Are You Exceptional?

ex⋅cep⋅tion⋅al [ik-sep-shuh-nl]

“Extraordinary, uncommon, noteworthy, remarkable, special, unique, unprecedented.”

What will you do today that is exceptional?

 

B Cre8iv #6: Releasing Your Creativity

So how do we release our creativity? If, as several have mentioned, one of the ways that we gum up the creative works is fear, especially fear of criticism, then moving beyond this fear would seem to be imperative for releasing our creativity. There are two actions we can take in this regard. I’ll talk about one now and save the second for another post.

Jesus says, “No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” (Luke 16:3a, NIV) While Jesus says these words in the context of a discussion about money, I think the general principle applies here as well.

There is an oft-espoused idea that creative people are at their best when they are creating for their own satisfaction. How often have you heard someone say something like, “I just write/play/sing/act/create for my own enjoyment. If someone else enjoys it, then that’s great”? The idea behind this thought is that the artist is most true to themselves when they are creating for themselves. If other people happen to like it, fine, but that’s not really the point.

I would argue that if we want to truly release our creativity, we need to take exactly the opposite stance. Rather than creating for our own enjoyment we create in order to serve others. We can’t serve two masters, we can’t serve ourselves in our creative endeavors and serve others, but when we are serving others we are able to move past what the critics might say about our creation. When we create to serve others, we are no longer worried about what people think; we are only concerned with whether what we’ve created helps those for whom we created it. It isn’t about us, it isn’t about our reputation; it’s about giving something of ourselves, something helpful, valuable, fun, or useful to someone else. When our focus is on them, then we’re no longer focused on ourselves. When we seek to meet their needs through our creations we’re no longer concerned about what the critics might think of what we’ve done. We know we’ve been successful because we’ve served another.

Is Creativity Really Even Possible?

I was talking with a friend today about creativity and he asked this question: In light of the fact that we are created beings, isn’t everything we “create” really just reorganizing that which God has already created? The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible says that there is nothing new under the sun. Is anything really creative or are we all really just imitating that which has already been done? What do you think?

B Cre8iv #5: Creativity or Just Rearranging the Furniture?

I realize I said that this post was going to be about how to free up the flow of creativity, but that will have to wait ’till the next one (maybe tomorrow). First I want to address something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile, but is especially on my mind this weekend.

For most places in the United States, this Saturday is the end of daylight savings time. In other words, we all fall back an hour. This daylight savings time deal has always fascinated me. How is it that we can just arbitrarily pick a date and decide that on that date we’ll move our clocks? Suddenly 12 midnight isn’t REALLY 12 midnight, it’s actually 11pm? What has changed? Has the earth’s orbit around the sun altered such that we have fallen back an hour? Will the night really last one hour longer? No, nothing has changed except our clocks.

Sometimes this is how creativity (or “creativity,” so called) works. The creative person really hasn’t done anything new, exciting, and meaningful, he’s just “rearranged the funiture.” The 42nd Britney Spears sound-alike, the 13th version of the classic-car-updated-for-the-21st century, the 9th Friends/ER/CSI look-alike are all rearranging the furniture. Nothing of substance has really changed. Is that really creativity?

If you’ll agree with me that it’s not, then we come to the following conclusion: creativity demands change. For something to truly be creative means that it isn’t like everything else. Miles Davis was creative because his musical innovations changed the sound of jazz; Monet was creative because his work changed the way we think about light and painting; the geniuses at Apple are creative because they changed the way we interfaced with our computers, and phones, and music.

So will you be content to just rearrange the furniture, or will you make the effort to be truly creative — to bring about real change in your chosen field? If you will count yourself among those bold enough to create, what baby step can you take today to begin your journey?

B Cre8iv #4: The Problem with Excellence

There is only one way to arrive in the land of excellence: by traveling through the regions of inferiority and mediocrity. You will never be excellent if you do not first have the courage to be inferior.

No one plays Mozart the first time they touch a piano. Nor does anyone paint like Picasso the first time they dip their brush in acrylics. Everyone starts out bad, then becomes mediocre, and then — assuming enough talent and practice — moves into excellence.

But here’s the rub: we can’t get from bad to excellent if we don’t allow ourselves to first be bad. If we (or others) are constantly critiquing ourselves, looking at what’s wrong with what we’ve created, we’ll never be able to move to the next level. Frans Johansson tells us in his book The Medici Effect that the best, most creative work emerges from those who have the most creative output. Some of their work is bad, some of it is amazing, but you don’t get the amazing work without the inferior. You have to work THROUGH the inferior and the mediocre to get to the excellent.

Many of us have heard that Thomas Edison tried more than 6,000 ways of inventing the light bulb before he was successful. Yet, we often keep ourselves from experiencing excellence by expecting it too soon and too often. How many thousands of adults wish they had kept with some creative activity (playing the piano, singing, writing, painting) instead of giving it up as a kid? Most of us give up before we gain the experience and put in the hard work to get beyond inferior and achieve mediocre. We quit too soon.

