Writer and actuary obsessed with the creative process. Author of MEGA CREATIVITY🪁. Sharing new ideas on Substack every Monday. links at MEGA-creativity.com
Joined August 2012
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Mar 31
MEGA Creativity is live on Amazon!
Thanks to everyone who showed interest in the book :)
After extensive research, using examples from Darwin to Djokovic to Bob Dylan, this is the most comprehensive view of creativity I could muster. I wrote the book I wanted to read: wide-ranging, practical, and (hopefully) inspiring. I'm very glad it's out in the world and the ideas are connecting with people.
Amazon link: amazon.com/MEGA-Creativity-S…
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Your motivation is important.
Jun 13
Naval Ravikant on the right reasons to start a company
“I really just wanted to be a founder,” Naval confesses with respect to the first few companies he started. “That desire kind of overrode everything… It was not a pure motivation.”
Then his motivation shifted to money and power:
“Nobody wants to talk about it, but [money and power] are fundamental drivers,” he admits. “I want to make money, and I want a company that has an influence. And that wasn’t that great of a motivation either.”
Naval continues:
“Now looking back in my career, I was most successful when I did projects because I was genuinely curious about them… Following my own intellectual curiosity gave me insight that led to good investments, startups, and outcomes.”
Today Naval is in a position where he doesn’t have to do things for money or status, so he only works on products he wants to see exist:
“What’s a beautiful thing I can make that wouldn’t exist if I didn’t put effort into it?” he asks himself. “And what people do I want to spend all my time around?”
Naval reflects:
“The truth is that when your material desires are somewhat met, you end up extremely bored… When you don’t have to hustle for a living, you’re like, ‘What do I do?’ You’ve lost your purpose in life. You can go meditate in a corner for a long time, but that gets boring too. You can go completely hedonistic, but that’s a death trap and just an empty lifestyle.”
He continues:
“What I want to do is self-actualize. I want to be the best version of myself. And what does the best version of myself mean? That means creating something. It’s better to create than to consume. It’s far more fulfilling to learn along the way and build… And I want to do it with friends — people that I really respect, admire, and enjoy spending time with… I wish I had that motivation and insight 20-30 years ago.”
Source: @zfellows (Aug 2025)
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Jun 12
The discourse about AI and creativity is alive and furious right now.
I bring some ideas from my new book - MEGA Creativity - to the debate:
open.substack.com/pub/megacr…
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Jun 12
Great discussion on Creativity and AI.
This @DKThomp episode w/ Adam Green is absolutely fascinating 👍
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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Jun 11
Search and Discovery, two key phases of the creative process.
I use the terms Exploration and Generation.
Underpinning this is the critical idea of domain possibility space.
Jun 10
DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg thinks that search is essential for a model to be genuinely creative.
Pre-trained base models can do incredible things. But Shane thinks this is just a matter of them mixing together existing concepts from their training data.
If he's right, coming up with genuinely novel ideas always involves searching a large space for "hidden gems".
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Jun 10
A group of crows is called a murder. You're welcome.
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Jun 10
MEGA Creativity
Describe your 20s in a book title
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John Botha retweeted
Jun 10
I spent three years writing a book about Creativity as a process.
I'm not sure exactly why, but I'm very sure it's leading me to interesting things in the future.
For example, the AI and creativity debates are lighting up the internet. The MEGA model is timeous.
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John Botha retweeted
Jun 10
T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Franz Kafka, Anthony Trollope, Harper Lee, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Bram Stoker, William Carlos Williams, Charles Bukowski, Agatha Christie, Joseph Heller, John Grisham, Khaled Hosseini
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Jun 10
Zig to exploration, zag to generation. You are constantly switching between modes of work and the phases of the creative process
Jun 10
Creativity is a much messier and more complex than the linear process we imagine it to be.
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John Botha retweeted
Jun 9
Book of the Day 📘: MEGA Creativity by John Botha
What if creativity wasn’t a gift — but a process you could learn?
