It’s often said that when an artist gets comfortable (either with enough acclaim or financial reward) they stop creating. John Lennon once said he thought it was a myth, saying, “It’s easier to write on a cushion”. But is it?
The paradox of the creative soul is that the driver for their creativity is often to attain a peace and order of their own making, in their particular medium, from the turmoil that surrounds them. The creative process is by definition a manipulation of the environment in some way. But that process can only be initiated from a state of a personal struggle, of chaos, an itch. So if the creator finds themselves in their perceived successful state, where all is already peaceful and ordered, their creative journey is over. They have no driver to continue.
Popular belief tends to suggest that not only is the poor, struggling, unfulfilled artist more prolific, but their work is often perceived to be more worthy. But is this true?
In music, the blues, songs of unrequited love and of melancholy, born out of struggle, heartache and sadness are ranked far higher in terms of artist merit than formulaic happy love songs that are deemed cheesy in comparison.
Because creativity and problem solving are so entwined, can it be that the creative soul needs problems to work on or they lose their raison-d’etre? Like the detective who longs for a mysterious murder to solve, without which he is nothing.
Do we as artists have a faustian pact with darkness, that we need it, to have the light we create have contrast?
But it IS easier to write on cushions. It IS easier to work productively on your art when you’re not trying to keep the wolf from the door, be that threat of personal safety or financial security. Urgency does fire creativity, there’s no doubt, but urgent creativity draws upon emergency quick fixes as the brain tries to effectively fight or flight. Urgency gets results but the brain doesn’t allow itself the luxury of tapping into deeper subterranean caves for more inventive solutions.
The reason there are so many stories of struggling artists does not suggest that poverty is a vital ingredient to creativity, but that it’s simply a feature of it being so difficult for anyone to gain superstar status. It’s especially difficult when the artist is busy doing their art and not selling themselves, and so often artists are better at one than the other. Neither is mental illness a prerequisite. Again, we know those stories well as news favours sensationalism.
Many creatives realise that their joy comes from riding the paradox. It is the creative journey that they seek to enjoy. It’s not about reaching the destination. In many ways, it’s not possible to reach the destination just at it’s not possible to touch a rainbow.
Many creative people are good starters but poor finishers, they’re more likely to kick start another process while the previous one is still in motion. This act of plate spinning itself causes more dark pain of chaotic struggle. This struggle requires, and conjures, the kind of creative energy the creative soul so desires.
Creative people are fixers. They spot problems and try to fix them, or reflect them for others to understand better. The artist is both hero and villain, harnessing both darkness and light, logic and chaos, art and science. This is the paradox that the creative soul must embrace and surf in order to play their creative role in the world.
(The picture is Salvador Dalí’s, ‘The Persistence of Memory’, 1931, showing softness and hardness and unconscious symbols of the relativity of space and time and the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order. © 2007 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Dalí is a great example of an artist who produced consistent work during high levels of personal success, accolades and wealth.)
Ayd works with people and businesses to explore and unlock their creative ideas in ways they may never have thought possible, to inspire innovation.
There’s no escaping criticism. No matter how good you are, there’s always someone who’ll have a pop. There’s a whole profession of people out there who describe themselves as ‘critics’ whose job is to criticise. And the more successful you get, the more open to brutal criticism you are.
When it comes to your own personal creativity and work you have done yourself, criticism is tough. It’s personal, or feels personal. Highly creative people often lack confidence in themselves and their work. We often believe that we’re only as good as out last piece of work (that’s never really true) so if we get a bad review or a finger is pointed at us and our errors, we take it so much to heart that it feels like the end of the world.
Can you imagine going from being universally loved and adored for your work to having pernicious personal criticism levelled at everything you do and then having one critic so hating you and your work that they set out to murder you.
In 1968 the Beatles released the John Lennon song Revolution as the b-side of Hey Jude. It had the line “But if you talk about destruction. Don’t you know that you can count me out.”
The revolutionary sub culture was split on whether their idol and spiritual leader had gone soft and had sold out. Was he saying they should all just be cool, peaceful and take it easy, or was he siding with the establishment?
But later that year, the Beatles eponymously titled White Album, was released with a different version of the song which contained the lyric ‘But if you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out… in.”
It had appeared that Lennon had done a u-turn on the previous non-violent stance. The subculture was now incensed. Not because Lennon appeared now to sanction direct action but because it looked like he’d swayed and changed his tune just to keep in with the underground.
