How Environment Can Boost Creativity

The Atlantic: 

It took F. Scott Fitzgerald nearly a decade to finish Tender is the Night, his semi-autobiographical novel about the physical, financial, and moral decline of a man with nearly limitless potential. While working on the novel, Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, moved between France, Switzerland, and the United States, eventually spending eighteen months at La Paix, an old country house north of Baltimore that he rented while Zelda was treated for schizophrenia at a nearby clinic. The Turnbull family owned the estate, and Andrew Turnbull, who was 11 at the time, later recounted Fitzgerald’s stay in his biography, Scott Fitzgerald.

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Kathleen D. Vohs, a professor at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and the lead researcher of the study, writes, “Being creative is aided by breaking away from tradition, order, and convention and a disorderly environment seems to help people do just that.”

Read the whole story: The Atlantic