Tilt your perspective to see things differently.
Pakistan to Siberia in a straight line without touching land. I had to watch that video 3 times to get how it’s possible.
Left on its normal axis you’d never see it. But tilt the globe a little and you start to see things you never saw before.
Axiom: Step away from your challenges long enough to gain a fresh perspective.
On June 15th, 1904 the PS General Slocum was chartered by St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church of New York City for $350. 1,360 people showed up that Wednesday for the 17th annual Sunday School picnic. It was a calm and beautiful morning… anyone who has visited Manhattan in the summer can envision this morning. The sun warming away cool breezes, the river waves slapping the dock, and building excitement as people arrived for a fun day.
Even by today’s standards… a church event with 1,360 people is a really, really big deal.
Each day is full of choice. Most are benign, seemingly meaningless. For some the payoff is immediate, like what to eat or wear or to do after work. For others the payoff is delayed, like plans you make, what you say to your kids, or the work you do.
I’m learning that I have to be intentional to pick faithfulness instead of ease, experience, or even wisdom.
If I’m honest… it’s the wisdom one that causes me the most trouble. All-too-often wisdom leads me to make the safest choice. It could also be that wisdom is different than Wisdom and little w wisdom often leads you to do the thing that makes the most sense instead of what is the most faithful.
Recently, I was spending time in Hebrews 11, and it kind of hit me… in most of these cases the author of Hebrews is celebrating someone’s action which their contemporaries probably thought was reckless, lacked wisdom, or was downright stupid.
On and on, Hebrews 11 drills home this point. Pick faithfulness.
Defy logics last stand and embrace faithfulness.
I’ve been learning a lot about the creative process lately. Like you, so much of my life is built around the concept that sometimes I need to be highly productive and other times I need to be highly creative. But, at all times, my work is best when it is both on time and creatively completed.
Since childhood, we’ve been taught that there are times to sit down and focus all of our efforts on a task. I remember being rewarded as a 6 year old in kindergarten for my ability to sit down and do my work. My teacher had it set up so that each child, during a segment of the day for learning, could work at their own pace. I was really, really good at doing this. But if you looked at someone or whispered to your neighbor or suddenly got up and did a wiggle dance, that was inappropriate & bad.
In college, you were probably truly challenged academically for the first time– you had to learn how to study and knock hard projects out quickly. Further, you learned that there were times that if you disciplined yourself to focus that you could turn your brain into a task-master machine.
I knew that I could disappear into the corners of Moody’s library for four hours with a mug of coffee and emerge with a 10 page paper, 25 definitions memorized, a test prepared for, and 2 chapters of a book read with annotated notes for later review.
The machine is the opposite of creative. It pounds out work. It produces. And when the grades came out the one with the most powerful machine often won the highest grades.
As an adult I depend on turning on this machine. It takes me a while to get to that “machine” space, but if I put my headphones in with some improvisational jazz, turn off social media, and get into a project I can get there– knocking out a lot in a short amount of time.
Have you been around babies & toddlers? I’ve had 3 of them crawl around my house in my lifetime. They are born magicians… incredibly creative in what they do. Turn your head for a second and BAM– they’ve done something amazing. Children can take two seemingly unrelated things and tie them together magically. In an instant they can disappear into a pretend world full of adventure, they can create stories out of thin air complete with backstory and plot twists.
You don’t have to teach a child how to be creative, it’s intuitive. If you allow them to just be themselves they are automatically creative.
The Machine is learned behavior to concentrate hard on a task, it is good.
The Magician is your natural creative self, the part of you that sees clay and stcks and smiles, it is also good.
When I am in work mode I tend to think distractions are bad. Positive reinforcement from teachers and success in college taught me that. I get somewhere quiet and predictable. I work very well after the kids go to bed or at my office. Interruptions and distractions feel like the enemy. Phones, texts, Facebook, Twitter, visitors, going to the bathroom… all feel as though they will disturb the machines production.
