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Archive for the ‘creativity’ Category

10 Golden Lessons from Steve Jobs

Posted in creativity, personal growth on May 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Across on the Ririan project there’s this great post.
Steve Jobs is a really inspring character. You get the impression he just loves what he does in life and he’s so creative! I’m a mac convert over the last 18 months or so. I had used Windows pcs for years and years – yep, right back to those earliest of Windows years and up to XP, but then my wife bought me an iPod for Christmas 2005 and I couldn’t get it to work with my ageing Sony Vaio with its USB 1.1 ports so I went out in the January sales and bought an iMac. Oh my! Did I love it right out of the box! Not only did it set itself up without a hitch but it found my internet connection and configured itself without a problem and when I pressed the button that said “add printer” well, blow me, it just went ahead and did exactly that! I had NEVER had such an easy straightforward experience with Windows pcs. And the machine was just lovely to look at. A friend called and asked “where’s the box?” – he meant, where’s the tower that the computer lives in! There isn’t one! Elegant, that’s the word. Anyway, I started using iTunes and soon got into the get all my CDs onto the computer project. Just under 7000 tracks later they’re all there and new ones getting added as soon as I get the wrapping cellophane off the boxes (hey, that’s another story entirely! Packaging rage!!). The iPod goes EVERYWHERE with me. I completely love it. Next up I got into iPhoto hooking up my new digital camera and you know its just that everything works so easily experience that gets to me. It still amazes me. So when it came time to upgrade the ageing Vaio (OK, it was well past time) I bought a Powerbook. I just cannot imagine wanting to use Windows ever again.
For me, the mac is my creativity tool. For words, for pictures and for music, and I have barely scratched the surface with them so far.
So for me, Steve Jobs counts as a hero.
Here’s the summary of the quotes the Ririan project used to collect their “10 golden lessons”

  • “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
  • “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
  • “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you
    haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters
    of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
  • “You know, we don’t grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes
    other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We
    use a mathematics that other people evolved… I mean, we’re constantly
    taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something
    that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.”
  • “There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind.’ It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.”
  • “We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off,
    and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”
  • “I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”
  • “I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.”
  • “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?”
  • “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s
    life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of
    other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown
    out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to
    follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you
    truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I got that summary from Lifehack, a blog I read regularly and thoroughly recommend.

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Ceiling height and ways of thinking

Posted in creativity on April 25, 2007| 3 Comments »

Now here‘s and interesting piece of research. Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu from the University of British Colombia have shown that ceiling height affects the way we think. When the ceiling is higher, people think more abstractly and when it is lower they think more specifically.

Now that’s interesting! Because they are not saying that one particular ceiling height is good and another bad but that the physical environment in which you sit or move will be conducive to a particular way of thinking.

So, next time you want to be creative, think freely, brainstorm, or whatever, maybe you should get yourself into a room with a high ceiling! What about outside I wonder? Is that better? But, next time you want to focus in on the specifics, the details of a piece of work you might be best to find a more tightly enclosed space. Reminds me of something I read about writers who use a garden shed to write in! I wonder if the different kinds of rooms writers write in suit different kinds of writers?

What do you think? Are you aware of the effects that a room’s dimensions can have on your thought processes?

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Stick or twist? Attractors and bifurcators

Posted in creativity, from the living room, health, life on April 15, 2007| Leave a Comment »

There are a number of qualities in complex systems. Let’s have a look at a couple of them and see how they can help us to understand why sometimes we get stuck and why on other occasions we when we get through a certain difficult experience we feel that not only life, but we ourselves, have changed irrevocably.

Attractors

One quality is that of an “attractor”. The one attractor you’ll know something about is the kind that makes “Black Holes” – those whirlpools in space that suck everything, even light, deep into their swirling vortices. There are three kinds of attractor.

  1. Point attractors – these pull everything towards a single point.
  2. Loop attractors – these have two centres close together and anything which comes close gets swept back and forward between the two centres, flip-flopping between two alternating states.
  3. Chaos attractors – a focus of chaos, with everthing that comes near being pulled into a chaotic system.

