• Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.
• We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! — once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we’ve made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.
• Cleese goes on to caution against a trap in this duality, one particularly hazardous in politics:
• To be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch backwards and forward between the two modes. But — here’s the problem — we too often get stuck in the closed mode. Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us, we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view.
• This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their nonpolitical colleagues is that they’ve become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour-by-hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the open mode.
• Cleese concludes with a beautiful articulation of the premise and promise of his recipe for creativity:
• This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
• For a related treat, see Cleese’s reprise of the talk nearly two decades later at the 2009 Creativity World Forum.

(source: Brain Pickings, Maria Popova)