Category Archives: David Theory

A quick summary of every book about succeeding in business

May 10, 2007 By in David Theory, Inspiration Leave a comment

Have an idea.

Pursue that idea with every ounce of will and strength you have.

If you don’t succeed, take what you’ve learned and apply that to the idea. Make the idea better and try again.

Repeat until you succeed.
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I was talking to a friend of mine and she compared succeeding  (in acting and writing but I think it applies to everything) to hitting your head against a brick wall until you finally break through it. Most people just coexist with the wall and learn to lean against it for support. That wall is a great excuse for staying right where you are.

But, she said, it’s totally worth it to keep slamming against it. The people who make fun of you for doing it are going to be asking you for work as soon as you get to the other side. They’ll also be talking about how much smarter they are than you and more talented and how they deserve what you have. But it doesn’t matter, because you’ve already found another brick wall and you’ve already started slamming your head against that.

Repeat.

If you want success, especially financial success, learn to love slamming your head against that brick wall!

Best productivity tip: disable your inner-critic

May 5, 2007 By in David Theory, Inspiration, Weblogs 3 Comments

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There was a challenge at instigatorblog to write your best productivity tip and link to other tips you felt were helpful.

My best tip is to…

Turn off your inner-critic for the first pass: When you are writing or sketching or designing something, let yourself do a quick first pass at it without criticizing it. Let your mind wander and be free. Once you have a complete rough, it’s much easier to go back and edit something toward perfection than it is to try to create something perfect the first time through.

Don’t be paralyzed by perfection!

After you’ve written your first draft, let your critic go crazy on it until it is good enough.

I wrote about a metaphor for this idea, the one I use, in The Two Faces of Creativity, Orson and Ed.

Here are links to some more great productivity tips.

Unplug! From Daily Blog Tips
Have fun! Kiss2

 

Creativity tip: work fast

May 2, 2007 By in David Theory, Inspiration Leave a comment

This is a tip for the kind of person that starts a project, but fizzles out before it’s finished. Work fast!

You can bypass your inner-critic and unleash your inner-Ed Wood by just getting your product out as quickly as possible in one giant unfinished lump. Don’t think. Don’t edit. Don’t stop to reimagine the whole thing.

Not only will it help you get a project, at least a first pass at the project, done quickly, it will clear out your brain so other ideas can take their place. Then, after a period of time, you can go back and start the editing process. This works with illustration, writing and even dance.

There are lots of events designed to help you accomplish working quickly. Probably the king of work fast, edit later is nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month). They give you the month of November to write a  50,000 work novel. They don’t care about quality, just quantity. I know a few people who have only finished novels because they participated.

In June, they are working a new project called Script Frenzy! The idea is that you, or you and a partner, write a 20,000 word screenplay or stage play during the month of June. If you’ve been putting off writing your screenplay, sign up for this event. It’s free, they send you emails to inspire you and you can get a community of people to commiserate with.

I once had a writing teacher that said you needed a four-foot high stack of terrible stories before you produced anything worth reading. If nothing else, this will give you another inch toward that four feet!

Write A Manifesto: Creativity Tip

April 26, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory, Inspiration 14 Comments

handturkeySometimes a lack of limitations on your art is stifling. Faced with an infinite number of possibilities, your brain refuses to make any decisions. Define down what you’re doing with a manifesto!

At its most base level, a manifesto is a written declaration of your principles and intentions. However, they can be a blast! Not only do you get to set forth what you believe without justifying it, you can also denounce everything you don’t like! You can use it focus your passion and fill yourself with a sense of purpose.

While you are writing it use the strongest possible language. Take a look at this bit from Manifesto of the Futurist Painters:

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.

We are sickened by the foul laziness of artists, who, ever since the sixteenth century, have endlessly exploited the glories of the ancient Romans.

It doesn’t mean you have to start your own artistic movement, you can use that kind of strong language whether you are knitting, styling hair or tracing your hand on a paper plate to make Thanksgiving turkeys.

