The vultures of mediocrity

March 11, 2008 By in Creator Blog, Inspiration, Marketing Leave a comment

Seth Godin, marketing smartypants and action figure, has a great post about how the world drives you to mediocrity. It’s very short, so I am reprinting most of it below. I do recommend you read his blog if you are at all interested in marketing yourself or your work.

There’s a myth that all you need to do is outline your vision and prove it’s right—then, quite suddenly, people will line up and support you.

In fact, the opposite is true. Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths… whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over.

If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely it would be worth the journey. Persist.

I wanted to add to it. Those forces are not just outside you acting on you. There is a drive inside ourselves to do things in a way that is “good enough.” Before you even start to worry about the world stopping you from being mediocre, you have to decide that you want to be better.

The difference between good enough and great isn’t always huge. It might just be a few extra seconds. It might be one more ingredient or one more draft that separates you from being extraordinary. If you want to be great, you have to convince yourself before you can convince anyone else.

Expect more than the mediocre. Stop settling for a C+ life, you deserve at least a solid B, don’t you? Just kidding! Shoot for the A+!

Trying for great and achieving mediocre half the time is much more satisfying than trying for average and achieving it every single time.

After you set your standards high, then prepare yourself for the forces in Seth’s post. The vultures of mediocrity are circling over every creative person, ready to rip into any good idea that dares to call attention to itself.

The simple reversal: creativity tip

March 7, 2008 By in Creativity, David Theory, Inspiration 4 Comments

I remember the first time I heard about reversing an idea as a conscious act. I was young, maybe 9 or 10, and my dad had kept me up late to watch Monty Python during a pledge drive on our local PBS station. The sketch that had just played was Hell’s Grannies, in which a grandma bicycle gang terrorizes the young people of a small town. They cut to the studio and some of Python was there, the announcer said that was his favorite Monty Python sketch. John Cleese dismissed it as “a simple reversal sketch” not worthy of praise. And I’ve found that in general comedians consider those types of jokes to be hacky and base.

However, since then, I’ve found reversing ideas to be a useful habit that can actually invigorate an old tired cliché. In fact, the way journalists describe interesting stories is a reversal. Dog bites man is not an interesting story, but man bites dog is an interesting story. It is also used as a humorous tool in Zen koans.

As an example of how this can work successfully, two of my favorite Coen brothers’ movies are based on brilliant using the opposite of the usual main character in a hackneyed plot and genre. The Big Lebowski is a film noir style detective film that stars, instead of the traditional tough guy war vet turned shamus, a war protesting hippie. Fargo is a police procedural that with a main character that isn’t a rule breaking tough guy, but a pregnant female cop that solves the crime by the book.

The next time your stuck or it feels like your just repeating an old idea, try reversing the idea or an element of it.  Many times this will take you down a new path and increase your interest in it.

Dean Kamen

February 27, 2008 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Dean2
Dean Kamen is one of the most brilliant inventors and innovators of our age. He’s probably best known for the Segway transportation system. His company, DEKA, is responsible for lots of innovative products and ideas, most recently the “Luke Arm“, a prosthetic arm created to replace limbs lost by soldiers in war. (He also has an awesomely eccentric house on a private island. If his focus wasn’t helping humanity, you’d almost think he was a James Bond villain.) I found a few interesting quotes in articles posted on the web.

From MakeZine and other sources that have since disappeared from the web.

You have been likened to a modern-day Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. What inspires you to create?

Life is really, really short. There was an infinite past before I was here–some would argue it was 20 billion years or so, but I am not so sure. Suffice it to say that there was a very long time before I was here, and there will be a very long time after I am gone. My life looks like a tiny dot on that continuum. This perspective gives me a sense of urgency. With that sense of urgency, I get up every day and think that I do not want to waste any time. And if you don’t want to waste time, you look at all the problems you can work on and say, “I only want to work on the big problems. I am only going to work on the ones that matter.” If you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.

Does public education and higher education actually stifle creativity and innovation?

I think that most of the people who succeed in some extraordinary way, and most of the people who fail in some extraordinary way, tend to be people who did really well or really poorly in school. I think that school systems are really good at telling people how to do “okay” in the world. That is what their curriculum is about. That is what their institutional capability is about. That is what the people who run them are about. This is not to say that there isn’t a world full of hugely talented teachers working hard every day to make a difference and change kids’ lives. It is simply to say that the bureaucracy of the educational system limits the ability of educators to address the fringes. So if somebody was a good “B” student in school, you can be pretty sure that he or she is a good, average person. If a person gets A pluses in everything, or F minuses in everything, you can be pretty sure that he or she is an unusual person. Unusual people wrap around the ends of the bell curve. The system does not deal well with them. And I am not sure that the A+ person and the F- person are particularly different. It does not surprise me that when you look at people later in life, the people who got A pluses and F minuses end up doing substantially differently than the average people who are doing well in a system designed to accommodate the center of the bell curve.

