A calling. An avocation. A pet project. A wildest dream. A compulsion.
Sometimes we think that hearing voices in our heads is a sign of mental illness. Other times we treat these inner voices as valued counselors who are trying to lead us to a better path. Let’s discuss the latter. Read the rest of this entry »
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I’m curious about a couple of things about creativity on this wonderful Wednesday.
I like to think that I’m a creative (or at least increasingly creative) person. I have used the Windows/PC platform exclusively for the past 17+ years. I have never owned an Apple product until I bought my iPod Nano a couple of months ago. The Windows environment meets my current needs for content creation.
Apple has been a favorite computing platform for many creative types as long as I can remember, including a few of my friends. Many of us who have used computers primarily in a business environment for, well, business purposes, have grown up PC/Windows. Many of us would never be accused of doing terribly creative work (although perhaps artistic work is a better phrase to describe this). Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a creative challenge for you. It’s Friday in North America and you’re probably not going to work anyway, so why not give this a try?
This is a challenge to stretch your brain and to try to expand your thinking a tiny bit.
The theme is superpowers. Define superpower in any way that you wish.
Here are some questions to help guide you through this:
If you’re stuck, let’s look at Superman’s better known superpowers:
If you’d like a more comprehensive list of superpowers, try this Wikipedia article.
# # #
Just for fun, if you answer these questions in the comments section of this post, I’ll chime in and make some observations or ask additional questions to try to spark things along. The goal is for you to exercise your imagination a bit and see what kind of ideas these questions will spark for you.
Let’s go! I want to see lots of great ideas here!
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I’m keenly interested in this whole creativity, inspiration, and idea generation thing. I like the idea of turning my (and your) cognitive surplus into something good. You can probably tell this from my recent postings about Maslow’s hierarchy, including esteem and self-actualization, as well as Creative Infrastructure 2.0.
I’ve been scouring the Web for resources to learn more about the creative process, so I figured I should share them with you.
The main (and highly subjective) criteria that I used to evaluate these blogs are:
So here they are:
Improved Lives –This post in particular has a great link to a NY Times article about the creative process - The Creative Process Demystified.
Creative Something – Subscriber only, but great short articles. Kind of hard to give you a meaningful deep link, but we did cover them recently.
Creative Creativity – This blog bills itself as a daily guide to creativity and new ideas. I really enjoyed their article featuring Douglas Adams (the man who created The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy) quotes: Douglas Adams on Creativity and Inspiration.
Abundance Blog at MareLisa Online – Just starting to explore this one, but it looks like a fun combo of creativity and productivity. Sample post: Creative Thinking Techniques – The “Playful” Edition.
Accidental Creative – Accidental Creative is a consulting company that provides services to creative professionals. Although it’s not really focused on the amateur, there’s still good material there for anyone. Blog and podcast. Recommended post: The Straw-Man and the Burn Draft.
Lateral Action – Brian Clark, Mark McGuinness and contributors – great new blog for creative entrepreneurs – I highly recommend that you check out the Creative Rock Stars series.
Wishful Thinking - Mark McGuinness’s own blog about “inspiring creative professionals” - this article talks about motivating creative people.
Creative Sage Arts Blog – The artist blog of Catherine Hrudika of Creative Sage. I particularly enjoyed this article: Rotating Creative Crops.
LifeDev - This blog’s tagline is Empowering Creative People. Good article about using mind mapping software. They also have interviews with people about creativity that are worth checking out.
Productive Flourishing – this blog bills itself as productivity for creative people. I particularly like the Do You Have An Idea Garden post because it’s very similar to the Fields of Awe concept that I’ve been thinking about for months.
Creative Generalist – Broad thinking leads to brilliant ideas - you’ll get a wide variety of quotes, anecdotes, links, and more from this intriguing blog. You’re bound to find something to stimulate your thinking. I liked this short post in particular: Respect.
TED - “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.” I haven’t watched many of the short videos that have helped make TED famous, but the ones that I’ve seen have been great. TED videos are a great place to find inspiration and ideas. Here, you can see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi speak about his famous “flow” concept.
Info Aesthetics – where form follows data. Big emphasis on design here. This article about lifeflow is great.
Smashing Magazine – I think Web designers, coders, etc. are often fans of this website. I’m not that familiar with the website, but the comic book geek in me was impressed with Showcase of Brilliant Comic Book Cover Art.