But that’s not how it works. Your best work happens because an idea is sparked. When I get peer review of my work and overlay positive feedback with the timing of its production, the things that are most often the best– a creative solution, a breakthrough, an insight, a great paragraph– most often are in my work because the machine got turned off for a time and the magician was allowed to play. Perhaps I was in full machine mode and needed a lunch break? While walking there, my mind still churning on the work, I’ll get an idea or a solution or a insight into that work that I add. But sometimes this happens because a phone rings in another room, or a someone at a coffee shop drops something. Those breaks from Machine mode allow the Magician to play with the thing I’m working with and mix it with something else.
In fact, I’ve learned that intentionally allowing myself to become distracted can be an excellent way to generate new ideas. Taking a walk, shower, phone call, checking Facebook, listening to a sermon, catching up on the news, pulling weeds in the garden, playing with my kids, goofing off, even doing a small task like packing a box– all of these things allow me to turn the Machine off and allow my naturally creative mind, the Magician, to begin playing with ideas.
I’ve learned that the Machine and the Magician are not adversaries. I will not truly be productive if I see the Machine as the winner and the Magician as the loser. (Though many people perpetuate that myth & it certainly seems productive.) My work is at its best when I foster interplay between getting things done and getting things done playfully. My work is best, not when I have hours and hours of uninterrupted Machine time, but when I have concerted time which builds in intentional distractibility so that the Magician has his voice.
You are probably a creative.
If your principle source of income is the result of stuff that comes out of your brain more than work that you do with your body, you’re a creative.
I work with a lot of creatives. Designers, writers, speakers, filmmakers, marketing geeks, thinkers, tinkerers, teachers, pastors… and everything in between. These are people who depend on what comes out of their brain on a daily basis.
Likewise, I spend a lot of my time needing to not only understand how I think but also those who think mostly with the right hemisphere of their brain.
In short, I want to know how to get the best creative output from my creative efforts. And, tactically, I need to know how to get the very best out of my creative friends.
Our society has bought into positivism. I think of it as the Oprah-fication of America.
I recently saw an appeal from a dad looking for a basketball league for his son which actually kept score. In lots of children’s sports leagues every child is told they are a winner just for trying and every kid is a given a trophy at the end of the year. They are fed a lie that it’s OK to be mediocre, that everyone is a winner, that keeping score isn’t helpful, and that the point of sports is exercise and not the pursuit of victory.
What a load of crap. That’s not how life works and that’s not what makes sports great. We are flat out lying to those children in a false belief that we need to positively reaffirm every effort. Some kids should quit basketball at a young age because they suck at it. They should move on to something else instead of being handed a trophy simply for trying. It’s actually cruel to reward someone for doing poorly because you are telling them they are better than they are.
Adults do the same thing. Millions of people believe that if they just looked at the positive side of things and denied the impact of incompetence or incapability or just a flat out lack of talent, that they should always go for what they are dreaming about and it will come true.
The education bubble is built on this lie. Every student should not go to college. But there is an entire industry of people lying to students and telling them that every child should go to college. Universities rake in billions of dollars in student loans every year as a direct result of this lie.
I’ve been reflecting on the research of Nancy Andreasen, a University of Iowa neuroscientist, who has researched the role of negativity in creatives. One powerful insight, and one that really helped me, was an experiment conducted to show the positive impact on the output of creatives given negative feedback. (Discovered this in this book by Wired contributor Jonah Lehrer.)
In one experiment a group of subjects was asked to first make a presentation about their career ambitions and then, after receiving feedback from a group of students, create a collage about their career choice. The students were asked to give some subjects positive feedback and others were told to seem disinterested, display negative body language, and verbally give negative feedback.
Interestingly, those subjects given negative feedback in the first step created much better collages in the second step than those who got positive feedback initially. The negative feedback made some subjects work far harder to produce a far better end product.
That’s exactly true in my work as and with creatives. This is why we consistently seek out peer review of our work. That’s why we suffer through a self-editorial and formal editorial process. And that’s why I rarely accept a first effort.
