Bruce Springsteen’s mind blowing insight into creativity.

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(Note to reader: when I posted this yesterday The Boss’ speech was all over Youtube in it’s entirety.  Now we have a bunch of sponsored clips. Thank you, capitalism.)

There are few lessons about creativity greater than those taught by a conscious, creative genius.  If you’re serious about understanding the creative process, and you missed Bruce Springsteen’s recent keynote speech at South by South West in it’s entirety here are my notes; the highlights and flashes of enlightenment that moved me:

Bruce talks about “The one thing that has been consistent over the years, the genesis and power of creativity…

“The elements don’t matter… the purity is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips…

“There’s no right way, no pure way of doing it. There’s just doing it…

“Everyone has their genesis moment, whatever initially inspires you to action…, my genesis monument was in 1956… Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. I discovered… that you could call upon your own powers of your imagination, that you could create a transformative self.”

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Does creative genius rub off?

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I find the above statement both absurd and undeniable at the same time.

I mean, how can creative genius actually rub off on an individual?  So, any idiot hangs around with da Vinci and he gets brilliant?  Yeah, right?  And if I spend enough time with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar I’ll get taller, too.

But wait a minute.  I’m a working-class kid growing up in a small industrial city in northern England.  I can hang around with the wrong guys on the corner and probably wind up in jail before my 20th birthday.  Or, I can hang around with these other guys with leather jackets, only they have guitars, too, and, if my name is George Harrison, I can grow up to be a creative genius.

Yes, this is hypothetical.  But, hey, it’s fun to speculate sometimes.  Continue reading →

Problem child? It’s the problem parent who can really screw up a brainstorming session.

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When you lead a group ideation session sometimes it’s good to anticipate the potentially difficult players in advance to head off the problems.

There are many types of problem children who could mess up the process. Here I’m going to talk about a trouble maker who is not necessarily a problem became he or she can’t play well with others.

But more than that, it’s their mere presence that often presents a problem because of where they are on the org chart, not who they are as individuals.

I speak not of the problem children, but the problem parents, if you will. The big cheeses. The bosses. The heavy hitters.

These are the people who, because of their positions, wield all kinds of influence on the brainstorming process, whether they intend to or not. It’s best to handle that potential dysfunction in advance, to head off any possible issues before they happen.

Here’s what I do. Continue reading →

You can search for ideas, or let them find you.

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Creativity can be an active process.  You look for a new idea, and, BAM! you find a new idea.

Or you don’t.

Active, yes.  Exact, no.   Yes, people can force ideas to come.  We do it all the time in our brainstorming sessions.  And, today, with deadlines shorter than a Kardashian marriage, often you have no choice but to force creativity.  But in many ways, the more you force, the more likely the ideas become, well, forced.

The greatest thinkers since the beginning of time were active creators, to be sure.  But they were also passive creators.  To put it in sports terms, “they let the game come to them.”

This passiveness is hardly an inert state, it’s a highly alert state, a state of o p e n n e s s.   It’s where you don’t have to look for ideas, just be open to them when they arrise.

Then there’s c o m p l e t e  o p e n n e s s, a place where highly realized creative people are not only open to anything, but they’re open to things that may be diametrically opposed to any preconceptions they hold.

Basic o p e n n e s s

This is easy to explain.  Many songwriters exemplify this degree of openness.  Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits overhears some delivery men talking about him, “He gets his money for nothing and his chicks for free.”  Voilà!  A song is born.  Hell, they even wrote some of the verses, “We got to install microwave ovens, custom kitchen deliver-i-e-e-s-s…”

Adam Levine of Maroon 5 is frustrated that the execs at the label are telling him he still hasn’t written the “radio hit,” the song with the big hook, for M5’s first CD release.  He’s pissed, his creativity is being stifled by a bunch of freaking suits, he’s suffocating, he’s… wait! “It’s getting harder and harder to breathe..”  M5′s breakout hit “comes to him” in the key of E-ureka!

Most of this blog is about active creativity.  Coming up with ideas.  But if simply being open to inspiration also works, shouldn’t we be, well, open to that.   Maybe we should be more than open.

C o m p l e t e  o p e n n e s s Continue reading →

I’m not creative enough

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I wrote an article for Communication Arts years ago entitled I’m not creative enough.  It has been the most republished piece I’ve ever written.  From what I hear it’s also the most photocopied of my writing as well, if I believe all the art professors and advertising instructors who tell me it’s required reading for their students.

I’ll tell you the punch line, if you’d like.  I believe the hollow feeling of creative uncertainty is one of the greatest forces one can have to fuel creative growth.  I believe it perpetuates the hunger.

I hadn’t read the piece in a number of years until just now, and you know what?  I still haven’t outgrown the deep, hollow hunger.  I hope I never will.  Because that will be then end of my creative growth. And as a new year is upon us it feels like a good time to reconfirm this resolution.

I’m not creative enough. 

As I sit down to write this article a cold shiver goes down the center of my back.

“What do I write about?”

“CA readers are a pretty savvy audience.”

“Will they like it?”

“Will it be meaningful?”

“Will it be valuable?”

“Will it be useful?”

“Will the column be good enough?”

“Am I creative enough?”

These are just a few of the frightful thoughts that flash through my mind, with a few side trips to my sweat glands.

The blank sheet of paper has been haunting writers and artists for centuries. Or, the blank canvas, or the solid slab of marble, or the empty stage…. All creative people have their boogiemen.

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What the umbrella “assassin” can teach us about triggering wildly creative ideas.

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The New York Times recently produced a wonderful little video, The Umbrella Man, featuring Joshua “Tink” Thompson, author of “Six Seconds in Dallas,” an analysis of the infamous Zapruder film depicting the JFK assassination.  Thompson devoted a good deal of his various careers to studying the complexities of reality, this is certainly a bending of reality as it relates to creativity.

This short film explains how the cockamamy theory of Kennedy’s umbrella assassin emerged, and shows us how introducing totally random data into a factual senario can lead to otherwise unfathomable conclusions – a pretty cool way to look at creative thinking.

When we’re seeking fresh ideas we’re all slaves to what we know.  It’s not wrong.  It’s just how the mind works.  We can only process what is in our minds; what we recall and what we observe in the present.  So the raw material for all of our new ideas is bits and pieces of what we know, all put into our mental Cuisinart.

But introduce a totally incongruous piece of data, and, BAM! the mind, still using rational process, tries to make it all make sense leading to some pretty creative concepts, as this film illustrates.

On many creative days we get these random cues and weave them into our thoughts consciously or not.  (More often we miss them, or even dismiss them.)  Stephen Tyler hears a Marty Feldmen line in the film Young Frankenstein, “Walk this way” and it leads to a great song hook.   Philip Pullman gets the core idea for His Dark Materials Trilogy when he sees a DaVinci painting of a young girl holding an ermine.

When I lead brainstorming sessions we use a simple tool called Intergalactic Thinking™ to trigger fresh ideas.  It’s easy and it’s fast.  The only thing that causes some people pause is that it forces them to deviate from the linear thinking that dominates their thought process virtually all of the time.  But this divergent thought process works.  The next time I lead a brainstorming session I’m going to use the umbrella galaxy and see what happens.The Umbrella Man film was brought to my attention by fellow creative thinking enthusiast and all around creative guy Marty Baker of Inotivity.