Get Fresh Minds – Ideas so fresh, they should be slapped (seriously, this is the blog’s tagline) – interesting review of Conversational Capital.
Greg Fraley, Author of Jack’s Notebook- Take a look at Creativity Gone Sour: Motrin, Mothers, and Twitter.
These blogs and articles aren’t specifically about creativity and inspiration, but they often make me think differently. You can do searches within these blogs on ideas, creativity, and more:
Seth Godin’s blog – business, marketing, making change, you know?
Illuminated Mind – this is a personal development blog and it has some interesting ideas about creativity Embracing Creative ADD and Thinking Inside The Circle.
Write To Done – Great posts about writing. They have several posts about inspiration and idea generation.
Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog – Personal Development for Smart People (and a whole lot besides that) blog and forums.
How To Be a Better Improviser – the techniques in this article are worth checking out.
GapingVoid.com - Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards. From Hugh MacLeod, the man who wrote How to be Creative: creative (and often humorous) cartoons and blog posts.
Hopefully the blogs that I linked to in this post will help inspire you to do bigger and better things. Do you have any favorites that you’d like to share with the rest of us?
PS: why not subscribe so you don’t miss any more creative goodness?
How many times have we started to write or create something and then stop short because we think, “Oh, why bother? Someone must have already done this before.”
Georges Polti once determined that there were 36 standard dramatic situations that represent all possible plots and dramatic possibilities. It’s also been said that there are no new ideas, period, and that we continue to reuse old ones. There is nothing new under the sun, including this very sentence.
Popular entertainment recycles creative content, especially the lucrative stuff. Movie sequels attempt to recapture the magic of a previous success involving similar characters and situations (e.g. Indiana Jones, Shrek, Star Wars, Saw, Star Trek, Batman, Rocky, X-Men, Superman, Spider-Man, etc.) Remakes or re-imaginings of existing properties are also popular (the Batman movies have been successful; Battlestar Galactica rocks; and we’ll see how the Star Trek movie remake will turn out.)
Marketers do something similar the world of packaged products and branding in general.
Virtually any major consumer packaged good (e.g. food, drink, shaving cream, toothpaste, shampoo, detergent) goes through a regular cycle of renewal by adding new adjectives to make the product seem fresh and exciting once again.
On demand, a competent marketer should be able to whip out any of the following adjectives to invigorate a tired product:
A product can evolve over time, but it’s the marketing, packaging, and naming that changes more than the actual breakfast cereal. Corn flakes are, naturally, still corn flakes.
If you believe that there are no new plots to be discovered, you might close down our word processor and start doing something more fun, like talking to someone, gaming, or disinfecting your toilet. After all, if you can be original, then why bother? (stay with me on this)
Learning that your brilliant idea has already been done is like getting a hard kick in the pants. You might think that you’re in the clear, then you do a Google Blog search and you learn that someone already wrote about the formula for the perfect cup of coffee. Argh.
At some point most creators will need to realize that they aren’t as clever, talented, or as original as they had thought. They can stop creating, or else try again.
If you want to try again, but you lack the self-confidence or the will to stumble back down this challenging path, here are some thoughts that might help you move forward:
The right combination of skill, knowledge, and chance rarely come together on the first few (hundred?) tries. One or two of these attributes is usually missing in a creator’s early work. This is normal.
Do a search on “Thomas Edison” and “light bulbs” to see one example of a large number of attempts that were needed to find the right solution. But when the light bulb finally goes on, so to speak, oh it’s sweet!
Six billion living people, and millions upon millions who are now dead, can come up with a heck of a lot of variations on a theme. This makes it hard to uncover new creative ground.
It makes sense to do some research before you invest a lot of time and effort into a creative project. In any case you’re bound to learn something new and useful even if you did manage to find something different to say.
Your thoughts, ideas, and your experiences are unique. J. Michael Straczynski (I’ll refer to him as JMS to avoid the possibility of misspelling his name), creator of the science fiction TV series Babylon 5, wrote an article about comic book writing that illustrates this point:
What a writer sells is, ultimately, his or her unique point of view. When you go out of your way to buy a short story by Ellison or Vonnegut or Bradbury, or a comic by Wolfman or Loeb or … Millar, you are buying it because you want to experience the way they see the world, to hear the stories that only they can tell. Nobody can write a Harlan Ellison story like Harlan Ellison. Nobody can write a Jeph Loeb comic like Jeph Loeb.
