Dare to create

Neera

Twenty-something years ago, a forty-something, overworked full-time middle manager, mother, wife, and daughter-in-law wrote a story in her head while washing dishes. She then typed that story and saved it on her desktop.

That little story gave her confidence. So she wrote another one. Then another.

Work, home, and family commitments took all her time and energy but she vowed she will continue to write little stories even if she gets to do them in the cracks of her busy days.

She didn’t share those stories with anyone. She just let them sit in a folder on her computer.

Each story boosted her confidence a little. So much so that one day she quit her job and became a full-time author.

She went on to write books and publish them.

Today she got an email from Medium.com, telling her that she is a verified author and that, one of her books will
feature on her profile page and a blue ‘Book Author’ badge will appear next to her name across Medium.

All because she dared to create.

Don’t just consume information as if it is food. While you are focused on consuming from the outside, you’re losing nourishment already inside you. Don’t make learning an excuse for not creating. Creating is more valuable than consuming.

Write a story.
Draw a sketch.
Create a melody.
Paint that painting.

There is no better teacher than a failure

Neera

All my businesses failed to be profitable.

At age 28, I started an artificial jewelry business.

Imitating a friend who had a successful jewelry stall in a busy shopping center, I bought jewelry from India and tried to sell it at a local school fete. I barely recovered my money.

At age 37, I got into the real estate business. That was the year Australia experienced its worst recession. Needless to say, I didn’t sell a single house.

At age 41, I established a network marketing business with a reputed company. I spent thousands of dollars setting it up and advertising it.

I even went part time at my job letting go of half the salary for six months.

After giving it to my heart and soul for six years, I had to give it up.

For years, I saw myself as a failure.

Then one day, thinking about them from a different perspective, I realized they were not failures.

They were the stepping stones for bigger and better things in my life.

From the jewelry business, I learned how markets worked. I learned more by doing it and failing at it than I would have by succeeding at it.

From the real estate business, I learned about negotiations and my local housing market.

I saved thousands of dollars down the track when we bought our house and several investment properties.

From network marketing, I learned confidence in presenting ideas, self-mastery, and people management skills. They helped me to win leadership roles in my job.

I owe a lot of what I became in life to my network of marketing business mentors.

The monetary gains are not the only gains you should seek from endeavors you take.

You learn more from failing than you can from succeeding.

Treat every new idea as an experiment

Neera

We are surrounded by endless knowledge, yet more often than we’d like, we are starving for wisdom.

We are exposed to countless strategies and solutions to every problem under the sun, yet too often, we don’t apply them.

Slow down to treat each new idea as a practical experiment, and to wait to see what results it produces before rushing on to the next fascinating concept.

Three weeks ago I started an experiment. To share 100 insights on LinkedIn with a splash of humour.

I was struggling at first to come up with ideas and to illustrate them. But it is getting easier now and I am enjoying it.

I called it a challenge then, but it is in fact an experiment. You can fail in a challenge and feel miserable. But if an experiment fails, it’s no big deal. You start again.

Take an idea shower

Neera

Ninety percent of my best ideas come in the shower. That too when I am not even looking for them.

Whenever I am faced with a difficult problem or have a bad case of writer’s block, I take a shower. The shower puts me in a relaxed state and distracts the brain just enough to give it a chance to rest. When I stop thinking deliberately about a problem and daydream a little, my subconscious has a chance to play.

Studies have found that after some wandering, the mind makes creative connections between bits of information, it already knows with the new bits of information, it has just acquired.

The shower is the ideal idea incubator. Not only does the warm water elevates your mood, but you also focus your attention inward. You cut out the outside world and ideas bubble up into awareness.

So, next time you’re stuck on a problem, try taking a break and letting your mind wander. Or just take an idea shower. You never know, an idea might pop into your head.

Two questions to ask yourself

Neera

Two questions you need to ask yourself.

  1. What will your success look like?
  2. At what point you will quit?

A few years ago, I read a book by Seth Godin called “The Dip.” It had a huge impact on me.

