Wander, wonder, wunder

Yesterday I described John Boyd’s bloody-mindedness as the perfect example of extreme disagreement as a type of creative fuel, where bloody-mindedness is a finer grained name for love, the first prerequisite of the creative process. The second prerequisite is theft, because a blank canvas has too many possibilities. These things need to happen before you can create anything new:

Love > Theft > Art

Today I wanted to very briefly describe a framework for finding what you “love”. That is, how can you find things that utterly fascinate and completely capture your attention, where they naturally draw you into a flow state such that you have no sense of time passing? And how can one then proceed to cultivate this enjoyable state?

Here’s my take for a compressed framework to maximise for interesting:

Wander > Wonder > Wunder

I use “wunder” as shorthand for wunderkammer, which translates from German as a “cabinet of curiosities”. I previously used the garden metaphor to describe wunderkammer: it’s a place where one keeps their discoveries as a collection and allows them to bloom.

It’s worth translating my lingo here. These “3 Ws” roughly map to:

Boredom > Curiosity > Discovery

…but I think the “3 Ws” step flow is far more interesting.

In summary: to find what you love, maximise for interesting. Go wander. Stop and wonder. Collect what you discover in a wunderkammer place.