Category Archives: David Theory

How to make yourself smarter: why does this blog exist?

April 3, 2007 By in David Theory, Genius, Quotes Tags: 1 Comment

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I wanted to take a moment and let you know why I started this blog. I started it to find other people who were interested in creativity and genius. Not in the same sense those words are always used. Like a lot of great words, they seem to have been co-opted by businesses. Just the other day, Apple Computers applied for a trademark on the phrase “genius bar.” Today I wanted to explain the specific way I use those words.

I have to admit that my view of genius and intelligence was heavily swayed in my teenage years by several radical thinkers. One of those people was Timothy Leary. He defined being smart on my different levels and tied in concepts that aren’t usually linked to intelligence. At least they aren’t tied in if you go by the usual dictionary definition, something like “The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge.” Survival, adaptation and happiness are all part of his idea of intelligence.

In his book The Intelligence Agents, Timothy Leary lays out three rules to follow if you want to be constantly increasing your intelligence.

Here is my paraphrase of them:

  1. Always be searching for new information and new sources of information.
  2. Constantly revise your perspective and view of the world and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what’s happening now.
  3. Don’t spend all your time by yourself. Use social interaction as a method of intelligence increase. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you.

Leary also had a wonderful way for you to tell if your intelligence was increasing or decreasing. Again, to paraphrase, if your world seems to always be getting bigger, brighter and more interesting, your intelligence is increasing. If your world seems to be getting smaller, darker and less interesting, your intelligence is decreasing.

Think about what that means. If you accept that definition, it means boredom and disinterest are signs of encroaching stupidity. Action is better than depression. Hope is a sign of intelligence. Being interested and interesting are signs of intelligence. Looking forward to the what the future will bring is a sign of intelligence.

I want to use this blog to explore all three of the rules for intelligence increase listed above. I’m especially interested in creating a community of smart people who are accomplishing things. To that end, if you have a link or thought you would like to share just email me at david(at)creativecreativity.com. Also, email me if you have a creative project with a web presence that you would like me to link to in a post.

You are a genius!

Creative Process: Walt Disney

April 1, 2007 By in Animation, Creativity, David Theory Tags: Leave a comment

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In his book Strategies of Genius, Robert Dilts quotes a Disney animator as saying there were three Walt Disneys, “The dreamer, the realist and the spoiler. You never knew which was coming to a meeting.”

He goes on to say that creativity is a combination of these three elements.

The Dreamer is necessary for creativity in order to form new ideas and goals. The Realist is necessary for creativity as a means to transform ideas into concrete expressions. The Critic is necessary for creativity as a filter and as a stimulus for refinement.

There are a lot of self-help books and experts that tell you the dreamer is the only one of the three you’ll need. They say that the realist and critic are evil and need to be stopped at all costs. Often imagination is extolled as fragile flower to be cherished and never judged. One of the most common bits of creativity advice it to silence your inner-critic.

Isn’t it only bad when you try and do all these things at once or get stuck in one without the other two? As the quote above says, you don’t bring all three to the same meeting. Perhaps you should just mute your inner-critic while you’re in a creative burst and then schedule a meeting with it the next day. Reality is going to impact your idea whether you want it to or not, so you might as schedule a meeting with it as well.

If you were going to break this down into a usable process it would be:

  1. Pure creativity.
  2. What don’t I like about it? How can I improve on the idea?
  3. Is the idea possible? Will the world like it? Will it succeed?

Is there one part of this process that you can’t do well? Is something holding you back? Try breaking it down into these three steps and seeing what happens.

Dream it, realize it, improve it and then let go of it. It may take years to finish a project, but it sure sounds simple when you say it like that.

Parody Yourself, I Did And Ended Up With A Bacon Tuxedo

March 31, 2007 By in Comedy, David Theory, Marketing, Product 1 Comment

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The company I work for, Archie McPhee, decided that we were going to do an April Fools joke homepage this year. I had the task of coming up with the products and soon realized that I was basically being asked to parody myself. If you aren’t familiar with the company, our products are incredibly over the top and exaggerated to begin  with. (Our top sellers include Bacon Mints and Remote Controlled Hopping, Yodeling Lederhosen.)