The dip is the lull in the excitement that happens after the rush of starting something new wears off. On the other side of the dip is success. The dip weeds out the people who will not make it. They hit the dip and give up.

A cul-de-sac, (French for “dead end”) is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing happens. Do you work through burnout, or do you recognize it as a cul-de-sac and just give it up so you can move on to something else?

There is nothing wrong with quitting. Winners quit all the time, they quit fast; they quit often and they quit without guilt. But they don’t quit before they are ready to quit. They determine beforehand when will they quit.

Here’s something I can tell you about the book I’m writing now. The one I’m burned out on and would love to never think about again.

I was excited about it until it dragged on and on and on. I have rewritten it at least six times. I am finding it hard to keep going. I’m in the dip for this project. But I am not going to quit. Because I had decided beforehand that I will quit if I can’t reach the mid-point. Once I crossed the mid-point I will keep going and publish the book no matter how unhappy I am with it.

I have passed the mid-point. The end part is not fun anymore. But it doesn’t have to be fun to be worth it. I am climbing through the dip,
to get to the other end.

Here’s an assignment for you:
Write down under what circumstances you’ll quit.

And then stick with it until then.

The beauty of compression

Neera

In December 2008, Juergen Schmidhuber, a German computer scientist, published a paper titled Driven by Compression Progress. This very influential paper, in the study of cross-disciplinary creativity, argued that the simple principle of compression is at the heart of everything.

Schmidhuber and his team point out that a simple algorithmic principle based on the notions of data compression and data compression progress informally explains fundamental aspects of attention, novelty, surprise, interestingness, curiosity, creativity, subjective beauty, jokes, and science & art in general.

In simple words, what does compression mean?

Compression says that ideas need to be boiled down to their most pure, dense, rich essence.

“The world can be explained to a degree by compressing it,” says Schmidhuber. Basically, our brain prizes efficiency. If it can remember one thing instead of ten, it’s happy.

Good communication is often compression, packaging up tangled thoughts into neat little words with agreed-upon meanings.

Love is compression, fusing a series of experiences, memories, feelings, and thoughts into an exhilarating state of mind.

Einstein changed physics with an incredibly succinct equation E equals MC squared.

Jokes boil down just to the punch line.

Compressed ideas can travel farther and faster. Not only through the communication channels like the internet but also through human minds.

One of the most famous and clear examples of compression is Picasso’s Bull. Picasso was a master of compression. He painted a series of 11 lithographs, his goal – to find the “essence” of the beast in a series of progressively simpler images.

He starts with a lively and realistic drawing of the bull. Next, he adds expression and power, making the beast even more evocative.

And then he stops building and starts dissecting. He keeps the lines that follow the contours of its muscles and skeleton and takes away everything else. In the subsequent images, he is simplifying and outlines just the major parts of its anatomy.

The compression continues in the final 5 images, as Picasso starts to understand the balance of form in the animal, and how weight is distributed between the front and the back. He removes structural lines of support that are no longer needed. He finishes the drawing with a final image, encasing what he has discovered are the most essential elements in a taut, nearly continuous outline. Along the way, he drops the bull’s head to emphasize the horns.

The result is a stunningly simple line drawing that somehow still captures the fundamental spirit of a bull.

“A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions.” Pablo Picasso.

Picasso did line sketches of several animals. I tried to copy his sketches, but it was hard to get the line control. Picasso, too probably wouldn’t have achieved this in one step –  the learning curve would have been too steep. He once described this process as “charging up” his arm with the essence of the animal. He often wouldn’t keep the whole sequence, turning the canvas upside down and painting over it at each stage.

Nike compressed its entire marketing philosophy down into just three words, Just do it. And then they compress that slogan into a symbol that is so recognizable all around the world, but it doesn’t even need the Nike’s name.

All of these examples show that compression is at the heart of creative excellence in every field.

When you compress your ideas, they automatically get better.

When you remove the parts that are merely good they no longer dilute the parts that are truly great.

We, writers, are compressors by profession. Our role is to explain complex ideas. To distill them down to the basics so that readers can get the gist of them without getting tangled in the fluff.