On how to manage innovation:

We not only don’t punish mistakes or failures, we celebrate them as long as we get through them quickly and efficiently. You learn from failures, and you move on. I think people would much rather take a risk and focus on what can be done as opposed to protecting themselves against failure.

Each member of the team needs to recognize that the definition of success is not equivalent to a lack of failure. We work hard at doing something, and if we succeed, we will have raised the bar to create a better solution than anyone else.

On how to manage a group where some people have better ideas

We attempt to treat everyone fairly, but treating people fairly is not the same as treating them equally. People are not equal. And I think people don’t want to be equal for many reasons. Most people want to be individuals; they want to excel at something. And the definition of excelling means, “I’m going to prove just how unequal I am.” I don’t think there’s a problem with recognizing that different people have different strengths – not better, not worse, just different.

Why change the world? To me that’s what life is about. If you don’t do that, you might as well hibernate and sleep. If everyone thinks what you do is “normal” . . . it probably is. Why do that? Do something else!

Articles Referenced In The NPR Interview

February 25, 2008 By in Marketing 4 Comments

If you are visiting my site for the first time, welcome! If you like my site, please consider adding my RSS feed or sign up for email updated from the link on the right side of every page.

I thought I would post some links to articles and ideas I talked about on the air.

First of all, we never got around to explaining my intro. It was referencing two articles on attaching magical powers to objects. You can read them here and here.

Create a James Lipton of your very own.

Orson and Ed.

Here are five quick tips on creativity.

Here’s a link to page with all the creativity tips.

Here are links to the Yodelling Pickle and Deluxe Jesus Action Figure.

Top yourself!

February 24, 2008 By in David Theory, Inspiration 2 Comments

This is an extension of the last post, Don’t Save Your Best Ideas For Later.

Don’t be afraid to top yourself. Once you have successfully created something, your instinct will be to stay safe and only change the formula only slightly when you begin your next project.

Instead, why not top yourself every single time? Why not set your standard for each project so high that while you’re working on it you can’t possibly conceive of any way to improve upon it. Burn up the concept behind your work so totally that by the end it is curled up exhausted in the corner of your brain.

Of course, this way of working requires an act of faith on your part. It means every time you start work on something you are entering uncharted territory – traveling through the bits of ancient maps that said “here be dragons” or  “end of the world.” It requires you to trust that you don’t have a limited number of ideas and that you should parcel them out in tiny quantities in everything you do.

The phrase “Jumping the Shark” has made some people afraid to take chances this way. Inherent in its meaning is the idea that once a certain change is made, a concept or artist or actor or writer or series will never be good again. Truthfully, what kills most of these things is an extended lack of change that results in a gradual decline in quality and audience interest followed by a change forced from the outside onto an uninspired artist or team.

Instead of shark jumping, think about “Jump and a net will appear.” Take a chance that you might fail because you are unsure about where you’re heading next. The universe takes care of artists who jump off of creative cliffs without looking. Besides, if it doesn’t, you’ll land right next to another steep cliff you can jump off of and keep jumping until that net does appear.

Take the artistic champ of topping yourself every single time.

Jump and a net will appear.

Don’t save your best ideas for later: creativity tip

February 20, 2008 By in Creativity, David Theory 2 Comments

There’s a concept floating around that each person gets only a limited number of ideas in their lifetime.

Maybe no one ever says it out loud, but they treat their own ideas that way.

Instead of using their great ideas as they have them, people squirrel them away and store them on an idea shelf in their heads where they gather dust. And there are only so many ideas you can fit on that shelf, so instead of constantly coming up with new ideas, they just wander over to the dusty mind shelf and look at the great ideas they’ve never used. Afraid that if they use them, there will be a terrible empty spot on the shelf that will never be filled.

But, we know that’s wrong. The truth is that as soon as you use your best idea, you come up with a better idea. Burning through them quickly lets you cycle through ideas at top speed.

Even writing an idea down in a notebook will let you come up with a new idea. It’s amazing what clearing your mind of a little clutter will do.

Do a little mind cleaning and act on all the “great ideas” that are sitting on your dusty idea shelf. I promise you, you’ll have more great ideas than you can use in your lifetime.