I recommend trying this exercise to everyone who does anything creative. It’s really much harder than you think! Half the ideas I came up with we decided were something we might actually do at some point in the future. (Which makes this exercise useful) The other half were too grotesque or profane to risk affiliation with our company. (Rainbow Flavored Unicorn Poop Candy? No.) I probably went through 15 ideas before settling on the first usable one.

After a few days, I decided to go for products that would be physically impossible, legally impossible or something that no one would want to buy. I came up with the Bacon Scented Bacon Tuxedo, the Baby Parachute, a Beard of Bees Kit and a Surprise Dumpster. You can see them here. Our graphics department did an ace job with the pictures, they sell the whole thing.

The reaction so far has been mixed. Some people, like Seth Godin, get it. Some don’t. I have to admit that I did enjoy the fact that proof of the downfall of civilization sprang from my brain.

The most interesting part of the whole experience for me has been the fact that the world is so over the top now, that people believe a product with this description would actually go on sale:

Beard Of Bees Kit
Tired of boring old facial hair? Take it up to the next level with a Beard of Bees! Years in development, we have finally come up with an economical way to take advantage of all the buzz about bee beards. In each box, you’ll get a tube of royal jelly, a grooming wand and a coupon for bees. Just send in the coupon or call with your redemption number and the following morning you’ll receive a package of 30,000 bees in our patented UPS approved Swarm Sack™ packaging. After they arrive, apply the royal jelly to your chin, neck and chest, shake the bag vigorously and then release the bees. Use included wand to coax bees into beard shape. Fun for birthdays, retirements or bachelorette parties. Not recommended for indoor use.

So, whatever you usually create, try and parody it. See what you come up with, it might surprise you!

April Fools Page

Creativity tip: think like a squirrel

March 25, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory, Inspiration 1 Comment

Screen Shot 2017-08-18 at 7.48.57 PMIn his book Overachievement John Eliot discusses how to get into a Trusting Mindset (A mindset of accomplishment) by thinking like a squirrel. He also defines an opposing method of thought called the Training Mindset. This is how we think when practicing to do something. The process of learning and getting better is a completely different mindset than actually doing something.

In the Training Mindset, you second-guess what you do. You think about it while you are doing it and evaluate every move to see if you can make it better. While practicing you should be analytical and critical, but are those helpful when you are actually doing something? How do you get into that Trusting Mindset that lets you just use what you’ve learned without over-thinking the process? In the book, Eliot states that a lot of mediocre achievers never get beyond this Training Mindset.

He uses squirrels to make his point about Trusting Mindset. Squirrels, he points out, don’t really think, they just react to their surroundings. When a squirrel is presented with a telephone wire to cross, it doesn’t consider how windy it is or how high the wire is off the ground, it just scrambles across. People get nervous and start think about falling and calculating how fast they should move to maximize safety as they make their way across the wire.

Another example of Trusting Mindset is tossing a set of car keys to someone. It’s an easy task, you can do it without thinking. Suppose someone told you that you could get a million dollars for successfully tossing them a set of keys. Would raising the stakes change your process? Would you be able to do it? Would it decrease your chances? It would flip you instantly into Training Mindset.

Here are some adjectives Eliot uses to describe a Trusting Mindset: Accepting, Instinctive, Playful, Letting it Happen.

He also says, “The Trusting Mindset is what you were in before you knew any better.”

To use the Trusting Mindset, he advises “practice, practice, practice” and that you should come to accept and enjoy the pressure that comes with creating something. Expect the fear and reservations that come when you are starting something new and let them become part of the experience while you focus your abilities and remain confident. Don’t not do something because you are worried about failure. In other words, there is no secret except knowing how you always feel before you begin and letting go of those emotions while you are creating.

Once you start creating, become that squirrel, unconsciously using every ability you have to get across that wire without fear or stopping to consider the consequences.

Be a squirrel.

Link to book.

What should I say? – Help with writer’s block

March 23, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory, Writing Leave a comment

The actual use for What Should I Say is for you to post situations where you don’t know what to say or help other people come up with what you think they should say. You know, it’s like having a group of friends giving you bad advice.

The next time you’re stuck while you’re writing, type the situation into this site, sit back and wait for the bad advice to start flowing in. Bad advice is great advice for characters. It means they’ll do the wrong thing and you’ll have plenty of drama.

Here’s one piece of advice:

What do a say to a friend who consistently breaks her promises? These promises are mostly things she offers to do, not things I request of her.

