related: Pygmalion Effect
Section Three // Working with a team
Suffragist 1826-1898
Goodhart’s Law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Devised to describe economic policy, Goodhart’s Law implies that people who are aware of a system of rewards and punishments will optimize their actions within that system to achieve their desired results.
Choose your metrics carefully.�
Related: The McNamara Fallacy
Section Three // Working with a team
Economist b.1936
Framework diagram
Benford's Law of Controversy
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available
Benford’s Law of Controversy describes what happens when bullshitters decrease available information, leading to passionate discourse about feelings.
Get your facts straight. �
Section Three // Working with a team
Astrophysicist b.1941
Joy’s Law
No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else
Attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, Joy’s Law describes a central challenge of management, which is to access knowledge outside the organization.
Look outside your org. �
Related: The Law of Crappy People
Section Three // Working with a team
Section Three // Working with a team
Ciprolla’s Golden Law of Stupidity
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses
Never underestimate the number of stupid people in the world.
Don’t be stupid.
Historian 1922-2000
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Books
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We sourced these laws from a wide variety of disciplines. The books below deal in large part with systems thinking, which we consider to be an excellent area of study for anyone interested in how today’s interconnected world works.
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Lessons from biology, psychology, statistics, physics, economics, and human behavior.
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