...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.

How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.

Grit is the stubborn refusal to quit.

Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.

You know more than you know.

If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.