Tag: creativity

Why I Blog Every Day

If someone told me there was something that cost $0 and only 20 minutes a day and it would help me…

  • Overcome fears
  • Build confidence
  • Improve thinking
  • Improve communication
  • Build social capital
  • Improve productivity
  • Enhance creativity
  • Bring new opportunities
  • Increase happiness
  • And more!

I’d probably think it was a cheesy infomercial or self-help book.  Yet it’s true.  Blogging every single day has done all of this for me.

It’s not some magical cure all.  It’s actually pretty straightforward and anyone who’s done anything every single day will have an idea why.  If you run every single day no matter how inconvenient, you’ll understand.  Or meditate, or read, or whatever else.  The act of committing to something every day with no breaks or wiggle room is scary in itself.  I heard of a guy who was challenged to run 10 yards every single day and he laughed and said that’s crazy because it’s too easy.  But he wouldn’t commit to run a mile a day because that was unrealistic.  10 yards wasn’t too easy.  It was scary because it was so doable.  There are no situations in which you can’t find a way to run 10 yards.  No excuses.  That kind of consistent finality is scary to face.

Once you commit it’s on.  Every day is a battle.  Ups and downs and everything in between must be overcome.  It’s a wild ride.  The thing I especially like about making blogging the daily commitment is that it’s public.  Once you announce you’ll do it every day you can’t hide.  Everyone can see whether you have.  I also like that blogging is a creative act, and the more you turn creativity into a discipline the more creative you’ll become.

It’s hard to overstate the ups and downs you’ll experience.  Recently I poured my heart into what I thought was a very inspired and very good blog post.  I spent an hour typing it into my phone on an airplane.  I leaned back in my chair tired, content, and excited.  I had a few ideas and a few turns of phrase I really liked.  Then the draft disappeared.  It was gone for good.  I couldn’t recapture that moment of inspiration or those turns of phrase.  And yet I still had to write a post that day.  It took everything I had to make myself get back on the horse and compose and entirely new post, knowing what I had previously written was gone.  The make-up post I wrote wasn’t that good, but I’ve never felt more accomplished than when I finished it.  I know, it sounds dramatic.  But in the moment it felt that way.

You learn a lot about yourself blogging every day.  You learn to pull a lot of ideas and insights to the fore that were floating in your subconscious.  You learn to see the world differently and get better at expressing what you find.  Most of all you learn to take yourself more lightly and not fear failure.  Your ideas are now public and open to scrutiny, which means they could be ridiculed.  Worse yet, they could be (and often are) ignored.  Both prospects are equally frightening.  Getting used to it and being unafraid to churn out posts changes your whole approach to the world.

I won’t go on (though I could) about the benefits of daily blogging.  Nor do I think everyone must do it to have a good life.  I only know how powerful it has been for me, and I think anything you commit to do daily will teach you to be in the drivers seat of your life.

Some Lies I Believe

I think Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame Induction speech where he calls out everyone he thinks disrespected him is one of the greatest ever.  I find Alec Balwdin’s “Always be closing” monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross incredibly inspirational.  I loved when Kevin Durant said, “It’s my fault” after playing an amazing playoff game while his teammates let him down.

Strictly speaking, all of these are lies.  Jordan’s high school coach didn’t disrespect him.  He saw an undeveloped talent and made a reasonable decision with no malice.  All the employees Baldwin yelled at were not losers who shouldn’t even think about drinking coffee until they can close a deal.  Durant was not to blame for the loss.

Jordan chose to interpret everything as a sleight.  He used it as a chip on his shoulder.  Probably not a very psychologically healthy move in normal life.  Baldwin’s speech is a terrible way to manage people in the workplace.  Durant’s claim that he was to blame reveals a God complex that is a pretty dangerous outlook.  Yet I love each of these instances.