The truth was that the album version of the song, although released second, was recorded first. Lennon’s actual stance was initially to perhaps support destruction which he later changed to be wholeheartedly in favour of peaceful protests.
The criticism he faced hurt him deeply and possibly pushed him into more proactively declaring his position (which was perhaps a good outcome) and led to his signature bed-in-for-peace events. But it also caused him to attempt to forge closer links with the more undesirable members of the underground subculture where his naivety was unable to tell good from bad. This led him to donate money and effort to some very undeserving causes, all to fend off that feeling of failure from harsh personal criticism.
This new radicalism alienated him from many of his former fans who, in Lennon’s words, “loved the mop tops and A Hard Days Night, but I’ve grown up. Have you?”
Yet this radicalism was short lived. He gained critical acclaim for his first solo album (1970’s John Lennon Plastic Ono Band) but it had poor sales figures. The best selling Beatle after the split was George Harrison with his hit single My Sweet Lord and triple LP All Things Must Pass. Even Ringo was having more hits than John. Lennon’s second LP, Imagine, was more commercial, but the third, Sometime In New York City was a disaster.
Lennon had been the first Beatle to be singled out for criticism, back in 1966, when the US radio stations picked up on the infamous ‘bigger than Jesus comments’. He’d had to suffer the embarrassment of having to ‘apologise’ repeatedly for what was a simple and fairly accurate statement made to a UK reporter months earlier and taken out of context. This event was part of their decision to stop touring. They had violent threats on their security by all sorts of weirdos including the Klu Klux Clan who threatened to plant bombs at a Beatle concert. John was physically sick before going on stage during that last American tour.
Then, from 1968, he’d had to put up with being criticised for getting together with Yoko, later blamed for ‘splitting up the Beatles’ but even before that, he had to endure nasty and disgraceful racial abuse leveled at her. He’d been criticised for turning his back on the Fab Four and pop music and being far too nutty and far out and yet also criticised for being childish and not being or radical enough.
Then he was criticised for producing ‘mediocre’ albums in the mid seventies (Mind Games and Walls and Bridges) and his LP of rock ‘n’ roll standards. Then he was criticised for not producing any new material for five years while he became ‘househusband’, looking after his son Sean. And more often than not, he was blamed for the lack of a Beatle reunion. (When if fact they’d all agreed on a reunion, but never at the same time.)
Then, in 1980, he was hunted down and killed by a ‘deranged fan’ who decided Lennon had become a ‘phoney’.
It would be hard for any of us to imagine what it could be like to have such adoration as the Beatles enjoyed (and suffered) in the sixties. It would be equally hard for us to imagine the type of criticism that followed, especially after following on from such acclaim. It would likely be impossible for us to consider that our creative work would cause someone to want to murder us.
I think when we consider what happened to John Lennon, it makes any criticism we face, just that little bit less raw, a little bit less biting and a little bit less relevant.
So don’t let it stop you. Carry on with your great works and love what you do remembering that there are no statues or memorials for critics.
Type Y: They don’t think they’re that creative. Or sometimes they do, sometimes they think they are a genius but then something happens. When they look back at the thing they’ve created they can only see fault in it. Sometimes they even destroy their own work, it’s never quite good enough. Sometimes they have so many ideas, but when it comes to taking action, they don’t know which to pursue. If they pick one it suddenly becomes less than it was, with all enthusiasm evaporated away. They always think that someone else is probably better at doing whatever it is they do. They try to keep that fact a secret, sometimes by hiding away, sometimes by hiding their work away, sometimes by not doing anything at all. And yet some days they are so prolific and everything they touch turns to gold.
If you asked them to write a book you’d get three half finished manuscripts and a list of further ideas as well as a treatment of how one of those ideas could be made into a film.
If you asked them to solve a problem you’d get a weird answer straight away, they’d start at the end and work backwards or their answer would raise more and bigger questions than the original problem.
Type Y people ask the question, ‘why?’. The Y stands for the openness of Yes. The symbol of the Y shows an upright line, splitting into two, reminding us that Type Y people increase yield by turning one thing into two things.
Type X: They think they’re highly creative. Or at least they tell everyone that. Or they will tell everyone that they’re as creative as they need to be. Or they’ll tell everyone that creativity isn’t really that important. If they doubt themselves and their work, they never show it. Their bravado increases the closer they get to Type Y people who they look down on. They show no pride in their work, but neither do they deride it. They have more interest in completion of an activity rather than the process itself even though they may have spent more time defining the process than the process needs to proceed.
