Tag: Creative process

Being An Employee Of Our Own Myth!

We are all frauds.

 

Creating is hard for every last one of us( including those from the allegedly superior Aryan race). Yes!

 

Coal mining is harder. Do you think the miners stand around all day thinking about how hard it is to mine for coal? Certainly not!  They simply dig.

 

Throughout life, you collect data points or dots. And you probably don’t have a clue as to how these dots will connect in the future. As Steve Jobs said, you can connect these dot only by looking backward. But you have to collect them moving forward.

 

Without the mistakes we make, the decisions we regret, and the experiences that didn’t live up to our expectations, we would be woefully short of material and ammunition for our creative work. These things are all ingredients for your soup, material for making meaning and creating art.

 

The creative life, just like the creative process isn’t linear. We don’t know how each of our life experiences will impact us down the road. With each step forward, the landscape differs, the view changes, and the most insignificant experiences of our lives at the moment can serve as the most informative ones in our future.

 

Our creativity is not something that someone can give to us or take away. It’s always something within us. Happily domiciled. Whether it’s the degree we earn or the job we hate,  every experience provides us with seeds to plant for the stories we tell.

 

Life doesn’t pause to make room for our precious creating time.

 

” There is an unknown room in the soul that is constantly turning the stuff of daydreams into myths for us, helping us to get at meaning we can’t get to through the front door “- Phil Cousineau

 

ENDS

Being an employee of our own myth!

We are all frauds! Forgive the blatant articulation.

 

To quote Wikipedia ” The master race (German: Herrenrasse) is a pseudoscientific concept in Nazi ideology in which the putative “Aryan race” is deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy. Members were referred to as “Herrenmenschen” (“master humans”).

 

Creating is hard for every last one of us– including for the ones from the allegedly superior Aryan race.

 

If you think creating is hard, try grave digging. Or coal mining. Infinitely harder. Do you think miners stand around all day thinking and talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? Certainly not. They just go ahead and do it ie dig!

 

Throughout life, you collect data points or dots. And you probably don’t have a clue how these dots will connect in the future. As Steve Jobs said, you can only connect these dots looking backward. But, you can only collect them going forward.

 

In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones.

 

Without the mistakes we make, the decisions we regret and the experiences that didn’t live up to our expectations, we would be very short on material for our creative work.  These things are all just ingredients for your soup, material for making meaning and making art.

 

The creative process, just like the creative life, isn’t linear.  We don’t know how each of our life experiences will impact us down the road. With each step forward, the view changes, the landscape shifts and the horizon offers a different dimension. The most insignificant of our experiences and life’s little skirmishes at the moment can serve as the most informative (and even inspiring) ones in our future.

 

Our creativity is not something that someone can give us, gift us or take away. It’s something thats always within us.  Whether it’s the degrees we earn or the jobs we hate, every experience offers us seeds to plant for the stories we tell.

 

Life doesn’t pause or stop to make room for our precious creating time. So, if you are running your own life’s employment exchange, show up and ship out!

 

ENDS

 

Creativity is Futureproof !

Did you know? The future apparently is already here, albeit a tad unevenly distributed.

 

Perhaps a lot of us get caught out like a deer in the headlights because the future arrives slowly and then all of a sudden.

 

That said, I can understand the obsession behind predicting the future. But why are predictions popular? Because they appeal to human nature. They create a sense of certainty in an uncertain world.

 

But they are wrong far more often than we assume.

 

Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences(circa 2008) Paul Krugman famously wrote in 1998 ” The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, Most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

 

That one may have slightly missed the mark 😀. Well, well, the best of them can’t get the future right, so what are we crowing about? The problem isn’t just with experts. No one is great at predicting the future. Much of life can’t be forecasted, diagrammed, or reduced to a PowerPoint deck. When the future doesn’t match our expectations, our projections get thrown out (or worse, they’re still followed).

 

How about changing the narrative from predicting the future to ‘ creating the future ‘? Now we could be talking! And one of the strongest arsenal that you have in your armory in creating the future is ‘ creativity ‘.

 

Creativity is human.

 

It’s global.

 

Creativity is technology-agnostic.

 

It doesn’t discriminate.

 

From people working on the bleeding edge of their fields..

 

To others bringing more humanity to technology and industry..

 

The call to action is for creatives to take control of our tomorrow.

 

In it, we’ll seek to recapture the feeling of optimism, not fear,  for the future. Because in the hands of creatives, the future is bright.

 

The creative process is often a matter of changing ‘ What is ‘ to ‘ What if ?’. We first observe the ‘ Status Quo ‘ and then imagine a ‘ Status Novus ‘- Keith Reinhard, Member, Advertising Hall of Fame.

The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

 

Every time you have an idea pop into your head and don’t muster the self-confidence to act on it seriously, think about the opportunity cost you are likely to pay.

 

In the balance sheet of creators versus consumers, the world rewards creators by an overwhelming majority. You will get far more from writing 100 blog posts than reading 100.(BTW, all good writing begins with terrible first efforts).

 

Consumption is deceptive because it makes you feel that you are productive when you are not. Artistic progress is the result of creation NOT consumption.

 

The myth going around is that creativity and productivity are mutually exclusive. But they are NOT.

 

So let’s create more than we can consume.

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” – Maya Angelou

 

Creativity is an infinite game. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use the more you have.

 

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock (Alvin Toffler), the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots – religion, nation, community, family, or profession – are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources.

ENDS