The struggle

28 May 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

I just got a new manager this week at work. Nine years ago he had an accident that changed his life and landed him in wheelchair. He told us a little about how it changed his life and the most profound things are how it impacted his attitude.

He said he had to consciously choose to be happy.

He had to choose how he was going to live his life. They had to move to a house that was wheelchair accessible and I'm sure there were so many other things they had to change.

It had to be a conscious choice!

When he told us this, it made me think of some incredible people who don't have legs or arms, or have mental disabilities. These people have so much less opportunity than people without those disabilities, and they so many of them do more than most people. I've seen a legless woman do gymnastics and mentally handicapped people memorize more digits of π than I can.

Why are people with disabilities so able to do amazing things? Because they made a conscious choice. See, us normal people without extra difficulties can make it through life without really making hard choices, without struggling. But those people have to choose. They are forced to choose and that's what has made the difference. And when they choose to struggle instead of hide away in their homes and do nothing, they blossom.

The cost is struggle

The choice we have to make is between taking the easy way, and taking the hard way, struggling. And without the struggle, we'll never be amazing at anything. The cost of being amazing is a hard struggle.

My boss has had a hard nine years of struggle but because of that he's become a very happy person. He's already an inspiring person to me in just the week I've known him.

I've been inspired to make sure my creativity is a conscious choice. I've been inspired to take the hard road and be willing to struggle to become great. Creativity is not free and you don't go through the struggle without choosing it.

Inspiration is the impulse which sets creation in movement

26 May 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roger_Sessions.jpg

Today's book appreciation post comes from Roger Sessions. He was an American composer and music teacher born in the 1890s. His work was considered neoclassical. He won a Pulitzer Price in 1974.

His few pages in this book that I'm slowly reading are about inspiration and how that translates to finished work of musical art.

Inspiration is the impulse which sets creation in movement

"'Inspiration' can come as a flash or slowly worked on until made great," he says and then asks essentially where is the inspiration in slowly creating something? "Yet if the word has any meaning at all, it is certainly appropriate to this movement [creation], with its irresistible and titanic energy of expression."

Speaking of the composer, he said, "He is not so much conscious of his ideas as possessed by them." We could say that about every creative field: we are possessed by our ideas. I love that.

Later Sessions talks about Aristotle's definition of art which is: "the reproduction of inner nature." But Sessions says that "art is a function, an activity of inner nature," not inner nature itself. The artist endow's the undisciplined materials that his inner nature provides him with a meaning that they do not possess—"to transcend them by giving them artistic form."

His words are almost poetry themselves. I love learning from the greats. What have you learned from Roger Sessions?

Just say no!

21 May 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by asalesguy.com

Saying 'no' is so liberating!

I just had a off-site meeting yesterday where we had to prioritize and plan projects. There's been a lot of pressure on my team to do more than we are able to do. We're a small team and it's not possible to do everything that different departments were hoping we would do.

In the last few weeks and especially yesterday I got to tell people that we are not going to be doing some of those things. It felt so good. Since we've started telling people no, there's been so much less pressure, and so much more clarity and happiness.

And the first thought that came to mind after that long meeting yesterday was, "saying no feels so good." And then I realized how good it is for you, and how good for your creativity.

I was reminded of a quote by Steve Jobs:

I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do

And I found another great quote as well

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

Say no until you've found the right thing to do, and then say no to everything else that comes along after you've started the right thing. Just keep moving forward.

When have you had to say no?

Update on my new process

19 May 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

I'm a month and a half into my new process and I've learned some things. I finished the storyboarding phase and now I'm writing the first draft! It took 1.5 months which I feel like is a big win because the first draft last book took 4 months and I still didn't have the story nailed down until at least the second draft, maybe later.

Storyboarding

The first thing I learned was that storyboarding was a success … but not really for the reasons I expected. You can read about my goals for the process here, but basically there were three:

• Quick iteration
• Feeling of discovery writing
• Something short to show to people to get feedback

Actually, on all but the second goal, it was a complete success. I was able to iterate quickly and I changed the story so many times, both little and big changes. Things changed so much I had to constantly read the current version of the story to keep it straight in my mind. I was also able to show it to three groups of people more than once and it got better every time. It took about an hour to show it each time, but that's much faster than them reading a whole book.

However, for most of the time it didn't feel like discovery writing. It felt like outlining. And at the end I realized that that's all my "storyboard" was. It was just an outline. I had hoped that by getting down into the details on the storyboard, it would feel like writing the story, but it was hard to get myself to make decisions and imagine the story without having written any of it yet. My natural tendency is to have to write the first half of the story before I get clarity into what happens in the second half, so this was hard for me.

Forcing myself to do this, however, created a much more powerful ending. I'm not sure if I'll be able to overcome the weakness that outlining has of having flat characters.

In conclusion, I wrote an outline, but in a format that is easy to show to people and I discovered that outlines help you iterate quickly. I'm still going to call it a storyboard to make myself feel better.

Test-driven Writing

I tried my idea of test-driven writing, but as I started writing tests—or goals—for each scene, it felt redundant. If the outline talks about advancing the storyline of character x, or especially if the scene is all about that, then it doesn't make sense to have a test/goal for that.