If you asked them to write a book, you’d either get nothing, or a hundred bullet points in a list of unconnected data.
If you asked them to solve a problem it will take them ages while they go through a massive preamble of nitty-gritty that isn’t really relevant, but a straightforward obvious answer will appear on schedule.
Type X don’t ask questions. They make the close down statement of ‘No’ and put a cross to prove something has been judged wrong. The X can also be used to give approval, again as a binary ‘on-off’, black or white decision. The symbol of the X shows that two things can be brought together, processed and passed through their systems, still as two uncorrupted things. Type Y can be caretakers but generate no yield.
So which are you? Or which are you in certain situations? Have a think about the particular situations below and mark with an X or a Y.
By aydinstone  Posted in Creativity	 Tagged creative, Creativity, left brain, problem solving, right brain
There are two types of people: creative people and non-creative people. They are not born that way, they decide to be that way. Sometimes they behave in one way in a certain situation, say being a monotonous drone at work and yet a creative genius at the weekend on the sports field or with the children.
The problem in most businesses is that they may say they want creativity and creative people working for them but what they manifest is mindless monotonous drones.
Creative people in business do not sit there doodling or daydreaming (but if they do you can bet they’re onto some big idea). Creative people innovate better ways of doing things. They naturally follow the path of progress. They can’t help making things more interesting. When channeled, these attributes always lead to increased profits.
If you have sales people: they need to be creative sales people because they need to create new relationships and create new sales opportunities.
Sales Drones do not create new sales opportunities. neither do they know how to up-sell new offerings to existing customers.
If you have administration people: they need to be creative administration people. They’re job is to make things work smoothly and there are always problems they need to resolve and there are always processes that can be made better.
If you have managers they need to be creative managers: handling people and their relationships is a complex task with many factors constantly changing. Motivating people to do their best is a skill that is bespoke for each individual. Problem solving skills and emotional intelligence are needed more than ever in such a role.
If you have staff that deal with customers they need to be creative staff who deal with customers. Creating great customer service is the most underdeveloped method of increasing sales and profits. Knowing how to handle problems or how to create value added extras that turn customers into advocates is a creative skill that’s worth its weight in gold.
Don’t employ drones, and even more importantly, don’t turn your employees into drones. Good people who get fed up and leave their jobs usually do it because they weren’t appreciated. A great way of getting good people to stay and excel is to allow them to use more of their skills and talents in their role, to have more responsibility for their role.
Research has been done that the amount of perceived self determination within an organisation is directly proportional to increased profits and success of that organisation. Using or converting people into drones is like running your business with everyone having one arm tied behind their back, or chaining employees to a desk (which is exactly what so many companies actually do if you think about it).
I can show you how to turn your drones into productive, inspired creative strategists who not only do a better job with their current role, but are capable of innovating areas around them. Some businesses (and of course most employees) would be offended to have people described as ‘drones’. That may be the case but when the economic climate is more challenging, the risk of drone conversion is even greater. I can show you how to avoid the dangerous slide into drone manufacture, to help you get even more from the good people you have.
By aydinstone  Posted in Business & Marketing, Creativity	 Tagged business, creative, Creativity, dalek, daleks, drone, genius, increased sales, profits, speaker, strategist, training, workplace, workshop
Not much music in the window. They filled it with a display for Oasis' Don't Look Back in Anger single in 1995. Those days are gone.
HMV is the last recorded music retail outlet left in the UK high street. Over the past few years we’ve seen the demise of Our Price, Woolworths and Virgin Megastore/Zavii. Now, for the very same reason HMV are closing around 60 stores.
People usually blame the demise of our record shops on technology and the rise of iTunes and Amazon. But I believe there’s a deeper reason why the high street shops have failed.
The fact that it’s more convenient to buy music online is a misnomer. We’ve all fallen into the trap thinking that ‘convenience’, speed and price are the only factors involved in a purchase. That is of course true with a commodity. With a purchase that is not a simple commodity, price has little baring because its the buying experience and the added value that is important. This is how the music industry has played the biggest part in it’s own death, by stupidly turning music into a base commodity.
The rot started in the mid 1980s when the music industry began the great compact disc swindle. They persuaded us to buy all the music we already had on vinyl, citing the better quality (which wasn’t quite true) and the better durability (which wasn’t quite true) and the fact that the new medium was smaller and therefore more, ‘convenient’. Because it was smaller we lost the experience of the album cover art. Because CD singles and albums were the same size we lost the specialness of both mediums. Because it was so handy and cheap it was quickly devalued and able to be given away free with magazines. The digital nature of the encoded audio and availability of CD burners meant it became easy to duplicate. By removing all the awkwardness and weaknesses of the vinyl record, they had transformed recorded music into a cheap, valueless commodity.
