UrbanMonk has an interesting article on how to get to the core of your passion(s) and then pursue them. A lot of it’s just the standard “don’t give up on your dreams” rhetoric (which isn’t exactly a bad thing) designed to give that much needed boost of hope that creative types need more often than most, as we pursue our various quixotic quests and treks up Maslow mountains.
What I found different about this post was how it encourages you to analyze a given passion, to break it up into a core essence, preferred forms of expression, and preferred mediums to communicate it to others. We often make the error of locking into a specific version of a passion (i.e. “I want to be a rock star with a record deal who sells out arenas”) when what we really want is much more fundamental (i.e. “I love to tell stories and explore emotion and thought, especially through music, and I’d like to do it full time. I could get a record deal to help with this, but I could also do it myself. It would be nice to have a big audience, but all I really need is a thousand true fans.”).
Check it out if you think you should be pursuing some of those passions you’ve been denying but don’t know where to start.
Since seeing Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity, I’ve thought a lot about muses. When we hear someone refer to a muse, we often think of a beautiful woman with whom a poet is deeply in love, writing poem after poem after poem for. I shudder to think of how many poor women have been tormented by moronic attempts at verse because of this personification. Ladies, you have my sympathy.
That’s not to say muses aren’t important. Gilbert’s talk made me realize that, far from simply being an easy source of inspiration, they’re a necessary mechanism an artist uses to keep from becoming too self-absorbed while creating some very personal and subjective things. A muse brings coherence to these personal experiences, making them transcend the person. It simultaneously allows an artist to maintain a comfortable distance from whatever it is that torments him to create and provides a framework in which others can understand those creations.
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This has been waiting in my queue for a while. It’s a wonderful TED talk from Elizabeth Gilbert on dealing with the elusive nature of creativity – the moments of genius and the grasping at straws that inevitably precedes and follows those moments of brilliance.
What is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each others’ mental health in a way that other careers… don’t do?
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A friend emailed me a few days ago to give me props on a song I wrote and recorded a while back, jokingly ending the email with, “You jerk.” He’s been playing guitar for a few years and just started recording and performing at open mike nights. I don’t know if anyone really knows how much comments like that help in giving you that often needed kick in the ass to do more. I’ve really enjoyed showing him all the tricks I’ve learned and like to think that I’m able to help someone else get to where they want to go a little bit faster than it’s taken me. But there’s one really important thing about writing and recording and performing that I haven’t told him about. And maybe that’s because I’ve never really admitted it to myself.
Last night, I did.
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Check out some great videos that introduce the ideas of the creative commons to the uninitiated of the world. I think they do a pretty good job at showing the spirit behind the idea in a way that anyone can appreciate. Wanna Work Together?
Creative Commons Mayer & Bettle Animation
Since the creative commons and remix culture often cross paths, it’s no surprise to find a remix of the first video that replaces the single voice narrative with the voices of the commons itself. What is Creative Commons? Wanna Work Together RG Remix
This is a great presentation by Christopher Penn on ways to coax your inner creative genius out of hiding. In it, he explores five almost mechanistic techniques that actually make your mind feel like less of a machine and more like the effortless fountain of inspiration we’d like it to be. Wander on an aimless journey of association, turn things into black boxes so you can chain them together (a good software developer will have this form of thinking burned into the circuits of his brain), draw parallels between past and future, experiment with artificial variations of tools and techniques, or start with an already great idea and figure out what it needs to push it to an even higher level. These may seem like simple concepts, but this presentation makes them look fresh again, and if the role of a really good teacher is to point out what you already know in a way that encourages you to go even further in our necessarily solitary search for Truth, then I suggest that Mr. Penn is definitely one of the best.
When I started watching this, I almost wrote it off as some web 2.0 remix version of the infamous “after school special” of days gone by. It seemed – how can I put this? – very straight edge. [ For those who are unfamiliar with the term "straight edge", you can click the link for the wikipedia article or you can just be satisfied with my admittedly biased labeling of this group as journeyman fundamentalists. ] Even after it has gotten over the sizable chunk of time dedicated to admonishing you for ever taking an intoxicant, it goes on to suggest that anyone with a new laptop is probably using it to hide his or her inferior creativity. But just as I started to think that the creator had simply taken everything he had not experienced or did not own and turned it into crosses that the geniuses of the world must bear, the moralizing that had been bothering me got turned down a bit, and I was able to enjoy a Desiderata-like message to the creative class. This side of the video is, I think, captured best when it warns the struggling creative to “avoid the water cooler gang”.
I was on a camping trip a few years back with some friends. One of them painted in her spare time. We were looking at this tree in front of us, and she was telling me that painting a tree like that would frustrate her because there would always be at least one branch that looked out of place. Being in one of my more philosophical moods, I thought aloud, “You know, that might be the path to genius – that one branch that you just can’t get right.” Here’s my reasoning… That branch that’s out of place is out of place because of something very unique to the painter. Her brain somehow sees it differently, and the harder she tries to take herself out of the scene and represent what’s actually there, the more apparent her affect is. It’s sort of like the Observer Effect in physics. I think some of the best art is created when someone notices that Observer Effect and, instead of trying to escape it, tries to really understand it, to embrace it. They turn the apparent flaw into a unique ability. No one else can describe the scene or paint that picture quite like they can. And certainly, in my own experience, my favorite bits of writing or musical composition have always resulted after a long period of trying to improve upon a flaw, where I finally give up trying to fix it, and in a moment of defiance I just do what comes naturally. So, for those of you out there who are stuck in a rut in terms of trying to improve your art, ask yourselves if it’s really a rut. It’s great to push the boundaries, but if something is being incredibly resistant to being pushed, maybe it deserves a closer look. Or, to quote one of my favorite philosophers:
The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.