The more I followed that line of logic, the more tests dropped off my list for each scene. I ended with a small list of emotions that this scene should hit. The exercise almost felt futile at first, but then I reached a moment of clarity.

In creative writing, the real test of each scene is whether or not your writing struck a certain emotion with people. It's all about the emotions. This discovery gave me a very focused set of goals that I feel like are really going to help me write this story.

Now, this is just my feelings working with my own story. I'll still need more examples and thoughts from other people and from doing this multiple times, but for now, this is what I'm running with and I'm so excited for it.


So lastly, I've started writing the first draft. I'm giving myself four months (the time it took to write the first draft last time) and my hope is that I'll need fewer drafts before I get a killer story. We'll see if taking 1.5 months to storyboard will save me 4 months or multiple 4 months. Wish me luck and I can't wait to share more about what the story is actually about!

From the Greats: Mozart

14 May 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

It's been a while since i've done a book appreciation post. I think when I first started this blog in November I did one, but I haven't since then. Of course, you could count the whole months of January and February as a book appreciation post about Creativity Inc.

Today I'm going back to the book The Creative Process edited by Brewster Ghiselin from the direct words of some of our worlds greatest creative geniuses.

Mozart explained his creative process and it's quite fascinating.

He explains how he hears in his mind the whole work. He doesn't hear the different instruments separately, but just all together. And he hears or imagines the whole thing from beginning to end. When he goes to write it down, it's rarely changed from exactly how it was in his head. And he says he can do it fairly quickly.

He doesn't try to make his works Mozartish. He suspects that they are that way for the same reasons that his nose is different from everyone else's or why it's Mozartish. "For I really do not study or aim at any originality."

His words are profound in their simplicity and his genius. They're inspiring.

The type of home-schooling education that me and my wife follow is called a Classical Education which involves lots of reading the classics. So, instead of reading about Mozart or Einstein, read Mozart's and Einstein's own words. I'm telling you this because I'm not doing justice to how Mozart describes his creativity, so go read it yourself to get the most out of his genius!

What makes your work yours?

Manage for collective creativity

12 May 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

I've been on a TED talk kick lately. There are so many good ones and not enough time to watch them all. I watched one recently on managing creative people. I watched it to level-up my managing skills at work because I'm a team lead, but it just had so many good things, I needed to share here.

Normally this blog focuses more on individual creativity, so it might not help you out that much unless you manage creative people (aren't we all, though?). But it does talk about how a group can be sustainably creative and by that I mean it talks about how to manage an organization so that it can innovate time after time after time.


Below I've got some great quotes and ideas from her talk. I promise that I didn't know that she talks about Pixar before I started the video. Pixar isn't the only thing I think about, really ;)

"innovation isn't about solo genius, it's about collective genius"

She talks about everyone having their particular "slice of genius."

"unleash the talents and passions of many people and harness them"

3 characteristics of an innovative team:

• collaborative problem solving
• discovery driven learning
• integrated decision making

"Hire people who argue with you"

"Sometimes it's best to be deliberately fuzzy and vague"

Creative Abrasion

marketplace of ideas through debate & discourse (heated but constructive arguments)
"innovation rarely happens unless you have diversity and conflict"

Creative Agility

quick pursuit of ideas, reflection, and adjustment
"act as opposed to plan your way to the future"
design thinking
scientific method and artistic process
experiments not pilots (pilots are about being right. When they don't work, someone is to blame)

Creative Resolution

combine ideas for a new solution
"they don't go along to get along"
"they don't compromise"

If any of those quotes sound interesting to you, go ahead and watch the video. It'll be worth your time. I think I'm going to watch it again to get everything I can out of it.

How do you manage creative people? How do you manage your own creativity to consistently innovate?

How schools kill creativity

07 May 2015 Unknown 2 Comments

Ken Robinson gave a great TED talk about how schools kill creativity.




I don't think I can add much to this incredible speech, but here's some great quotes:

"Creativity is as important as literacy and we should treat it as such."

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

"The whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors … but we shouldn't hold them up as the highest form of life."

"Brilliantly creative people think their not [smart]."

"Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value."

What do you think about his take on creativity? Were you schooled out of creativity?

Keep moving forward

05 May 2015 Unknown 1 Comments

"Walt disney portrait" by NASA - http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-000060.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

"Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." – Walt Disney

I love this quote. I first heard it from the Disney movie Meet the Robinsons. I still cry every time I watch that movie, but admittedly I'm a crier.

This has become my own personal mantra, "Keep moving forward." And I know my wife feels the same and it's kind of our unofficial family saying.

To me, it means push past the failures and just keep trying. In the movie it talks about how good failure is, and that's one of the things that the main character has to learn. The inventor in the movie makes several failed prototypes until he finally invented something that changed the world.  No matter how many or how horrible the failures were, he just kept going.

I also love the part in this quote about opening new doors and doing new things. Not being afraid to learn new things and explore new territories is so important to creativity. Just not being afraid in general. Not being afraid of failing, not being afraid of the new, not being afraid of a blank page, not being afraid to put yourself out there. "… curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."

What is your mantra? And how do you help yourself to keep moving forward?