"When the quickening comes. When the air between us feels less like a gap than a passage. When we don't know what to say because there is so much to say. Or, conversely, when we know just what to say because somehow, weirdly, all the billions of impulses around thought and language suddenly coalesce and find a direction home.
"Sometimes you meet someone who could change your life. Sometimes you feel that possibility. The sense that, in the presence of this celestial body, you fall into a new orbit; that the ground beneath you is more like a trampoline; that you may be able — with this new person — to create things more beautiful and useful, more fantastic and more real, than you ever could before.
"How does this happen? What conditions of circumstance and temperament foster creative connection? In other words: Where and how does it begin? And which combinations of people make it most likely?
"When we answer these questions, by looking at initial contact in a variety of pairs, we catch sight of our first enduring theme: the heart of creative connection is the felicitous combination of the familiar and the strange. I've come to think of this combination as complementarity — and from what I've seen time and again, it's the essential seed for how two people come to not only support each other, but also startle and vex each other, leading to daring work that neither could achieve alone.
"Put another way: The individuals in great dyads will be very different from each other and very much alike. These simultaneous extremes generate the deep rapport and energizing friction that define a creative pair."
