Your Creativity - Early or Late in Life? Quick or Never Done? Malcolm Gladwell makes sense of it

Are you a Jackson Pollack or a Cezanne... an Elvis Costello or a Leonard Cohen? Is your creativity iterative or a one and done? You gotta hear this excellent Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Hallelujah, if you want to better understand your creative process. And, it's even more poignant with the passing of Leonard Cohen.

I got hooked on the series after watching Malcolm Gladwell on Stephen Colbert. The Hallelujah segment spoke to me and helped me understand my process as more Paul Cezanne and Leonard Cohen. (Ha, I drafted this post two months ago.) It offered a connect-the-dots of ideas about creativity. He began with an Elvis Costello song that he likes and described how it changed when you recorded it many years later a second time. He likened the process to Cezanne who was never finished with a piece of art and contrasted it to Jackson Pollock who found his voice early and had many one-and-done paintings. He then went through a list of people and called them either Pollacks or Cezannes. For another example he used the many iterations of the Hallelujah song which I love and now appreciate even more.

Are you a Pollack or a Cezanne?

The podcasts are all 35 to 45 minutes long just about the time to drive into Chicago.