When Do Great Creative Minds Peak?

Are your best creative days ahead of you?

This feature about Oliver Uberti's fascinating study of creativity contains a brilliant talk he gave on the subject. He plotted the lives of 177 creative thinkers and the ages at which they each completed one notable work.

I met Oliver when we gave back to back talks at TEDxNASA. I highly recommend checking out his talk, Smash the Design Button. His work at National Geographic stunned me (seriously, look at this). We became friends instantly.

In the time since, we have collaborated in some way on all of the projects about which I am most passionate. He illustrated Science House and designed our logotype. He worked with me to design the brand identity for my Mystery Jars project. He worked with me on the brand identity for my Treasure of the Sirens project. After seven years of development, he worked with me to create the visual version of the Glyphs of the Imagination Age, which I use every day in my work.

I remember very well when Oliver was working on his Lifelines project. We would speak late at night or in the middle of the afternoon between his stints listening to opera, visiting museums, reading and soaking in some of the most dazzling creative works ever made. His energy during that period, as ever, was a force in my own work, and it manifested in many ways.

On top of all of his other projects, he birthed a book. London: The Information Capital, is a masterpiece.

All around, his work is as great as any that he studied while creating Lifelines, pictured above. But his most excellent quality is the exquisite, creative friendship that I am fortunate to have in my life. Having Oliver as part of my tribe inspires me to create more, and I hope that you feel the same after checking out his beautiful contributions to human creativity.

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Rita J King is the EVP for Business Development at Science House, a cathedral of the imagination in Manhattan focused on the art and science of doing business. She is a strategist who specializes in the development of collaborative culture by making organizational culture visible so it can be measured and transformed. She is a senior advisor to The Culture Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and a Fellow at the Salzburg Global Forum. She makes Mystery Jars and Treasure of the Sirens, writes about the future for Fast Company and invents story architecture, characters and novel technologies for film and TV as a futurist for the Science and Entertainment Exchange. Follow@RitaJKing on Twitter.