And nobody can write the story you are going to write as well as you can.
Every writer is the unique consequence of all the days and years and experiences we all accumulate over time. Anything run through that filter is going to come out as a unique creation, a unique voice. And that’s what editors want…to see how you see the world.
Your ideas, knowledge, and experiences may not be original, but they are authentic and unique. You experienced them, and they made you feel or think certain things. If you can convey your own perspective and words in your creative work, it does not matter if you are completely original.
JMS’s concept is the only sane path forward for a creator. Your unique formulation or presentation of the idea will be what people ultimately read and enjoy. Just remember that the consumer is savvy and has limited patience for BS.
If you take a box of Tide, call it Ultra Tide and put it in nifty new packaging while touting it as “a revolution in powdered detergent”, but you don’t improve the basic Tide formula, you’ll eventually have a lot of angry customers.
Similarly, if you write a story that you call “a fresh new approach to space opera”, but you copy the basic plot and characters of Star Wars, you’re screwed.
Don’t worry about retracing the path of ten thousand other creators. Make the journey your own with your honest, authentic thoughts and feelings. No one can accurately duplicate that. Just make sure that you don’t just change the packaging on the Tide or the Corn Flakes.
Note: the original version of this post was published here. This version was edited significantly, but the message is the same.
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I’ve been scouring the Web to find more blogs on creativity and idea development and I encountered something… unusual.
A Google search led me to Creative Something, which seems to be a really good blog about the creative process. The search led me to a blog post that listed other blogs about creativity - great! When I clicked on the link, though, I found something that I hadn’t seen very often before:
The blog’s author has made the full content available only to RSS subscribers. Try this link and you’ll see what I mean.
I haven’t seen this happen very often.
I’ve certainly heard of pay walls (i.e. pay to get access to content) but never putting all of the blog’s content behind a “RSS wall”. The author wrote a post about why he turned this in a subscription only service, which you can read here. Uh, no, actually you can’t… not unless you subscribe. I’ll say it’s because the author wants to restrict the content to a community of subscribers - there are no restrictions on who can belong to the community.
I can see going subscriber only to prevent blog scrapers from copying your work. Although you could use some other kind of exclusive website, even a member’s only forum, to distribute your work.
It’s certainly the author’s choice as to how they publish their work, I’m not saying what they are doing is wrong. It just seems like you’re cutting off the means to spread yourself further if all you see is a single paragraph that’s open to public view. Leo Babauta has gone the opposite route with Zen Habits and “uncopyright”.
Creative Something is an excellent blog, by the way. I recommend that you subscribe if you’re interested in this subject matter.
What do you think? Is the Creative Something blogger being smart or making a mistake by going subscriber only?
EDIT: in addition to some great discussion here, I’ve also been contacted by Tanner Christiansen of Creative Something, who shared these thoughts about his blogging approach:
The reasoning of putting the content behind an “RSS wall” is two fold: 1) I wanted Creative Something to be more like a members-only club, rather than just a blog that people can come to and read as they please. By making the subscribers the only people who get complete articles they feel like they are a part of the blog, instead of just readers. 2) Because the blog is all about creativity and doing things differently, I figured doing something such as this would be interesting to try. The results have been incredible thus far. I’ve only been on a “subscribers only” basis for a few weeks, but already my subscriber, visitor, and click-through rates have increased dramatically. I’ve seen a huge spike in subscribers (as expected), and don’t plan on changing the way the blog is for a long time.
Interesting stuff!
gvo boe joufsftujoh vofyqfdufe uif nbljoh bcpvu bmm jt dsfbujwjuz
There will be a prize for deciphering this.
Back and forth, back and forth: where to start and where to stop?
Everyone’s trying to get ahead, at least ahead of the next person.
First person to solve this in the comments, in the correct sequence, wins!
EDIT: congrats to Jason R. for winning this contest! He wins a huge whopping $5.00, delivered electronically. Sometimes the early bird…. well, you know how it goes. 