Something like:

We violently reject the mass-produced Thanksgiving turkey tchotskies available at Hallmark stores. They exist as stagnant nothings without souls. At a time when thankfulness is supposed to be at the forefront of our very beings, instead we find ourselves faced with a tiny feathered tryptophan drenched disappointments. The answer is the power and cosmic beauty of a hand traced turkey! Is not the hand an avenue into the self? Is not coloring in that hand an expression of all the is good? Making a hand turkey is a celebration of thankfulness that will resound across the universe.

And so on…

Here are a couple more examples:

The Surrealist Manifesto

DADA Manifesto

If you need any help, just comment and I’ll be happy to contribute to your manifesto.

The question that makes you smarter

April 24, 2007 By in David Theory, Genius Leave a comment

Have you ever been discussing a problem with someone and hit a dead end? Neither one of you can come up with any possible solution. Then, one of you says, “You know, if we were smart we’d just (insert solution here).”

Notice the phrase “if we were smart”. Now, obviously the solution to the problem came from the person making the statement, but they don’t feel like it did. They feel like it came from outside themselves. Most of the time people stumble on answers like that, but how do you make it happen?

Here’s a question that does wonders. Just ask yourself:

What would I do in this situation if I were smarter?

This question depersonalizes your problems and removes any self-doubt you might have. The answers that come from the question are often shockingly straightforward and obvious. As if you knew the answer the whole time and were just refusing to acknowledge it.

There’s a great visualization exercise for doing this as well. Imagine that inside your head there is a deeply buried bunker with nothing it in but a computer.  This computer contains all the answers and information you need, all you have to do is sit down in front of the computer and type your question in. Seconds later, the response will appear on the screen.

If you prefer, another extension of this exercise is to depersonalize the answer even further and ask, “What would I do in this situation if I was Albert Einstein?” Not that you have to use Einstein, pick someone who you admire and who you are familiar with.

This question gives you access to abilities and resources far beyond what you think you have. In fact, it might prove once and for all that you are smarter than you think you are.

Could it be that you are already a super genius?

Short-term obsession: creativity tip

April 23, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory, Inspiration 3 Comments

The word “obsession” has taken on taken on a negative spin in the last decade. It used to be that if you were obsessed with something it meant you were good at it and knew all about it. Well, drug companies and stalking laws have redefined being obsessed, to any degree, as abnormal.

Think about all the great artists in the world that were obsessed with something. Painters that painted the same subjects over and over again. Writers that dealt with the same situations or topics in everything they wrote. It’s funny, but it’s usually because of these obsessions that we enjoy the artist in the first place. It’s like a hook or a doorway into what they do.

To super-charge your creativity, take a topic you are interested in but haven’t studied and developed a short-term obsession. How short? That’s up to you. It could be a day, a week or a month. Read a book on it. Google up all the best websites on the topic. Talk to other people about it. No topic is too high or too low. If you like  Christopher Walken, use him. The possibilities are endless, cowboy poetry, unicorns or squirrel recipes, whatever you find yourself wanting to obsess on, do it!

When you sit down to create you won’t be short on ideas. In fact, the idea will be right in front of you. Make sure you create more than one thing based on your obsession or it really doesn’t qualify.

Eventually, you’ll get tired of your obsession. Just drop it. You can always go back to it. In the meantime, pick something else to be obsessed with.

Being obsessed frees you from having to worry about being “creative” in the sense that most people use the word. You don’t have to come up with a big idea or topic, you just use what is right in front of you.

I’m off to research the use of surgically implanted monkey glands used to keep rich people young in the 1920s.

Creativity tip: repurpose failure

April 18, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory Leave a comment

Have you ever come up with a great idea that just didn’t work? No matter how much you try to push it through, it just doesn’t seem to fit. This is especially true when you are trying to come up with a solution to a specific problem and end up a great thought or strategy that doesn’t actually work in this instance.

Lets use Silly Putty as an example. A scientist was looking for a rubber substitute when he accidentally dropped boric acid into silicone oil. His result was an interesting bouncy substance that acted a bit like rubber. When he sent it around for peer review, no one could figure out a practical use for it. But everyone loved playing with it, scientists were even throwing after-hours parties to play with big slabs of it. Finally someone named it Silly Putty, silly being short for silicone, and marketed it as a toy.