12” long playing records or a three minute 45 rpm single are completely different objects to the equivalent CD. They are bigger, heavier, have bigger almost poster-like artwork. They are fragile. To play a vinyl record you have to remove it carefully from the sleeve, place it on the spindle, lift the needle into place. After 3 or 20 minutes or so you have to lift the needle again and turn the disc over. With vinyl you are engaged and that’s the key: listening to music is an experience, not a commodity.
In the mid 1980s, Our Price Records changed their name to Our Price Music because they were now stocking tapes and CDs. They somehow felt they weren’t ‘records’. A small point but a relevant one in the separation of ‘music’ from the medium it came on and at the same time from the experience. It’s interesting that new bands, even today, stubbornly refer to their product as ‘records’ not CDs. A compact disc or vinyl disc is the medium for the ‘record’, which is the important thing.
At this point in an argument like this people usually cite the old chestnut of the ‘march of progress’ and the ‘advancement of technology’ and that we shouldn’t live in the past but embrace the future. This is rubbish. If technology was more important than experience we would not have restaurants or cooking, we’d just take a variety of nutrition pills. We would not have clothes fashion, we’d all wear silver fabric jumpsuits. The experience is important and that’s what we cling onto. That’s what we pay for. That’s why cinema attendance has never been so high even though it’s more convenient to watch DVDs at home on your 40” TV. That’s why music concert and festival attendance has never been so high when we can all put our iPod headphones on an listen to whatever we want whenever and wherever we want.
The irony is that the secret to the safe survival of the music industry was right there all the time, inside the music industry with the songwriters and musicians that make new music. The technology involved in recorded sound has advanced unimaginably since the early 1960s and yet all new rock bands that start making music aim to make that music using methods and technology that goes back 50 years. That’s why rock bands play guitars that may be newly manufactured, but their design and set up is a facsimile of the instruments that the Beatles, the Stones, or Led Zeppelin all played. In the 1990s VOX amplifiers brought back their old fashioned looking range of amps because all the bands wanted their stage to look like what all the classic bands stages looked like. Amplifier manufacturers ditched the advanced electronics and transistors to return to the values and tubes of the 60s because the musicians wanted that authentic value sound. And of course every rock band wants their records to be released on vinyl.
Of course not all new music follows this pattern and amazing sounds and new forms of music have been created with new technology too. The point here is that the music industry failed to realise that all music is not the same. The dance halls are filed with electronica, young girls fill their iPods with the latest pre-fab teenybopper and festival goers want their bands to be live and authentic. These are just three types of music which are created and consumed in completely different ways by different types of people for different types of people. And yet HMV and the like tried to sell it all in the same way, and when that started to fail they filled their shops with DVDs, computer games and iMacs, betraying the music audience they used to serve and appealed to no-one.
It’s probably too late for a single company like HMV to recover, but it’s not too late for the music industry. They need to re-discover that music is an experience. Some of those experiences can be packaged and sold at a profit and some cannot. They need to stop treating all music as the same thing. The genres are consumed in such different ways and yet the only way they’re differentiated in a music shop is by having their CDs in a different rack.
High street shops have something that iTunes doesn’t have: a physical shop that you can walk into. Music shops (and bookshops) seem to moan or panic as if such an advantage is a noose around their neck. If retail was dead, how come Apple Inc. opened their hundred or so shops worldwide and get a footfall of almost two million people per day for products that is easier to buy online. The answer is that they have created an experience that you can’t get online.
If the music shops realised that certain genres of music have an audience that would relish having a shop experience they could have transformed their retail units to accommodate them. By getting rid of all products that people would rather buy somewhere else they could have re-stocked vinyl records (a niche but growing market). They could have hosted classic album listening sessions. They could have hosted live bands. They could have built a model around the long-tail (selling many different obscure materials rather than stocking just few obvious titles). They should have realised that the markets these ideas would appeal to have the money and inclination to want it. It would mean abandoning the X Factors, Pop Idols and the charts (you can’t compete with the commodity of the download) and embracing an older audience. It would mean only the music genres that have the strongest experiential and lifestyle elements: possibly including new emerging urban sounds, some types of dance, classic rock, blues, jazz and folk (basically all the music forms created from the ground up by people, not manufactured to a formula by music industry management).