And no one lives forever.

That’s probably the best reason for using your best ideas right now!

(you know, death)

Improvise your way to a better, faster first draft

February 10, 2008 By in Creativity, Inspiration, Writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

One of the major schools of improvisational acting (improv) developed not as an exercise for actors, but as a tool to help creative writers develop new material and overcome blocks. Improv itself is really the art of trying to present the first draft of a play that’s so good it’s worthy of an audience. It doesn’t always work, quality wise, but with improv you always get something.

Without an audience, you have the ability to go back and perfect your draft until it’s fantastic. Instead of this making writers feel free to do whatever they want in their first draft, many people have difficulty even completing the first draft. It occurred to me that these rules might help writers free themselves up while writing.

Following these simple, basic rules of improv will get you a completed first draft and, over time, improve the quality of your first drafts of both fiction and non-fiction. There are great stories that break all these rules, so they really aren’t rules so much as suggestions. In my opinion, it’s better to break one of these rules in a second draft rather than the first.

1. “Yes, and…”

This is the most basic rule of improv. In fact, this is improv in two simple words. The idea behind these two words is that you always accept what came before and add something new.

In acting, the “yes” part of the phrase means not denying what someone else does or says. In terms of sitting and writing your draft, this means that as soon as something is down on the sheet of paper it is part of the story. There is no going back and switching around details because you got a better idea, it’s down in ink. I think more things were written this way before the word processor, but now it’s always easy to go back and change.

Now, let’s talk about the “and.” This addition to the phrase points to not repeating things over and over again. Each sentence should add something to the story or move it forward. So, you accept everything that has already happened and add something new. Each sentence should expand the world of the story or move it forward.

Taken together, they create an unstoppable force creating a world and telling a story.

2. C.R.O.W.

This is an acronym for the most basic parts of a story that needs to be established fairly quickly for a reader to want to continue with the story. They stand for character, relationship, objective and where. Withholding one of these pieces of information too long results in a twilight zone story where everything is just killing time until a last-minute piece of information changes everything that happened before. You’re much better off giving your reader this information and letting the story follow its natural path. It belongs at the beginning of the story.

Withholding this information will make your audience lose patience with you.

3. Start in the middle of the action.

Try to start with characters that already know one another involved in an action. Starting with a couple leaving a dry cleaner with a stolen wedding dress and tuxedo being chased by the shop owner is far better than starting with two characters who have never met sitting on a bench. Strangers need to introduce themselves and have no emotional connections, which means more work for you and more patience from your readers.

4. Listen

I know, you’re not listening, you’re writing. So, really this one should be “read yourself carefully.” Everything you need to tell your story is right there. Often, people don’t figure out what they’re writing about until later drafts. Reading as you write will allow that process to speed up.

Also, have your characters listen to one another and really respond to what’s said to them.

5. Details

Be as specific as possible in your details. If a character is reading, he isn’t reading a book, he’s reading Bridges of Madison County or Highlights Magazine or a copy of the Constitution. Every detail is important. Training yourself to be as specific as possible in your first draft will charge what you write with meaning.

6. Justify

There are no mistakes, justify what you write. If there is confusion or contradiction explain it. Repeated mistakes are a theme! However nonsensical something is in your story, make it natural and real. Justify justify justify. If it truly doesn’t belong, cut it out in the second draft.

7. Change

Some of the worst improv scenes are when all the actors refuse to let their characters change. Story is change, if nothing changes there is no story. Don’t love your characters so much that it becomes like bad fan fiction where the familiar character run through familiar situations and say familiar things and leave ready for the next adventure with no emotional impact at all.

8. The end is in the beginning

Don’t pull in some outside force, deux ex machina, to end your story. Look at what initiated the story and find the solution there. Walk backward into the future figuring out where to go next by examining what has happened before. If a story starts with someone cleaning a gun, someone will probably be shot in the end. If a story begins with a farm boy who wants to be a hero, it will end with that boy either becoming a hero or not becoming a hero.

Aging and marriage, do they kill creativity?

February 7, 2008 By in Creativity 2 Comments

Two interesting articles on creativity and its relation to age.

The first is a somewhat depressing, unscientific and sexist article that suggests that marriage and age tames genius. A psychologist in New Zealand compared the lives of 280 scientists noting the ages that they made their greatest contribution and comparing it to other biographical details.

He says that most scientists stop making significant contributions within five years of getting married.

My favorite part of this article is the reasoning that he uses for men being motivated to be creative.

Dr Kanazawa suggests “a single psychological mechanism” is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women.

That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone.