Only once you know no one is out to get you can you benefit from pretending they are.  Humans adopt beliefs and take actions based on story.  We need narrative.  Sometimes, especially if you’ve achieved some modicum of success, life simply does not present much conflict or direct opposition.  Yet we are moved by stories of heroes and villains.  This is when the truly great ones fabricate a narrative that powers them to achieve.

I sometimes joke with my wife that I want her to pretend to leave me for a few days so I can feel enough angst to write music.  As a teen I wrote songs constantly, fueled by high emotions.  A stable, secure marriage is a real challenge to musical creativity!

When life doesn’t provide them I tell myself stories of struggle.  I create myths wherein villains and haters are obstructing my way or mocking my effort.  I don’t actually make enemies with real people, but I weave a narrative that produces a chip on the shoulder.  I enter into a game where no one really believes in me and metaphorical bullets fly from every side.

A belief that the universe is trying to destroy you is incredibly disempowering.  But once you know it’s not true yet selectively choose to play as if it is you become unstoppable.  You can’t be unstoppable if nothing is trying to stop you.

Put that coffee down.

The Obedience-Entitlement Matrix and Generational Differences

I love a good two by two matrix.  Trying on new lenses through which to interpret the world is a big part of intellectual exploration.  Plus, it’s fun.  I have been fascinated for some time with differences between generations, especially since I’ve interacted a lot with Millenials (or Generation Y) in the last several years, and now I’m interacting with the next generation (I’m calling them Generation Z, because I’m not sure any other title exists currently).  There are some pretty significant differences between these two generations, not to mention the huge difference between both and Generation X, Baby Boomers, and even earlier generations.

In order to explore these generational differences, and to sate my desire for matrices, I put together the Obedience-Entitlement matrix.  Obedience – the degree to which a person follows orders and maintains existing norms – is measured from high to low on the vertical axis.  Entitlement – the degree to which a person believes they are owed something from others – is measured from high to low on the horizontal axis.

You can see the four quadrants that result.  The first label in each quadrant describes the dominant trait displayed by individuals or groups in that quadrant.  The second label in each quadrant serves as a kind of archetype, describing informally the role people in that quadrant play in a society.  Don’t mistake the second label as a career description.  It may be that, but obviously many societies don’t have slaves in the formal sense, and many people who make good soldiers are not necessarily soldiers, etc.  You get the idea.

Don’t be too distracted by the word “Slave” in the upper left quadrant.  Again, it’s an archetype.  I tried to think of a less loaded but still accurate word to describe people who are highly obedient and don’t challenge authority, and are highly dependent and expect to be taken care of.  Slave is the best word I could find.  Obviously not the kind of slaves that revolt or escape, but kind that accept their lot and seek nothing more than the most comfortable slave life possible.

Obedience-Entitlement Matrix

 

So here’s where I started having fun with it.  Thinking in terms of generational differences, I tried to map out the dominant characteristic that describes each of the last four generations.  The Greatest Generation and Boomers were pretty easy.  It gets harder after that.

The ‘Greatest Generation’

The WWII generation fits pretty nicely in the upper right quadrant.  They tend to be deferential to authority and feel a need for maintaining a constant order in the world.  They don’t mind knowing and staying in their “place”, and they don’t expect anything for free.  This generation is accustomed to earning everything through hard work and individual effort, and they keep their gripes to themselves rather than upsetting the apple cart with direct action.

Baby Boomers

Boomers are in the bottom left quadrant.  They grew up questioning everything and tearing down what didn’t suit them.  A big part of their revolt came when they felt they didn’t get what they deserved.  They want things, and you’re damn-well gonna give it to them.  This is a group that’s willing to question all authority structures, and yet doesn’t mind fawning over those promising free goodies.  This is a source of radical idealism, but practical problems.

Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z

Here’s where it gets hard.  I’ll theorize on why it gets harder in a minute, but first let’s see what we can do.