They say you can make excuses or you can make money, you can’t do both. The problems any business faces today can’t be blamed on technology or changing markets, or government policy or the world banks. They can only be blamed on an inability to creatively change the business model to follow the money. The reason businesses can’t cope with change is that their stuck in one way of thinking with an inability to be more creative when solving business problems. That’s way those record shops have gone. It’s not because people don’t want music or don’t want a shop, but because the shops failed to supply the experience the audience wanted through stubbornness, greed, ignorance and by keeping on doing what they’ve always done and expecting different results.
By aydinstone  Posted in Business & Marketing, Creativity, Music	 Tagged beatles, creative, Creativity, HMV, iTunes, music, our price, record shops, records, vinyl, Virgin
When discussing creativity, quite a lot of people seem to think it’s necessary to run around saying ‘wahey! I’m mad me!’, like that annoying nerdy irritant that manages to infiltrate your circle of friends.
Creativity is not about being an idiot. Being creative doesn’t require you to dress like a 1980s children’s television presenter with a pair of comedy spectacles, silly hat and a large sponge hammer to bonk people on the head with who are taking things too seriously. You don’t need a gunk tank nor do you need to give and receive foam-custard pies.
Being creative is a bit like being able to harness The Force from Star Wars. To use it properly and productively, you don’t need to be and shouldn’t be too cocky or showy. The goodies (the Jedi) went around in simple, ordinary clothes. Their lightsabres were tucked away in their belts, out of sight, but ready if needed. They used their powers to help people and get the job done and not for cheap parlour tricks just to make them feel good. The baddies, on the other hand, were different.
The Sith went into showing off in a big way. Darth Maul was such an egotist that he tattooed his whole body to make him look ‘really scary’. It was a bit obvious. He was mad and bad, a one trick pantomime pony with no subtlety at all.
The same was true of Darth Vader. Ok, so he was a burns victim, sure. But, I know quite a few serious burns victims and none of them decided to wear a black helmet in the shape of a skull. Vader wore his bad heart on his sleeve.
To be creative you are bound to be eccentric. You have to be. Eccentric means ‘not in the middle of the circle’. Being abnormal means not being the normal straight up and down at a right angle to the ground (eccentric and normal are geometry terms for circles and lines). We must be abnormal and eccentric with our creativity otherwise we won’t be creative. But we don’t have to be abnormal and eccentric fools. We just need to be ourselves.
By aydinstone  Posted in Business & Marketing, Creativity	 Tagged creative, Creativity, darth vader, star wars
The midwife holds up the newly born baby and declares, “we’ve got a creative one here all right. This one’s a genius and no mistake.” You can tell just by looking at them can’t you?
Well, the people that society judges to be genii, the cleverest people that humanity has ever produced all say that although babies are born with a tendency to be better at some tasks than others or be interested more in one thing than another, ‘being creative’ is not something you are born with to a greater or lesser degree than anyone else. It’s like running. Babies aren’t born Olympic sprinters or long distance runners, they become them many years later by training. We could all become Olympians if we went through the relevant education and training and it’s the same with creativity.
A dictionary definition of creativity is “the ability to create new ideas or things using your imagination”. Notice it doesn’t say “the ability to be able to draw and paint a lifelike representation of a bowl of fruit”.
So why do people think it is? Perhaps it’s because creativity hasn’t been understood or taught particularly well in so many schools.
This could be changing. Teachers have realised that creativity can be taught alongside and within every subject. The National Curriculum is tackling this and have come up with their own definition of creativity: “First, creativity involves thinking or behaving imaginatively. Second, this imaginative activity is purposeful: that is, it is directed to achieving an objective. Third, these processes must generate something original. Fourth, the outcome must be of value in relation to the objective.” It sounds a bit vague perhaps but it seems to encompass everything.
Creativity is the process of making associations between disparate concepts, to make decisions based on those associations and then take action. What that means is that creativity is looking at things, making connections between things that weren’t connected before and then doing something about it. We can simplify that to a formula:
So what’s this all about you say, and how does it relate to me making more money? Well the products of creativity are ideas. Ideas are the currency of tomorrow’s world. We need more ideas. If you can consistently come up with good ideas in your field, for your business, for your life, you win.
Still think you’re not creative? No, I didn’t think so. I know you’d never admit it but you’re probably the most creative person you know.