In MEGA Creativity, John Botha breaks down the creative journey into four clear phases: Motivation, Exploration, Generation and Amelioration. It’s a practical framework for solving better problems, generating stronger ideas, and actually finishing what you start. @MEGA_Creativity
Part research, part toolkit, part mindset shift, this is a thoughtful guide for anyone who wants to create with more purpose and less mystery. a.co/d/0jdVFckq
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John Botha retweeted
18 Feb 2025
We value creative people and funny people so highly in society because creativity and being funny are two things that cannot be faked. You can fake smart, you can fake rich, you can fake confident, you can fake nice, but you can’t fake creativity and you can't fake funny
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Curiosity is the engine of creativity.
6 Apr 2022
Creativity begins to die when we fail to celebrate curiosity.
We reward students for getting the right answer, but not for asking good questions. We promote managers for delivering results, but not for developing new ideas.
Encouraging imagination is the mother of invention.
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John Botha retweeted
GOD BLESS YOU SIR 🫵🏻🫡
My respect 96 years .
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
AMERICAN MADE .
The GOAT !!
Clint Eastwood Said Something About Getting Old That Stopped Me Cold.
Aging is not gentle.
You are still here. Still present. Still watching the world move. But the body that carried you through everything - the wars, the work, the wildness of youth - begins to ask for more than you can give it. Joints that never complained now speak up in the morning. Eyes that once took in everything now flinch at the light. Breathing, which never required a single thought, starts needing little pauses.
But none of that is the hardest part.
The hardest part is the quiet.
At a certain age, you reach for the phone and remember there is no one left to call.
The people who knew you when you were young - who remembered the same summers, the same streets, the same faces
- are gone. One by one, then all at once, until the memories you carry have no one left to share them with.
So you tell the stories anyway.
To whoever will listen. With a little more color than perhaps the truth deserves. With a touch of pride you've earned and a grief you don't always name. You know the person across from you wasn't there. You know they can't quite feel it the way you do.
But you tell them. Because the telling is the holding on.
Those stories are not just memories. They are the proof that a life was lived. That people were loved. That things mattered.
And if no one asks for them - you offer them anyway, quietly, like setting something down on a table and hoping someone picks it up.
Old age is not simply what happens to a face or a body.
It is memory looking for a place to rest.
And what an older person needs - more than advice, more than solutions, more than someone telling them how to feel - is simply someone willing to sit down, be still, and listen.
Not to fix anything.
Just to be there.
That is the whole gift. And it costs nothing.
~Wild Whispers .
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Creativity is the way to access our unconscious minds
9 Nov 2024
I could listen to Cormac McCarthy talking about creativity and the unconscious mind for weeks
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Exploration before Generation. Then Exploration again.
13 Nov 2019
The result of creativity and innovation is new ideas, but the cause of creativity and innovation is more ideas.
The person with a bigger intellectual toolbox has more entry points and additional lines of attack to solve problems.
Read widely. Explore broadly. Then apply.
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Creativity is not just a mash of things.
It requires this recombinant generative step but it's a lot more than this.
im really glad chatgpt makes insane images when pushed slightly off the rails thus proving machine creativity is real and probably very nerfed in daily operation
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Creative work can be scheduled. Good ideas can't.
We ask people to sit at a desk for 8 hours and be creative on command. Morgan Housel told me that this is not how it works. He argues: "Good ideas can't be scheduled."
"I can't structure creativity. I just have to let myself go and trust that it'll hit me eventually. The title for the my first book just hit me walking down the streets of New York. For the title of my latest book, I was on the treadmill just zoning out.
Whenever I come up with stories and hooks, it's never when I've been trying to do it. It's in the shower, it's walking my dog, it's waking up at 2am wrestling around in bed. It's always in the unstructured moments."
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Eureka moments happen in each phase of the creative process:
Motivation: figuring out which problem to tackle
Exploration: finding a wonderful store of ideas or techniques
Generation: The new idea! In bathtub or at workdesk
Amelioration: getting the work into the right form
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I quote John Cleese in my mega-creativity.com book.
His speech on getting into the creative mode, the open mode as he calls it, is genius.
16 Mar 2019
Since I read John Cleese's advice to "keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way," that phrase has popped into my head on average several times a day. It so perfectly describes that m.o. brainpickings.org/2012/04/12…
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