September 4 2015. A natural force, of truly astonishing power, we don’t yet either understand—or know how to harness. Creativity is life.

THE LONGER I LIVE, THE MORE I CONLUDE THAT WE GROSSLY UNDERESTIMATE CREATIVITY

WE NEED TO ENCOURAGE IT IN EVERY WAY—AND INVEST IN IT.

IT’S A FORCE AND A QUALITY WE DON’T SEEM TO KNOW HOW TO HARNESS PROPERLY. SEEMS A DAMN SHAME!

This graphic is just one tiny (but admirable) example of what I’m talking about. In this case, it’s a different way at looking at the global economic picture.

It’s visually striking, ingenious—and informative. Creativity is hugely about perspective, communication, and a host of intangibles like design which can transform the mundane into the compelling. It’s a life-force multiplier society spends a great deal of time trying to drum out of people in the interests of concepts like ‘socialization.’ The road to mediocrity is paved with such words.

We praise creativity—in the abstract—but we enforce conformity. An original cast of mind is regarded as unsettling. We are all born creative—to some extent or other—but it is a quality that tends to be hammered out of us (in our own best interests, of course).

But, those who possess an original cast of mind are, by definition, ever ingenious at resisting such pressures, so creativity endures—indeed thrives—nonetheless (in some of us). We learn that creativity takes fortitude and requires taking the initiative. We maneuver and we fight on. We become battle-hardened. We need to. The status quo is fearful and vigilant. We always break through—albeit at considerable cost. The status quo always recovers.

The war between good and evil is as nothing compared to that between creativity and the status quo.

I ran across the above impressive example of creativity  on the ever admirable www.vox.com

Here's a very cool data visualization from HowMuch.net that took me a minute to figure out because it's a little bit unorthodox. The way it works is that it visualizes the entire world's economic output as a circle. That circle is then subdivided into a bunch of blobs representing the economy of each major country. And then each country-blob is sliced into three chunks — one for manufacturing, one for services, and one for agriculture.

• For example, compare the US and China. Our economy is much larger than theirs, but our industrial sectors are comparable in size, and China's agriculture sector looks to be a little bit larger. Services are what drive the entire gap.
• The UK and France have similarly sized overall economies, but agriculture is a much bigger slice of the French pie.
• For all that Russia gets played up as some kind of global menace, its economy produces less than Italy. Put all the different European countries together, and Russia looks pathetic.
• You often hear the phrase "China and India," but you can see here that the two Asian giants are in very different shape economically.
• The only African nation on this list, South Africa, has a smaller economy than Colombia.

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