Tag: artist

We are all artists

Neera 1 Comment

Yesterday I wrote about Seth Godin who made me understand what is art. Today I am going to reveal the identity of a man who told me that I am an artist too. I have never met him. I have only seen his art. And I read his book and that was all I needed. He helped me believe in myself, my own creativity and my own potential.

His name is Hugh Macleod. He is a cartoonist, marketing consultant, and a highly-regarded author, writing on the themes of innovation, creativity and motivation. His book “Ignore Everybody” began life on his popular marketing blog, gapingvoid.com, as an e-book. It was downloaded over 5 million times since being posted and enjoyed by readers all over the world. Re-imagined in print form, the book “Ignore Everybody” made the Wall Street Journal’s best sellers list.

An earlier version of the “Ignore Everybody” is available free as How to be Creative and it has been downloaded 4.5 million times and this was the book that introduced me to Hugh’s philosophy. The book has 26 chapters i.e. 26 pieces of advice. I selected three which made the most impact on me.

1. We are all born creative

Hugh’s simple argument is that we were all given a box of crayons in kindergarten. We all used them freely and had a lot of fun with them. Then what happened? We hit puberty. And they took away the crayons and gave us books on algebra:

Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.

So you’ve got the itch to do something. Write a screenplay, start a painting, write a book, turn your recipe for fudge brownies into a proper business, whatever. You don’t know where the itch came from; it’s almost like it just arrived on your doorstop, uninvited. Until now you were quite happy holding down a real job, being a regular person… until now.

You don’t know if you’re any good or not, but you’d think you could be. And the idea terrifies you… You don’t know any publishers or agents or all these fancy-shmancy kind of folk…Heh. That is not your wee voice asking for crayons back. That’s your adult voice, your boring and tedious voice trying to find a way to get the wee voice to shut the hell up.

Your wee voice doesn’t want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. There is a big difference.

Go ahead and make something. Make something really special. Make something amazing that will really blow the mind of anybody who sees it.

So you have to listen to your wee voice or it will die… taking a big chunk of you along with it.

They are only crayons. You didn’t fear them in kindergarten, why fear them now?

Hugh MacLeod in How to be Creative

2. Ignore Everybody

When we get an idea that holds us and doesn’t just go away, our first reaction is to run it past others. To get advise. To think about it logically. Do a feasibility study. But Hugh advice is to ignore everybody:

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.

You don’t know if your idea is any good the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feeling is not as easy as the optimist say it is. There’s a reason why feelings scare us.

Plus the big idea will change you. Your friends may love you, but they don’t want you to change. If you change, then their dynamic with you will also change. They like things the way they are, that’s how they love you – the way you are, not the way you may become.

Hugh Macleod in How to be Creative

It is so liberating to do your own thing. It is so liberating to do something where you don’t have to impress anybody. It is so liberating to feel complete sovereignty over your work. Hugh writes, “The sovereignty you have our work will inspire far more people than the actual content of it.”

3. Put the hours in

When Hugh first started with the cartoons on back-of-business-card-format, people thought he was nuts. He got asked a lot, “Your business card format is very simple. Aren’t you worried about somebody ripping it off?” His answer to them was “Only if they can draw more of them than me and better than me.” What gave his work its edge was a simple fact that he’d spent years drawing them. He had drawn thousands. That was tens of thousands of man-hours.

“Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and the failed people is time, effort and stamina.

If somebody in your industry is more successful than you, it’s probably he works harder at it than you do. Sure, maybe he’s more inherently talented, more adept at networking, etc. but I don’t consider that an excuse. Over time, that advantage counts for less and less. Which is why the world is full of highly talented, network-savvy, failed mediocrities.

Put the hours in; do it for long enough and magical life-transforming things happen eventually.

Stamina is utterly important.  And stamina is only possible if managed well. People think all they need to do is endure one crazy, job-free creative burst and their dreams will come true. They are wrong. They are stupidly wrong.

Hugh MacLeod in How to be Creative

When we put the hours in, do it for long enough, magical and life-transforming things happen eventually. That is the promise Hugh makes.

I urge you to read his books How to be Creative and Ignore Everybody. They will answer most of your concerns and tackle head-on the fears which are stopping you from starting whatever it is you want to.

Tomorrow, I will introduce to you the man who inspired me the most. I owe, starting of this website and many other creative ventures I have started, to him.