What can these phenomena teach us about life? Well, a point attractor is the kind of thing that traps us. It might be a wound, a hurt, a bad experience. Or it might be a habit or stuck way of thinking. These are the well-worn paths that always, inevitably, end up at the same destination, producing the same outcome. It’s hard to move on, to grow or to develop when you keep going back or holding on to the same old thing. Point attractors are about stuckness. They produce routines that become ruts.

Loop attractors are those alternating states we often experience – a cycling back and forward between emotional highs and lows, between frantic activity and depression, between fear and anger. There is more variety in a loop than in a point, but they both entrap.

Chaos attractors are the most confusing of all. They hardly seem recognisable. They have no pattern, no rhythm and no predicability. Their only inevitably is chaos. These are the states we often find ourselves in when we are overwhelmed by something – bad news, loss, terror, grief. Like the points and the loops, the chaos attractors trap. At least points and loops have the comfort of the familiar, and, to some extent, the predictable. Chaos states are very hard to experience and can’t be sustained for long.

How can we break free of the pull of an attractor?

  1. Imagination. Developing your powers of imagination generates the potential for change and for movement. Without imagination it can be hard to believe that there is any possibility of breaking free from the entrapment of an attractor.
  2. Will. Determination and motivation. It’s one thing to imagine how life could be different but it takes a strong desire and determination to change to break free of the attractor.
  3. Relationships. Sometimes it takes an external influence to make the difference. This is where other people can make such a difference. It can be the attention, the love and the care of another which helps us to break free from our stuckness, our habits and ruts.
  4. Changes in circumstances. We all exist in constant interaction with our environments. As the environments change so do we. Changes in circumstances like new relationships, the ending of relationships (whether through break-up or death), loss of employment, new employment, moving house, and so on, can all exert huge power to knock us out of the old patterns and stuck places. This is why sometimes painful events can result in significant gains.

Bifurcators

Bifurcators are like crossroads. They are points where things change. With a bifurcator you usually have two possibilities – growing or shrinking. At a bifurcator the system changes and either develops, changes and grows stronger or more resilient, or it declines, shrinking or disintegrating, becoming weaker. The key thing about a bifurcator is that life is not going to be the same again. A good example is pregnancy. Once pregnant, a woman’s life will never be the same. She can never again have never been pregnant. Either the baby will grow and thrive and the woman will become a mother (and how different does THAT make a life!) or the pregnancy will not progress and the woman will experience an abortion, a miscarriage or a stillbirth. In none of these circumstances will she ever be the same again. Often there are no choices possible. Life develops one way, or it develops another. However, in many situations a bifurcator is all about making a choice. The challenges which come our way for example can be accepted or rejected. Accepting a challenge brings the potential for growth. Rejecting a challenge can leave you stuck in the arms of an attractor!

So, here is a key difference between a hero and a zombie – heroes break free of attractors, grasp the bifurcation points and grow; zombies stay stuck at the same points, in the same loops, engulfed in the same chaos, avoiding bifurcators and preventing growth.

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Creative space

Posted in creativity, from the reading room, from the viewing room on April 15, 2007| 7 Comments »

Morning pages, originally uploaded by bobsee.

What makes a space a creative space? Every Saturday in the Guardian there is a photo of a writer’s room. It got me thinking about the spaces which somehow make creativity flow.
A number of years ago I read The Artist’s Way and I two lessons really stuck with me (but for some reason I never got round to carrying them out until recently).
The first lesson was what Julia Cameron calls “morning pages”. Her idea is that you should write, pretty much stream of conscious writing, every morning until you’ve filled three pages of a notebook. Well, I never did it, until 27th December last year. Since then I haven’t missed a single day and it’s almost a kind of addiction now. If I don’t actually do it first thing there’s a kind of irritation in me, a discomfort, until I sit myself down and write the three pages.
I haven’t stuck to writing first thing but most mornings I do get up at 6am, shave, shower, dress, then sit myself down and write the three pages. If I’ve got time left, I have breakfast! I find it takes anything from 15 minutes to just over half an hour to write the three pages. I’m not precious about the stream of consciousness thing but I do try not to stop once I’ve started (I don’t pause for thought, worry about grammar or punctuation).
Sometimes I have written on the train, on a plane, in a cafe or in an airport. The variety gives me a bit of a kick. I let myself just ENJOY it and don’t give myself a hard time for not having written within an hour of getting out of bed. With this leeway, I’ve written 3 pages EVERY single day since December 27th and I really don’t see me stopping now.
I didn’t read what I’d written at all for the first six weeks and I haven’t kept up a time for writing what I’ve written (in fact, most of what I’ve written I haven’t read!). However, my creativity has been unleashed! I can’t tell you just how much but I take more photos than ever before, post up to Flickr for the first time ever, started this bog, wrote a few pages for a website……I could go on. I just feel that ideas don’t rattle around my head like hard peas in a tin any more, rather they come together, they develop and, more than anything, they turn into real world phenomena – words and images mainly.
I cannot recommend this habit highly enough. It is transformative.