Others expect excellence too often. Imagine a baseball manager that expected every member of his team to hit .800. That would be ridiculous. Yet, we often expect 80% or more of our creative output to be fantastic. We quit while we’re still in the land of mediocrity. A recording artist writes many more songs than those that are chosen for an album; a book goes through a long editorial process before it is published. If we aren’t generating enough good ideas, it’s because we haven’t generated enough bad ones. Our desire for excellence, right now and all the time, stymies us from ever getting there.

So what do we do? That, my friends, will be the subject for the next post.

B Cre8iv #3

I appreciate what both Chris and Adam had to say in response to B Cre8iv #2. Appreciating creativity wherever we find it is a sign that we’re experiencing God and his work in the world. Certainly God sometimes chooses to work through those who haven’t received Christ and we should recognize that.

Adam’s point is also well-taken: fear of failure stifles creativity. American society is one of the most competitive societies in the world. From getting into pre-school to getting into the retirement home, we have turned most all of life into a competition. Competition by definition means there are winners and losers. Since those who determine who wins and who loses are external to us (other people), our biggest fear, and likely one of the biggest blocks to real creativity is our fear of what others might think. What will they think of me? What will they think of my creation? Will it be good enough? Will they understand it? If they don’t like it, will they still like me?

Having said this, it’s important as a creative person to be open to appropriate critique. If we never listen to anything other people say about our work we will never improve in our craft. It seems we need to somehow learn to live in this tension. On the one hand we must be confident to create free from fear. On the other we must be open to honest and helpful critique in order to improve.

Is it possible to maintain creativity in the midst of others’ criticisms? What can a creative person do to silence their own inner critic and learn to turn a deaf ear to the inappropriate criticism of others? How do we discern when to accept a criticism and when to reject it?

The Road to Success

Don’t worry; the posts on creativity aren’t over yet. We’ll get back to that topic soon. I’ve enjoyed your comments.

I wanted to take the time to think about success for a minute, though.

We all know that what we do today helps determine if we’ll be successful tomorrow. That is, we all know somewhere in the back of our minds that this is true. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we actually do anything about it. There are a number of reasons for this: we may not really know what we want, we might not know what to do, we may fear success. But my guess is that for most of us, we just plain procrastinate. We intend to work on that script, that song, that project. We intend to make those phone calls. We intend to do a million things we know will help us achieve success, but, well  … we don’t. Which leaves us sitting in the middle of the road rather than moving forward. (Not an altogether safe place to be.) After all, it’s not the road to success that is paved with good intentions.

So, what will you do TODAY that will take you one small step in the directon of success? Give yourself a little accountability for it by leaving a comment and letting us know.

A New Tool for Managing Too Much Information

Have you ever thought, “I wish I knew more about …” or “I wonder what’s going on with …” but didn’t know where to find it? Wikipedia and Google searches can only go so far and the results are often disappointing.

Enter Alltop, a new way to manage information on the web. Alltop’s stated purpose is to “help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.” (taken from the Alltop About page)

By giving you the ability to organize websites, newsites, and blogs that you care about on topics that interest you, Alltop saves time and gives you the ability to scan a lot of information efficiently. Then you can decide what areas you may want to drill down deeper into.

Give it a look at Alltop. I’d love to know what you think.

B Cre8iv #2

I don’t know anyone who would honestly confuse derivity (the act of “creating” something which is actually simply a copy or adaption of something else) with creativity, but it seems like a lot of people get by with the former rather than pressing on to the latter. How many television shows, movies, songs, and products are truly creative, truly original? Heck, some so-called “artists” make an entire career by simply sounding like, acting like everyone else in the pack.

But here, in my opinion, is the worst part: Christians are notorious for their derivity. From music to books to videos to paintings, we have Christian versions of Hallmark, Time Magazine, the Grammys, and even breath mints. When was the last time you saw the work of a Christian and thought, “Wow, that’s truly original” as opposed to, “Wow, that’s almost as good as …” fill in the blank with someone from the secular realm.

Wouldn’t you think that we who have committed our lives to worshipping the Creator would excel in creativity? Why, then do we seem to lag so far behind? What’s the most creative Christian work you’ve seen recently? Why was it so creative?

Which are You?

I had an interesting conversation with a friend this morning. We shared some funny stories about how we relate to our wives. We discovered that both our wives are do-ers, while we are both thinkers. Our wives measure the day by how much they accomplished; we measure our day by how interesting it was. After all, why accomplish something today when you can analyze it to death, right? I think most people are predominantly either do-ers, people who just want to roll up their sleeves and get the job done, or thinkers, people who want to think deeply about the large issues. Of course, we all have to accomplish things and we should all think things through, but we probably lean one way or the other.

So, which are you? A do-er or thinker? Which is your spouse? Are you like my friend and me, did you marry your opposite?