Again, lets give up being nice for the sake of being kind.
What do you think? Is receiving negative feedback making you better?
Laying in the grass in our front yard last night, Paul and I were chatting about his 9th birthday. His birthday turned out great. Since his party is this weekend we just did the family thing on his actual birthday. After dinner, he blew out the candles on his birthday cake and opened his presents. He was surprised and smiling and happy.
At some point in the conversation I asked Kristen if she remembered what she got for her 9th birthday, 27 years ago. She didn’t remember.
Then I thought about that question for myself.
It dawned on me. On June 2nd, 1985, I got baseball cards for my 9th birthday.
I was into baseball cards as a kid. I saved all of my money to buy great big boxes of them at the comic book store in downtown Mishawaka, Indiana. I would open each pack in the box and categorize each card by team before cataloging them in a great, big box. I’d take the best cards and put them into a folder. Sometimes I traded them but mostly I just held onto them.
And on my birthday for a couple of years I got a full set of Topps baseball cards. I had full sets from 1984 – 1988.
And I still have all of them. I still have full sets from 1984 – 1988. I still have my precious binder from when I was a kid. And I still have that box of carefully categorized cards, complete with my 9 year old handwriting of each teams name.
Why do I still have them? Because I still believe a lie about baseball cards.
I believe that one day they will have value again. And that belief has lead me to hold onto them for 27 years.
They moved to Germany and back with me in 1992. They went to college with me in 1994. They’ve moved with Kristen and I several times in my married life. Three times I have paid to put them in a a moving truck and shipped them across the country just so they could sit in my garage again.
And all of it goes back to a single conversation I had with my dad when I was a kid. He said his mom had sold his baseball cards at a garage sale and he wished he still had them, they were worth some money.
My dad didn’t lie to me. He was telling the truth. But it was me that convinced myself that I could never depart with these things.
Trust me, Don Mattingly’s rookie card will never have the same value as Mickey Mantle’s. In fact, of the thousands of cards I have I’m positive that none of them are worth more than $5 individually.
So why do I keep them? Why don’t I just toss them out or put them on Craigslist? Why don’t I just give them to Paul & Jackson to play with?
Because I believe a lie that one day I’ll need them. I believe that one day, if I don’t have them, they will be worth a lot of money and I’ll be sad that I didn’t listen to my dad.
That lie defies logic because I believe it.
I’m a smart guy. I make good decisions. And I still fall into the trap of believing some lies in my life. I can look at all of the evidence, I can know that the belief is silly, stupid even, but I just can’t kick it.
When someone lies to you, it hurts. But when you lie to yourself? It’s a trap.
SAN DIEGO, CA – A 36 year old man was seen in front of his Rolando neighborhood home this morning playing in the sprinklers. Wearing only his pajamas and an ear-to-ear grin the man could be heard giggling for blocks. Neighbors reported that the man is also seen regularly walking with his dog, baby, and a woman they perceive to be his wife in the evenings. The status of the man’s mental health is unknown.
Busted. Guilty as charged. I confess. That’s me!
There are some things in life that I label as simple pleasures. And playing in the sprinklers (er, I mean “adjusting them“) is one of them. As our little garden has expanded so has the need to water things. Almost 4 years ago I installed a simple drip watering system for a small patch of our garden in the backyard. As our garden has expanded so has the drip system. It now covers most of the backyard, delivering prescribed amounts of water to various plants all over. And this spring we decided to try to keep our grass a more socially acceptable yellow/green combo instead of the yellow/gray color we’ve accomplished in previous dry summers. And to make gardening just a little more manageable we installed fancy timers for both the front and back yard which deliver exactly 5 minutes of water to all plants simultaneously every 12 hours.
So, when the battery on the timer needed to be changed this morning and one of my spray patterns in the front was a little off… it became an opportunity to play.
These are some of my simple pleasures. Things that make my soul giggle. Things that, if I stop doing long enough to start being, make life a little more enjoyable.
What are your simple pleasures? (Um, keep it PG!)