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How to be creative

Posted in creativity, from the living room, from the reading room on April 6, 2007| 1 Comment »

I’ve just read a couple of books about creativity and it’s interesting to compare what they say. The first one I read was “The Creative Brain” by Nancy CAndreasen. (ISBN 0-452-28781-2). Nancy Andreasen sounds a really interesting person. Not only is she an MD who has specialised in brain research, but she is a PhD in Renaissance literature. Sometimes I think all doctors would be better doctors if they also studied a Humanities subject. Her final chapter is “Building Better Brains” and here she gives creativity exercises for adults and for children. Here are the paragraph heads –

  • Choose a New and Unfamiliar Area of Knowledge and Explore It in Depth
  • Spend Some Time Each Day Practicing Meditation or “Just Thinking”
  • Practice Observing and Describing
  • Practice Imagining

and for children –

  • Switch Off the TV
  • Read Together, Interactively
  • Emphasize Diversity
  • Ask Interesting Questions
  • Go Outdoors and Look at the Natural World
  • Get Them Interested in Music

The second book I read was “Window Seat. The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking” by Julieanne Kost. (ISBN 0-596-10083-3). This author is a photographer and “evangelist and trainer for Adobe Photoshop software”. She took 3000 photos from the window seats of commercial aircraft as she travelled on business over a five year period. The 150 photos in this book are stunning and inspirational but what makes this an incredibly different photography book is that it is in three sections. The first section is “The Art of Creative Thinking”, the second section is the photographs, and the third is an appendix of the techniques she used to make the photos. Here are the paragraph heads of her first section on creativity –

  • Master your tools
  • Listen to what your life is trying to tell you
  • Be open to whatever comes your way
  • Share what you know and learn from others
  • Collaborate with other creative people, especially the quiet ones
  • Be flexible. Learn to negotiate
  • Fix whatever you complain about the most
  • View every challenge as a possible discovery
  • Take 15 minutes for yourself every day
  • Figure out what you need to do to reach your “zero point”
  • Integrate work and art; both will benefit
  • Take up an interest in something you know nothing about
  • Look at new stuff – and at what you already know – with a fresh perspective
  • Keep a journal
  • Visualise first, Photoshop second
  • Replace your thoughts with intuition
  • Play! Play! Play!
  • Know when you’re done

Even although I’m not writing about the detail of any of these paragraphs here you can see a large potential consensus. Both of these authors write clearly, simply and are very down to earth. There’s nothing “airy-fairy” about them.
Having read not only these two books but many others on the subject of creativity here are the practical steps I think lead to becoming more creative in your life –

  1. Take some time each day to think and reflect – you might call this meditation, you might go over something in your head, or write down your thoughts – but however you do it, actually take some time each day to think.
  2. Notice more. Actively try to observe more consciously.
  3. Explore. Be curious. Find out more about something every day
  4. Be passionate. If you have a passion for something, pursue it!
  5. Share. Spend some time talking or playing with other people – adults or children – every day.
  6. Accept challenges as opportunities to grow
  7. Focus on difference. Seek diversity and variety
  8. Create your own rhythms. Certain habits or disciplines are not constraining but instead they release – this is one of the bases of poetry which is not just words which rhyme but is words chosen within certain disciplines of pattern.
  9. Capture something every day – either write in a journal, take a photo, record a video or audio clip. What you capture will be your treasure chest!
  10. Schedule. I don’t just mean schedule what needs to be done, I mean schedule in some periods of time just to pursue creativity

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