Generation X might be the least clear.  I consider myself a Gen Xer, even though my date of birth may or may not put me in the tail end of that group, depending who you ask.  I have older siblings and grew up primarily with people and accouterments considered Gen X.  So what does grunge music and a bunch of movies about discontent corporate workers and long-haired slackers mean for the matrix?  I’m still not settled on this one, but I think Gen X is mostly in the upper right quadrant in deed, if not in words.  You don’t see the abiding respect for authority that the Greatest Generation displays, yet for all the complaining and philosophizing about the system, Gen Xers pretty much do the ‘normal’ thing.  They complain about it and feel like it’s pointless, but they do it.  Xers don’t seem to have a strong sense of entitlement either.  In fact, they seem to expect mostly bad things to happen, and have made a kind of stoic peace with it.

On to Millennials.  Here’s where I’ll tick some people off.  If I can narrow down the diverse set of Gen Y characteristics to only the most common, I’d have to place them in the upper left quadrant.  Millennials are demanding and ‘high maintenance’ if you ask employers or parents.  But not in a revolutionary way that truly scares those in authority.  Millennials aren’t threatening to the status quo as much as they are frustrating.  It’s hard to know what they need.  They want a lot of things, and they want someone else to figure it out and give it to them.  They aren’t afraid to openly criticize or make demands of authority, but mostly as a way to vent emotions.  They want to be taken care of above all, and have an abiding sense that the world is unfair if they don’t get what they want.  If you provide, they’ll obey.

Generation Z is really interesting to me.  Only in the last few years have I spent a good deal of time around this generation.  I place them primarily in the bottom right quadrant.  They’ve seen older siblings pay a lot of money for college only to end up in debt living in the basement.  They’ve never known the phenomenon of ever increasing home values and 401(k)’s.  They don’t expect their lives to be better than their parents by some automatic function of time passing.  They’re not entitled.  But they also feel comfortable openly criticizing existing institutions.  Unlike most Millennials, however, they’re not afraid to do something about it and pay the price.  Unlike boomers, they don’t see revolt or reform as the best way to confront the status quo.  They simply walk away, opt out, and exit what they don’t like.  They’ve grown up in a world full of options, and they don’t feel the urge to go along with, or revolt against the game.  They just quit and find or create a new one.

The End of Generations?

X, Y, and Z are pretty hard to easily categorize.  Not just on this matrix, but in general.  They don’t seem to share really dominant characteristics the way previous generations do.  Perhaps that’s because not enough time has yet passed for us to have the ability to look back at their full record.  But I also suspect that the value of defining generations is declining across the board.

We have more choice and customization than ever.  It was once the case that everyone in a certain age range was sure to have a lot of shared experiences.  You saw the same shows, heard the same songs, wore the same clothes.  There weren’t many options.  Today it’s not uncommon for one 18 year old to be a huge fan of a band or TV show that another 18 year old in the same town has never even heard of.  The number of shared experiences and cultural icons has diminished.  This is a very exciting development!  Oppression and stagnation thrive off of sameness.  Collectivism is a dangerous mindset, but it’s becoming endangered.

Your Turn

Play around with the matrix yourself.  Place generations, individuals, companies, sports teams, or anything else on it.  Tell me why I’m wrong.  See if you can adapt it to be of more use to you.

The Trade-Off Between Productivity and Adaptability

When I got to the office this morning the WiFi was down.  It put a wrench in my whole day.  I had planned to write a blog post then jump right in to my task list.  Today was one of those productive days.  I could feel it.  But with no WiFi I couldn’t start in my preferred order.  I could do emails and several other things on my phone, but it’s much harder to write a blog post that way, so that had to wait.  I am now off my game, and struggling to get back on.

Some days I’m pretty adaptable.  If I know things are going to be unpredictable, I enter a flexible state of mind and can handle it well (when travelling, for instance).  But even though I handle it well, I’m far less productive when I’m highly adaptive.  I get back from a trip and I have a lot of catching up to do.  I have yet to find that zone where I can be highly productive and still easily roll with unexpected schedule shifts or curve-balls.