Dr Kanazawa theorizes after a man settles down, the testosterone level falls, as does his creative output.

No word on what that means for female creativity or other areas of creativity. Groan. This is so sexist it’s almost painful. Not to mention the obvious fallacy of implying that men’s motivation for going into science is to attract ladies. Following that logic, Mick Jagger must have become a rock star because of his passion for knowledge.

A far better article comes from Smithsonian Magazine, an interview with David Galenson, which divides creative folks into two groups, Young Geniuses and Old Masters. Young Geniuses tend to be conceptual, while the Old Masters improve with age by applying trial and error. Here’s a key quote from the article.

What’s the difference in how Young Geniuses and Old Masters think?

Conceptual people—the Young Geniuses—emphasize the new idea, and plan their work very carefully. They often say that the execution is perfunctory. Indeed, in today’s world, some of the greatest conceptual artists don’t even execute their own work—they have it made by other people. But the Old Masters are never entirely sure what it is they want done, so they couldn’t possibly have anybody else do it. Cezanne couldn’t have said to somebody, “Go and make a painting for me.”

There is no mention of marriage or testosterone levels in this article.

Links via devilduck and Dose of Creativity

John Cleese on how to get out of a creative rut

February 3, 2008 By in Inspiration, Quotes 2 Comments

John Cleese on overcoming a creative rut. This applies to writer’s block or any other time you need to figure out a problem and just aren’t motivated.

I knew a wonderful teacher once—a tutor. He tutored my stepsons and my elder daughter. He said to me, “Always start where the energy is.”

People make an awful mistake by starting where the energy isn’t. If you’re feeling very world-weary—and sometimes we’re all in that boat—you have to sit down with something that’s going to engage you. That doesn’t mean you just switch on the TV and watch a cartoon, but it does mean asking, What would be fun? Maybe take a piece of paper and a pencil and start drawing silly things. Go for a walk. Just sit very quietly watching your breathing. Anything. Just allow the whim to get you going.

Now, you can’t do this all of the time; it’s too disconnected. But I think in that particular frame of mind, when you run out of energy and motivation, I think you have to go right down to the instinct, right down to a whim.

I’m coming up on 60, and I’m wondering where my life will begin to go. I need to take a slightly different direction. I talked to a very wise man, and he said, “If you’re trying to find a new direction, don’t plan it, because this [pointing to his head] has been planning your life up to now. You can’t plan something new with the same old apparatus.” He said, “Leave a gap. Leave a space, and just do things on auto for a while. Just see where these whims take you.”

It’s like creativity. You have to follow it without knowing where you’re going. If you try to control where you’re going, you’re back in the same process. It’s like asking a piece of machinery that’s broken to mend itself.

Meaning, Metaphor and Magic

January 31, 2008 By in Creativity, David Theory, Inspiration Leave a comment

I posted before about making a magic object to help you with your creativity and work, but today I was thinking about all the magic in the objects already around us. Not every object has the same amount of magic, but you know the ones that are meaningful to you. Maybe it’s something an old friend gave you to remember them by or a trophy of a great success in your life or a picture of you with a famous person. You know the kinds of things I’m talking about. Generally they have a low dollar value, but you’d miss them the most if they were gone.

What if these things had real Harry-Potter-Lord -of-the-Rings magic powers? That handkerchief you took from your grandmother’s house the day she died. Would it have healing powers? Would it protect you from demons? Would it make cookies appear whenever you wanted one?

The connection between the magic of these items and their powers is the root of the energy of metaphor that powers everything you create. Their meaning is part of you and examining them is like being able to look at yourself from the outside.

So, find that cigar box of mementos you keep or dust off your nick knack shelf and go through them one by one. Hold them in your hand and ask yourself what spell it would cast if it could? What power does it contain?

This is the raw force of creativity at work, the discovery of connections between seemingly disconnected objects and yourself. You’ll get a better understanding of your needs and wants and emotional underpinnings.

What do you keep? What does it mean?

In fact, why limit it to what you own? Look at other objects in the world and ask what magic powers they would have. A pair of Houdini’s handcuffs or a handwritten page from one of Shakespeare’s plays or a piece of the Berlin wall?  It all has power inside and recognizing it will allow you to control it.

Plus it’s fun. So, even if you get nothing from it, you’ll have a good time. Oh, and they don’t really have magic powers, so don’t get any bright ideas that your grandfather’s walking cane can really make you invisible. It’s just that your grandfather made you feel invisible when you were around him because he was such a powerful man. You can’t walk around naked in public just because you’re holding a cane.