I would say, sort of poke fun at it next time she makes a similar promise. Like “Oh really!” or “yeah, sure”. Be sure to do it in the most playful, least offensive and least confrontational way. “Can i expect that by next year?” Something along those lines, I guess. Joke about it, that way it communicates your position on it in the least hurtful way. She’ll get the idea.

Great advice! Passive aggression always works in situations like that. It lets you raise the tension of the situation without actually dealing with it. Usually, you get three or four different pieces of advice, so you might get a character option you haven’t thought of yet.

If you are feeling kind, go give advice to the kids in the romance section. They need to know how to tell a girl that you like her…

Link to site

Creativity tip: select a theme song

March 21, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory Leave a comment

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One of the hardest parts of working on project is getting started. Writing the first page of a novel is difficult enough, but every single time you sit down to work on it you have to start all over again. Long term projects require you to maintain the same creative urge for months or years at a time. You have to create a signal to you brain that it needs to enter a creative state.

My favorite way to do this is to pick a theme song for every project. Just like the opening credits to a TV show, play the same music every time you start your project. As you create more and more, your creative state will get linked to the music and you’ll be able to get into the groove instantly.

The best songs to use are the more simple or corny songs with positive lyrics. Don’t use something that makes you think or already has some emotional connection for you.  Don’t Stop Me Now, by Queen, is one that I use all the time. I know people who use the theme from Rocky and Funkytown.

Different music can be used while you are creating to help you enter different emotional states or to help you zone out. This tip is just to help you take that first step, if you can’t do that then nothing else matters.

Marketing Yourself: Don’t Push The Bad Stuff

March 9, 2007 By in David Theory, Marketing Leave a comment

This advice is incredibly obvious, but not easy to hear. One of the primary marketing faults I see in creative communities is that people use all of their resources to push what they produce regardless of the quality of the product. Every actor has been in a bad show. Every artist goes through a period without inspiration. Not all art is created equal. However, some people invite everyone they know to see, read or listen to everything they do.

If people see you produce bad work they are less likely to want to see what you do next. It’s exactly the same process that people use when they judge a company’s products. If you buy a watch that breaks right after you buy it, you are less likely to be willing to buy that brand again. Get bad food from a restaurant and you won’t go back for a while. It’s just basic human nature.

This is particularly important with first impressions. If you read a novel from a writer than you love, you will probably still read their next one. However, if the first book you read by someone is terrible, it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll ever attempt another novel by that writer.

Since word of mouth is your best advertisement, it’s to your benefit that as few people as possible see the bad stuff. Find honest feedback that you trust and if that feedback tells you you’re involved with a stinker, don’t push it. Make sure people look forward to what you do next.

Even big Hollywood stars don’t follow this rule. Of course, they’re contractually obligated to advertise everything they do no matter how bad. You probably aren’t.

You have limited resources to market your creativity, make sure you use those resources on the good stuff.

Selling yourself: marketing yourself with your own personal failures

March 5, 2007 By in David Theory, Marketing Leave a comment

This is the first part in a series on marketing yourself as a creative person. Obviously every solution won’t work for every person. These are just suggestions on creating an appealing personal narrative that will help you to make you and your work memorable to other people.

FAILURE

To sell yourself, whether in the media or just making yourself memorable to people you meet, you need to create a personal story that sticks. One powerful way to create an instant story for yourself is to point out a failure that contrasts with whatever current success you have.

Our natural tendency as humans is to hide our failings. We want to deny anything that doesn’t fit in with our current perception of ourselves. However, what we find most interesting in other people is what they don’t want us to know about them. Letting people inside some of your failures creates an instant memorable narrative.

Jim Carrey slept in a van when he was growing up. William Carlos Williams was a working doctor. Johnny Depp started out on 21 Jump Street. Bon Jovi sang on the Star Wars Christmas Album.

By the way, failure in the sense I’m using it in this article is not objective failure. Failure in this sense is anything that prevents you from living the creative lifestyle you want to live. If you are a highly paid attorney and you would rather be a novelist, for our purposes, being a lawyer is a failure. (People imagine that successful creative people don’t need to do anything but their art, so any other work is a failure. Sad but true!) If you had a big show at a major New York gallery and didn’t sell a single painting, that is also failure even though getting a gallery show in the first place is a success. If you were homeless last year and are now a rock star, being homeless is a failure even if it wasn’t your fault.