This apparent trade-off got me thinking about great sports teams.  Some of the greatest regular season teams are highly productive.  They have a plan, they are excellent at execution, and they deliver results week in, week out.  But many of those teams struggle mightily in the post season.  They face top defenses who have had longer to plan and throw out every trick in the bag.  They can upset the schedule.  Teams who operate far on the productivity side of the continuum suffer from lack of adaptability and can sometimes get blown out just by missing one or two early series.  I’m thinking of football especially.  How many Super Bowl winning teams have been the most consistently productive regular season teams, compared to the more tumultuous, creative, adaptive, and even streaky “big moment” teams?  Outside of Manning’s Colts, not many in my lifetime.

Where does this leave me?  I don’t really know.  I suspect the sweet spot is to find a way to dial in to productive mode for the regular season – the daily grind when travel and tumult are not the norm – and flip the switch to adaptive mode during the post season – the busy times and big moments where a lot is in the air.  I’m not sure how well one person or team can embody both styles of play and change between them on call.  I’ll have to think of some examples.  Still, I suspect that is where consistent greatness comes.  The kind that can win day in, day out, playing to strengths and rising to the big game with whatever’s needed.

Two Habits That Help Me

I was checking out some new podcasts while travelling yesterday and listened to an episode of Tim Ferriss’s show where he interviewed Josh Waitzkin, on whom the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer are based.  Waitzkin mentioned several habits that keep him productive and help him maximize his day.  Two in particular stood out because I’ve found both extremely helpful when I practice them, but had not consciously thought about why that might be.  Waitzkin helped clarify the why.

The first is simply to begin the day with writing or some other kind of creative activity.  Do your creative work first, before checking emails or social media.  Those tasks and inputs will put your mind in a reactive orientation.  Once in react mode it’s very hard to keep the creative part flowing and it can make for a more stressful, chaotic day.  If you create first, you orient your mind creatively and then when it’s time for the inputs and tasks, you’re less reactive and more creative.

The second habit is to finish the work day with high quality work.  Whatever task or project you end the day on, make it your best work.  This not only gives a sense of pride, completion, and accomplishment that helps you transition away from work and unwind, it also leaves you in a productive, high quality mindset.  Your subconscious will carry that over into the night.  When you awake the next morning to create, you’ll already be in a good frame of mind to do so.

I’ve not always been consistent with these habits, but both essentially formed on their own as I found how valuable they were to getting and staying in the zone.  As I said, I hadn’t actually pondered them as explicit habits and discovered why they worked until the podcast, but they definitely do for me.

Stay in Touch with the Future

There was a great Super Bowl ad that showed a now famous clip of two newscasters discussing the internet and email in 1994.  It was only 21 years ago, and already the thing they were so helpless to define or understand has completely redefined our world in a way all of us tacitly understand from birth. (You should see my kids with an iPad).

I’m an optimist and a big believer in the possibilities of tech and progress, yet too often this belief is just theoretical.  It’s easy to get a little impatient.  Yes, I know what’s possible in theory, but why don’t I see marvelous advances in practice?  Looking to the recent past is a great reminder of how much radical progress has happened in my lifetime alone.  Looking to the cutting edge of the present is even more exciting.

I try to read or watch something at least every few weeks about some area of science or technology that is a new frontier.  Whether checking on the latest in 3D printing, taking a peek at what’s going on at the Large Hadron Collider, or reading up on Bitcoin and its implications, I’ve discovered my sense of wonder is stirred by frequent updates from the fringes.  Every time I poke around new research and discoveries I wonder why I don’t do it more often.

If you’re looking for some crazy new stuff, here’s one I watched yesterday.  In addition to discussing some specific new technologies, Jose Cordeiro mentions four ways to deal with the future: Passive (bury your head like an Ostrich), Reactive (respond to it like a fire-fighter), Preactive (hedge against it like an insurer), and Proactive (create it like a builder).