Top Photo by Avinash Kumar on Unsplash

Four stages of Creative Process

Neera

English socialist and social psychologist Graham Wallas proposed four stages of the creative process in his book The Art of Thought, published in 1926.

These stages are:

  • Preparation
  • Incubation
  • Illumination
  • Verification

The preparation is the feeding stage. Your brain is hungry for knowledge, so you got to feed it. At this stage, your brain is like to sponge, soaking in everything, storing it, and making subconscious connections.

During the incubation stage, your brain is still making connections. Forcing it to come up with a unique and special idea during this stage is asking for too much. Let it do its work. It knows there is all this good material it has stored in its files. It hasn’t indexed that material yet.

Illumination is the stage when your brain comes up with great ideas, connecting pieces you had been looking for, causing you to leap out of your chair and scream “EUREKA!” These “lightbulb moments” happen at all sorts of awkward places—in the shower, just before you fall asleep, on long walks alone, or on a solitary drive in the car.

In the final stage, called verification, your brain takes that beautiful, shining lump of clay and molds it into the perfect statue. It evaluates the idea, verifying that it is a realistic idea, and starts building the surrounding framework to bring it to life.

The Art of Thought is out of print, but the following excerpt from it beautifully explains that our brain can be in one or all of these four stages at a time. They are constantly overlapping each other as we’re exposed to new exploration and experiences.

In the daily stream of thought, these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a businessman going through his morning’s letters, may at the same time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much very important thinking, done for instance, by a poet exploring his own memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be distinguished from each other.”

Source: Brain Pickings

Seven Principles of Creative Living

Neera

Lawrence G Boldt, a writer, career consultant, and personal coach, gives seven principles for creative living in his book How to Be, Do or Have Anything:

1. Among human beings, creativity is a natural, and not an exceptional, trait. Birds fly, fish swim, and humans create.

2. For the individual, personal freedom and self-fulfillment depend upon the conscious expression of his or her innate creative capacities. Without such expression, one will meet with unhappiness and unnecessary limitation.

3. Social and psychological factors may limit or impede an individual’s innate creativity. These factors can be overcome.

4. The creative process follows a definitive pattern and is essentially the same for all outcomes.

5. The creative process is knowable and understandable. It can be taught and learned.

6. The more one creates, the more confident he or she becomes in his or her ability to create.

7. Experience gained in applying the creative process in one area of life can be transferred to other areas.

Is being creative means being original?

Neera

What is being creative mean to you?

If you think a creative is someone who creates something unique out of the blue, then you are as wrong as I was when I didn’t understand creativity.

Creativity is nothing more than a process. A process of creating something. From imagination to reality. From an idea to a tangible thing. We all create something all the time. That should be enough to make us all creatives.

But we don’t feel creative because we don’t think we are creating something ‘original.’ Because the literary definition of creativity is the “use of imagination or original ideas to create something new.”

Most of us get fixed on the idea of being original.

How to be original when everything has been done before? All story plots have been used endlessly, every emotion has been exploited, songs repeat themselves and there is no new way to paint the sky.

We get so obsessed with being original that we stop creating. We get frustrated because we can’t find a new way. All the time we are looking for a completely original way to do things.

This is where we are mistaken.

The true creators know there is nothing new under the sun. The concept has been best explained by Jobs, a genius in creativity. He writes in I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words.

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, writes:

“[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. … Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.“

James Webb Young offered the same point of view many years earlier:

“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

Creativity belongs to the artist in each one of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is to ‘fit together’ and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters, but we are all artists.

Each time we fit things together, we are creating—whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, or a day.

“This energy which we call “making” is the relating of parts to make a new whole. The result might be a painting, a symphony, or a building. If the job is done well, the work of art gives us an experience of wholeness called ecstasy—a moment of rising above our feelings of separateness, competition, and divisiveness “to a state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed.”

In this video, How to be Creative, a web series exploring art, internet culture, and people creating it, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson urges people to let go of this romanticized idea of “originality.”

He agrees ideas don’t actually come out of thin air; in your subconscious, you were still processing all these influences from memories, education, experiences, etc.

He also mentions that humans create new ideas by copying, transforming, and combining other ideas.

Artists take existing ideas that nobody would have thought of combining and connecting them; making them work.

So, in nutshell, creativity is nothing more than connecting pre-existing ideas into new ideas.

We all are capable of doing it.