When you’re working on something and come up with a great idea that just doesn’t fit, don’t throw it away. Repurpose it! Not every idea is meant for every project and one of the best parts of creation is revision. Slicing out what doesn’t fit makes you look brilliant, but it’s sometimes painful because what you’ve removed is so fantastic.  Save it, recycle it and let it shine in its proper place.

Design your own propaganda, for you!

April 17, 2007 By in David Theory, Happiness, Inspiration Leave a comment

There are corporations out there spending billions of dollars to make you buy what they have to sell. They are pitching you toothpaste, cars and movie stars constantly. There is hardly a place left in the world that isn’t covered in advertising. Why not use all this propaganda as an opportunity to advertise for yourself? Surely you can use the same advertising methods to fill your brain with how awesome you are.

Spend a little time today designing advertising for yourself! Make a poster of yourself with just the word “genius” at the bottom. Here’s a website where you can use to do it easily. Then, write your bio as if you had a high-powered PR agent who puts a positive spin on everything. Leave out anything you want and make sure that anything positive is slightly exaggerated.

In fact, write a whole campaign commercial that you can play in your head. Start with your rough beginnings. No matter how good you had it, make it sound like you had to struggle. Then, pick out every positive thing you have done to work toward your goals. Hire that guy who does all the movie trailers to talk about how great you are in an over the top way. Let the commercial end with you surrounded by your greatest accomplishments.

Don’t stop there. Project yourself in the place of products in all the advertising you see or hear. All the adjectives they attach to the product actually apply to you! You are sweet-smelling, delicious and you can help people save money on their mortgage!

Every instance you see today where someone is trying to make you feel good about their product, turn it into an opportunity to make you feel good about yourself.

Take control over the propaganda in your life!

The end result of creation, a thought

April 14, 2007 By in David Theory Leave a comment

Our culture is created through consensus, we live in a wiki-reality. Most people don’t take advantage of what little power they have to effect change. The vast majority simply choose between the options presented to them rather than making their own options. They give their power over the world to companies and television networks and film studios.

If you believe that every action taken or object created impacts the rest of the world and changes perception, which I do, what does that mean to the individual who chooses to create?

If you only create things you love, that reflect your passions and ideas, and then send them out into the world, it’s an attempt on your part to make the world more like you want it to be.

If you create things that you don’t like, that don’t excite or interest you, but that you think will appeal to other people, you are just reinforcing what you don’t like about the world.

The things that make the most change both appeal to other people and reflect an individual’s view of the world they would like to live in. Audience equals impact.

There is more money to be made in reinforcing the culture than in trying to change it. So, if we leave it to companies to decide the future, it will be as similar as possible to the way we are right now.

Is this something you consider when you’re working?

The Innovation Room

April 8, 2007 By in Creativity, David Theory 2 Comments

Here’s an interesting article on businesses making special meeting rooms for innovation. Not like normal conference rooms, these companies make a big room full of toys and such and when they need ideas they go to the “innovation room.” However, check out this description of Canadian Tires “innovation room.”

There are Lego sets and crayons on minisize tables and chairs, and a canoe and sun deck. A tree, seemingly sprouting from the walls, is made of ski poles, skateboards and other items sold by Canadian Tire. The room is usually locked.

That’s right, the innovation room is usually locked. We wouldn’t want to have innovation all the time. When we want people to use their imaginations, we’ll get out the keys and take them into a dusty abandoned room full of toys and get them to create for a while and then lock up the creation room again for another year.

I point this article out because I know creative people, unconnected to businesses, that do the same thing. They are so stingy with their creativity that they might as well have a locked room. Why not create constantly? A business that schedules innovation is going to lose out on a lot of opportunities and the same goes for creative individuals.

You don’t need a funny hat or a box of crayons to come up with a new idea unless the rest of your life was set up to squash new ideas. It’s like businesses, and creativity experts, have come up with a list of objects that represent imagination to them and they think putting them in a room with people magically makes them creative. The truth is that they lower the stakes of coming up with a stupid or bad idea. Crayons don’t make you more creative at work, but your boss not calling you an idiot for coming up with a bad idea probably would make you more creative.

Instead of the “innovation room” they should figure out what is killing innovation in the rest of the building and take care of that.

Read the article