Back to the Blog

I have said many times and I still firmly believe that the six months I spent blogging every day, seven days a week, led directly to the creation and launch of Praxis. Creating begets creating.  Posting ideas and words publicly every day puts you on the hook.  It makes you face fears.  It makes you ask “Why not”, instead of, “Why”.  It stirs the subconscious and unearths latent ideas and inspiration, and forces accountability.

Not long after launching Praxis, I stopped blogging here daily.  I’ve continued to blog once or twice a week at the Praxis blog, but I’ve done very little writing outside of what’s directly relevant to the company and its broader mission.  That’s been wonderful and will continue.  But it’s not enough.  I’m not sure what took me so long to realize it, but I need to blog every day.

I’ve been getting that restless feeling more and more, and wondering what to do about it.  I’m having the time of my life and facing new challenges every day with parenting, Praxis, and life in general, but I’ve felt just a little intellectually and spiritually sluggish in recent months.  Even my weekly blog posts for Praxis were sometimes a challenge.  When writing doesn’t come easy it’s a sure sign that I’m not ingesting enough new ideas.  When I’m reading or listening to interesting podcasts or lectures frequently, writing is easy.  In fact, it can’t be resisted and I often have to push other things out of the way to get the overflow of ideas out.  There is some kind of process my brain engages in when new ideas are fed in.  It does something to them and spins them back out reconstituted and reformulated.  I suppose it’s a kind of idea alchemy – though as anyone who’s read this blog can affirm, it doesn’t always result in the output being more valuable than the input!  It almost doesn’t matter the quality of the inputs or outputs.  Nor does it matter if anyone reads it.  As long as ideas are flowing in, being processed and transformed, and flowing out, I feel fulfilled and happy.

Blogging every day is the best way I’ve yet found to not let myself forget to consume a steady, healthy quantity of ideas.  Faced every day with the blank page, you realize quickly when you don’t have enough material to work with.  When you do, the posts write themselves and the challenge becomes keeping it concise.

That’s a lot of setup.  The point of this post is simply to say that once again I will be blogging here every single day, seven days a week, until further notice.  I’m not sure what I’ll write about or what themes might emerge.  I just know I need to do it to be my best self.

Take a listen to this great episode of the James Altucher podcast with Seth Godin and you, too, may be inspired to blog every day.

The Art of Science

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal this week claimed that great scientists needn’t be good at math.  E.O. Wilson argued that big ideas, not number crunching, are the source of major breakthroughs.  In other words, it’s the art of science, not the science, that inspires the game-changers.

I think there’s something here that applies beyond the physical sciences.  The social sciences, in particular economics, have been in a race of sorts to see who could mathematize fastest.  While complex modelling and statistical analysis can illuminate, they cannot generate.  Data is meaningless without a theoretical lens through which to interpret it.  Path-breaking work comes not from those with the best “hard” skills, but from those with the best paradigmatic innovations.  The best work seems to come from seeing the world differently, constructing theories from the new lens, then running some numbers to see how they look from the new vantage point.

This bit about seeing the world anew has never been more profoundly communicated to me than in a book by the novelist Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation.  Koestler sets out to reveal general rules of creation that apply across media – from the creation of a joke, to a work of art, to a technological invention.  It is a stunningly informative and ponderous work.

Koestler describes worldviews as matrices of thought; well-worn knowledge and assumptions that we carry along with us and use as shortcuts for understanding our world.  The eureka moment – the burst of laughter in a joke, the flow in the making of a sculpture, the sudden insight that unlocks the innovation – comes when two separate matrices intersect.  Koestler calls this intersection “bisociation”, and sees it as a kind of relieving of tension as two paradigms moving in what appears to be unrelated directions suddenly converge.

A poignant example in the book is Archimedes’ discovery of how to measure the purity of gold in a crown.  Archimedes knew the weight per volume of gold vs. other metals, but he could not melt the crown down to figure out its volume.  The thought matrix relating to weights, volumes and metals was completely unrelated to Archimedes afternoon bathing.  Yet as he slipped into the tub and noticed the water level rise, matrices collided and the bath solved the measurement problem of the crown.  It was not new, fancy calculations that resulted in this breakthrough on determining purity in oddly shaped gold items.  Instead, it was a bisociation of existing knowledge on water displacement with that on metallic weight.