A good exercise is to imagine that you have an incredibly bored and cynical reporter sitting in front of you. He/She has been assigned to do a story on you, but only if there is something interesting to write about. This person already knows about your successes, has read the one paragraph published bio on your website and rolls his/her eyes when you start talking about your future projects. What do you do?

If you got an F in high school English and you just published a story in the New Yorker, it’s a memorable hook. If you worked as a rodeo clown for two summers in high school and you now sing heavy metal music, it’s a great story. The caricature that you drew in your college newspaper that got you expelled, fantastic! The experimental art show you participated in where you played a spermatozoa running headfirst into an egg, wonderful!

The more embarrassing the story, the better. The bigger the contrast between then and now, the better. Don’t be angry about these failures, just smile when you talk about them. You’ve moved past them. They’re part of the story. They’re giving people something to say about you.

Remember, we aren’t trying to give people a look into the truth of your inner-being, we are reducing your life to a three sentence pitch that will get you a story in the paper, on the radio or on TV. We’re giving you an easy to remember hook that will make people want to tell other people about you and your work.
One final bit of advice. Don’t lie. I guarantee you it isn’t necessary. Everybody who does something creative for a living has failed at one time or another. The more personal and unique your failure, the better the story is and the more people will want to see what you’re doing.

The one thing marketing can’t do is make the product better. That’s up to you.

Creativity idea: make choices using the story-ability factor

March 1, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory 1 Comment

Bored? Boring? Try choosing what you do this weekend not on the basis of what you want to do or what makes sense, but by how much fun it will be to tell as a story later. I call it the “story-ability” factor. Factoring story-ability into your decision-making every once in awhile makes for a better life. The next time someone invites you to go to a bigfoot believer convention, go! Someone wants you to cover their shift as a clown at a charity event? Of course!

Now, the key to this is to end up with a fun story. You have to choose something that even if the actual event is a dud the simple fact that you did it will be interesting. Doing something new and fresh will make you use different parts of your brain and give you something to talk about.

Avoid doing something that will result in a bad story. (Choose things with a high storyability factor and a low drama factor.) Don’t pick up hitchhikers, rob a bank with an old high school buddy or say yes to someone who asks you if you want to see a dead body.

But, when a neighbor asks if you’d like see his collection of Charlie Chaplin memorabilia or go with him to get lunch at a restaurant where the waitresses dress like characters from the Wizard of Oz, say yes. Be forewarned, once you start saying yes to these opportunities, they will start coming more often and you will find yourself agreeing to do more and more them. New and interesting experiences can become addictive.

What am I doing today? Reading The Cat in the Hat to 350 grade school kids while wearing a crazy striped hat. Keep your fingers crossed for me, I have to follow a fire chief in full uniform.

Exercise to unstick creative blocks – What would never work?

February 28, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory 2 Comments

Mick NapierA few years ago, I attended a sketch comedy workshop in Chicago with all the living Second City directors. Mick Napier, of the Annoyance Theater, told us about an exercise that I not only remember, but use constantly. While they were writing their show, he sent the players home with the challenge, “Write at sketch you would never see on the Second City stage.”

Most of what he got back was unusable, but one sketch was so shocking and funny they had to use it. The premise was a group of men were robbing a bank when they heard a noise from offstage. One of them looked out the window and said, “Oh no, the jig is up, it’s Superman.” Then, Superman rolled out on stage in a wheelchair.

This was in the mid-90s, Christopher Reeve had just had his accident, so the concept was even more shocking then than it is now. The sketch continued with the thieves reacting to Superman as if he weren’t in a wheelchair. He gets their guns away from them and eventually leads them off to the police station.

They didn’t use the sketch as it stood, they had Superman sing a song about what was going on inside his head to win the audience over, but it was one of the stronger sketches in the show.

Now, when I’m asked to brainstorm about something, I always ask myself, what would never work? What would our company never make? What would I never say? What would never sell to consumers?

Whatever your creative endeavor, let your mind wander across the line into the unacceptable and the impossible Even if you don’t come up with something that is directly usable, it will help you define exactly what you can do. Sometimes you don’t know where the line is until you cross it.

The next time you’re stuck for an idea, ask yourself, “What would never work?”

In his book, Improvise, Mick gives one of the best pieces of artistic advice you can get. He says it in the context of improvisational acting, but it applies to anything. “Do something. Anything.”