Creative Infrastructure, the concept used by magician Stewart James to help him develop magic routines, has three subsystems, as we discussed in the previous Broadcasting Brain post:
1. A mental and physical state that fosters creativity
2. A system for storing, retrieving, and sharing information
3. A system that encourages mentorship
Creative Infrastructure 2.0 augments the above sub-systems using social media and other Web technologies to help you collect valuable and interesting information, communications, and other contacts from around the world to help fuel your creative fires. It can be a great step along the road to self-actualization.
Now we’ll unpack these concepts into some more detail for you to consider.
Where does the information needed for creativity come from? How do you get your hands on it? And how do you make it easy to get this information? Today’s Web technologies are providing the next level of idea generation tools and environments in order to excel. We’re going to start looking at something that I’m going to refer to as Creative Infrastructure 2.0, inspired by the work of magician Stewart James. Climb Maslow’s hierarchy!
Image by jderuna
Unless you intend to survive off the stories that reverberate through the echo chambers of the blogosphere, you’re going to need help and inspiration.
If you want to create good creative content you’re going to need to find new material, new ideas, and innovative ways to combine facts and thoughts into meaningful output on a regular basis. New ideas, unknown facts, and the ability to connect these things together are crucial to the content creation process.
Note: talent and skill are crucial, too, but they can be improved over time.
We can look at professional magic as a possible model for the process of generating ideas. One of the most interesting books that I’ve read on creativity and idea creation is Advantage Play by magician David Ben. Ben uses techniques of magic (illusion, slight of hand, etc.) to try and provide inspiration to business leaders in his book. He spends a significant amount of time on idea creation by focusing on the methods used by one of his mentors, Stewart James. Ben gives us an idea of the incredibly productive methods used by James to come up with magic tricks:
Stewart was the most prolific inventor of magic in the twentieth century. Where most magicians invent a handful of magic routines during the course of their lives, Stewart created over one thousand. His prodigious output has been recorded in two massive publications totaling over 2,700 pages.
Put another way, imagine creating over 1,000 astonishing posts, articles, images, podcasts, or video blogs. Or, considering how science and technology have advanced over the years, consider an output of 5,000 pieces of content. Or how about ten thousand?
Stewart James used a concept that called Creative Infrastructure to help himself create magic routines.
David Ben refers to creative infrastructure as:
… an organized repository of personal and professional resources that creates an inventory of experience from which one can generate ideas and evaluate options.
Creative infrastructure includes at least three complimentary sub-systems:
Stewart James died in 1996, just as the Internet and the World Wide Web were starting to become ubiquitous and affordable. In his day, his creative infrastructure was limited by:
Nonetheless, James created a huge amount of work with what he had. He was probably one of the greatest creative geniuses of his time.
We have the potential to tap into a much greater collection of information, storage, and communication capabilities than James may ever have imagined. Creative Infrastructure 2.0, powered by the Web, can help you do amazing things and self-actualize in ways that our ancestors could not conceive.
More on this in the next post (which you can find here).
Stay tuned and don’t forget to subscribe by RSS reader or E-Mail updates (assuming you haven’t already) so you won’t miss what comes next.
Today I want to ask you a question and I’m really, really curious to know how you do things.
I’m really curious to know if you are the type of person who does things in a linear sequence or do you follow a more random pattern of working.
Linear sequence would be an example of starting at the beginning or logical starting point and then following a predefined set of steps, in order, until you reach the logical ending point. If you were driving from City A to City B, as an example, there is probably a shortest path where you always pass by several other cities, towns, landmarks, and so on. Food recipes are another example of doing work in a specific sequence of steps.
Random-access, a little-used term but quietly prolific process, means that you can do things out of sequence, just like the way that your computer’s hard drive, your DVD player, and your digital music player can move to any piece of data (or section of the storage media). These machines can move directly to a specific piece of information without passing through all preceding pieces of data. In terms of work, this means that you do not work in a pre-determined sequence. Instead, you’ll flip from task to task depending on your interest levels or other criteria.
By habit or by nature, I seem to use non-linear methods whenever I can, particularly when I have a lot of control over how I can do something. The main reason I use these methods, I think, is that I need a starting point to sink myself into before I can properly get oriented on doing something.
It’s not always the most efficient way to get things done, but it’s effective for me (I tend to be more biased to effectiveness than efficiency).
But enough about me.
How about you?
Are you a linear worker or do you move through work differently, more random-access? Please share your thoughts with the rest of us and thanks!
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