Not only is creation about seeing familiar facts in new ways, it’s about allowing oneself the time and mental play to do so.  Some of the greatest eureka moments have come upon waking from a dream, going on a long walk while the mind wanders, or taking an explicit break from the problem at hand.  It is true, the great innovators have been versed in the science of their craft.  But what separates creators from specialists is not better technical expertise, but new eyes that generate new ideas.

Think big.  Explore.  Don’t let a lack of mastery keep you from probing the mysteries that fascinate you.

Homestead Your Interests

Homesteading is an age-old form of gaining common-law right to property.  A piece of land that is unowned or abandoned can become yours if you improve upon and maintain it for a period of time.  In the American West, pioneers would find a parcel of land they liked and stake it out as their own.  So long as they built fences or signposts or boundary markers of some kind and generally maintained the property, it was considered theirs.  Smart pioneers would homestead more than they could gainfully farm at first, looking to the future and leaving open the opportunity to expand their operation.  We may not have vast stretches of unclaimed land today, but the need to homestead some metaphorical acreage is still very real.

You have a body of knowledge, expertise, and a set of activities that define you.  This is your brand.  I’ve written before about the danger of being hemmed in by your brand, especially if it’s a successful one.  But how exactly can one prevent it?  By homesteading more space than you can currently occupy.

If you really enjoy architecture and keep in the back of your mind the idea that someday you may put a lot of yourself into it, whether vocationally or avocationally, you need to stake out a territory that includes architecture, and keep the underbrush trimmed so it doesn’t begin to encroach on your homestead.  Maybe you’re a lawyer, and all your friends and associates know you as the law guy.  If you keep your passion for architecture under the surface for twenty years, never letting it see the light of day, it will be a lot harder to make a sudden switch from law to design.  People will find it odd and see it as a frivolous deviation from your brand.  You will feel a lot of pressure to prove that you’re serious about it.  It will take a monumental amount of courage and resolve to make the move, and you will have to steel yourself against the reactions should you fail at first.  It’s like homesteading a virgin wilderness full of hostile flora and fauna.

If, on the other hand, you staked out your creative territory early in dimensions far beyond just lawyerdom, and you maintained your property line with the occasional foray into architecture, the opportunity to make a move later will be far more real and the transition far less daunting.  Maybe you keep copies of popular architecture magazines around for inspiration, and to let visitors see that you consider it a part of who you are.  Maybe you write about it from time to time, or offer amateur architectural tours of your city.  Maybe you keep a design table in your house and draw up blueprints.    Whatever it is, if you maintain the fringes of your property, it will be a lot easier to occupy it should the opportunity arise.

I make myself post a song or a poem once a week on this blog.  It feels a little odd sometimes, and It’s a little embarrassing.  But I love creative writing and keep in the back of my mind the possibility of composing short stories, recording songs, or working on film scripts as something I may want to put more of myself into someday.  I feel like it’s somewhere in me, but not yet ready to fully occupy my energy.  If I go on only producing what currently comes more naturally, commentary and prose, one day I’ll feel the urge to emerge creatively and it will feel like such a drastic transition it may be overwhelming.  I want to trim the weeds back at the corners of who I am by a little creative writing here and there.  I want it to be public, so that a later switch won’t seem quite as out of left-field to the observing world.  I’m under no illusion that posting a song once a week means I will be taken seriously should I become a full-time songwriter; far from it.  It won’t be quite as scary though, and I’ll have a little more confidence being used to putting my creative side out there.

Think about who you are, what you love, and what far-fetched dreams you entertain.  Draw a generous property line that includes even the most out-there interests.  Homestead it, and keep title to your identity with regular maintenance.  You never know when you’ll want to expand your brand.  If you never do, who cares.  You won’t have lost anything by keeping your boundaries wide.