“The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas.  It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent.  To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it is the source of our misery.  What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude.  We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships.  We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires.  To think more flexibly entails a risk—we could fail and be ridiculed.  We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery