In praise of irritation

Creative places are uncomfortable. The tendency is to relax into comfortableness, but this needs to be fought against. We should seek out irritation in our lives.

People mistakenly think that living in stasis is desirable and achievable. Both are wrong. There will always be problems, and we will always need to generate solutions through creativity. We need to live in a place of creativity, which will mean discomfort.

The trick is to search out the right irritations in life, the creative situations, the correct set of tensions, the sand that will produce a pearl.

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”