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!

Best Creative Advice Ever From Mick Napier

April 16, 2007 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Mick Napier is a brilliant improviser from the Annoyance Theater in Chicago. The quote below is from his book Improvise: Scene From the Inside Out. This advice is given in the context of what you should do in an improvised scene, but I love it as advice and a warning about what not to do with your life. Just replace the words "improv scene" with "your life."

For God’s sake, do something. Anything. Something. At the top of an improv scene, do something. Please, do it for yourself. Do yourself a favor and just do something.

You see, there’s this guy you know, nice enough fellow, and he’s always talking about what he’s going to do someday. He has big plans, and if he’s in The Business, then he talks about a screenplay he’s going to write or a thing he’s going to shoot on video or an idea he has for an improv form. If he’s not in the The Business then he talks about  what he’s gonna do at work or to his house or some scheme he has for this or that. He talks endlessly in great detail of the necessary steps he will take to someday execute his master plan for whatever he will do and speaks of all the rewards he will gain once he does his thing.

Maybe you know this guy for two or three years and begin to notice that he doesn’t really carry out anything he talks about doing. Perhaps you begin to label him as a "talker" or "full of it." Maybe as he speaks of his next scheme you begin to , "I wish this guy would stop talking about it and just do it."

And as time goes by, you see this guy at parties and notice that you doing a little bit to avoid him. When he catches you and engages you in conversation, you begin to observe that you are bored "someday I will do this" tirade. As a matter of fact, you start looking around the room at other people  kinda hoping that someone will rescue you from this person because you are so bored. There he is again talking about something he’s gonna do, and you know that it’s never going to happen and it bores the hell out of you as you have to listen to it again.

Two weeks later he catches you walking down the street and now, as he approaches, you actually get a little angry on the inside. You’re still nice but you feel as if your time is being wasted. You want nothing more than to release yourself from this guy that never does anything, but talks endlessly about what he’s going to do someday. You wish he would do something, anything, and just stop talking about it.

He goes on to make the point that this is how an audience feels watching a bad improv scene. But, isn’t this a good metaphor for the people that say they’re creative, but never create anything. It’s easy to create, the difficult part is to create something lasting. A writer must write. A painter must paint. An actor must act. If you are just talking about what you want to do, please, do something. Anything. Something. Don’t be that guy.

Tom Waits on songwriting

April 15, 2007 By in Inspiration, Music, Quotes Leave a comment

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The latest Mojo Magazine has an interview with Tom Waits about his songwriting process. I wanted to share a few quotes. The first is on the diversity of influences songwriters have. The basic point being that you draw from sources that are unlike your own.

We all have a feeling that songwriters are purist, that if you like folk music you only listen to folk music, but it’s not true. Like for example, Howlin’ Wolf loved Jimmie Rodgers and Muddy Waters loved Gene Autry. He didn’t sit around listening to blues all day. It’s like breathing your own oxygen. You’ve got to find some nutrients somewhere.

I love the thought of Muddy Waters sitting around listening to a Gene Autry album and digging it. Creators need a broad range of  sources to create new things. Limiting your consumption also limits your output. If you want to break new ground, you’re going to need every resource you can get.

He also compares hearing new and different music to “entering another world.”

I think everybody’s looking for something they’ve never seen before. You work on your songs, but your songs also work on you. So you absorb and you excrete and in some way you retain, and slowly you start to become some place that songs are passing through. I’d like to think that they enjoy blowing through you. There’s something electric about you, maybe, some kind of a force left behind by music that passes through you. Like everybody likes to be around someone who does something well and loves doing it, so songs would be no different, right? Like, ‘Let’s blow down and see that guy.

In other words, instead of trying to build the songs, make yourself into a person that attracts songs. You have to open all the windows in your house for a breeze to come through and you’ll have to open your mind to new resources for ideas to wander in.

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?

Creator Blog: John August

April 12, 2007 By in Creator Blog, Writing Leave a comment

John August is the screenwriter behind movies like Corpse Bride, Go and Big Fish. (And Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, but, hey, they can’t all be great.) He keeps a regular blog that covers what he’s working on and the more technical angles of writing movies. He had one post that I wanted to pass on. How Do You Become Successful. While he is talking specifically about the film industry, his answers apply to any endeavor where art and industry meet. Here are two of his five lessons:

1. You’re not entitled to anything. A film degree is basically worthless. You won’t get recruited, and no one will ever ask to see it. An MBA from USC gets you a $100,000 starting salary. A film degree from USC might get you an unpaid internship. All you get out of it is the education, so make sure you’re learning every second of the day.

5. Make your own luck. Sometimes, magic happens and Spielberg likes your wacky short film. But that can’t happen if you didn’t make it in the first place, and the seven others no one saw. You never know which script, which lunch, which random idea is going to be important. So treat them all as important.

Great stuff.

John August’s Blog

Reader Links

April 10, 2007 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Peter-Callesen-I’ve got some great reader submitted links I want to pass on to you.

Mark sends an article on the 10 most flagrant grammar mistakes. While it’s obviously incomplete, avoiding these mistakes will make sure that no one stops reading something you write because they lose respect for you or start to doubt your intelligence.

Erin sent this awesome link to an article on how to design your own post-it notes.

Erin also sent Peter Callesen’s page. His paper cuts are amazing. He uses a single sheet of paper to make amazingly detailed pieces that are beyond description. That’s his skeleton rising out of a sheet of paper at the top of the post.

If you have a great link, pass it along!

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

What Is Beauty? An Experiment

April 8, 2007 By in Art, Marketing, Music Leave a comment

Does context matter for beauty? Do people need to be told what is beautiful? Or, does beauty stand out no matter where it is?

The Washington Post did a simple experiment to try and answer this question. They got Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most famous violinists who can charge $1000 a minute for his services, to play in a crowded pedestrian area in Washington D.C. during rush hour. They had crowd control measures in place in case things got out of control and let him loose. He played for 43 minutes.

Any guesses as to the outcome?

The Post went to the director of the National Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, and asked his prediction.

"Let’s assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don’t think that if he’s really good, he’s going to go unnoticed. He’d get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

So, a crowd would gather?

"Oh, yes."

And how much will he make?

"About $150."

There was a shoeshine place nearby and the lady running it usually calls the police on musicians because they drive away her business. She didn’t call the police that day even though the music was far too loud for her liking because the musician was pretty good. A postal worker stops at the top of an escalator when he hears the music. He has to go back and find the source. He gave $5 and still didn’t recognize who Bell was even though he was a fan.

In total for that day he collected $32.17. Some people gave him pennies and he was recognized once. No crowd control was needed.

I think this just goes to show the importance of context for art. Also, it shows how much other people depend on experts and crowds to tell them what is good. Most people like what other people tell them to like. They don’t have time to find beauty on their own.

I’m betting if he played there for every single day for a year, by the end of the time he would have fans and crowds. Eventually the early adopters would find him and then the rest would follow.

Kind of sad to think of beauty as a commodity that needs to be marketed instead of beauty having its own appeal.

There are great videos taken of the experiment embedded in the article.

Read the article and watch the videos here