I’ve been thinking and writing a lot more about creativity lately and today my thoughts brought me to the subject of art.  Art is one of those things that seems so subjective and person its hard to really define.  Most people when they think of art, think of the traditional styles of art, like drawings and paintings, perhaps music or even sculptures.  To me, art is much more than that, it is not in the things you produce as an artist but actually in the process of creation.  Art, therefore, is really anything that is created.  It is still subjective since it is a personal reflection or process to create something but it is wrapped around the process of creation, not the end product.  The creation itself is what drives an artist to do what they do, not only the end product itself.

What is Your Art?

What led me onto this subject is my graphics business.  Its a business that lets me create visual content and end up with an animated 3D piece of art.  I used to have much more desire to make this a full time career because it was my most significant area of creativity and art in my life and I love it.  Still do in fact.  The difference now is that I’ve learned that there are many other areas in my life where I can be just as creative and find art in that creative process as well.  This includes my writing here at LearnThis.ca and it includes my engineering work in design, architecture and managing of people.  The art is in all of that as well.  More importantly I’ve found art in creative actions with my thinking, my feeling, my relationships and my spirituality.  All these areas now I find myself using my creativity to produce change.  Change in myself and change in others around me.  That realization lets me look at creativity and art in everything I do, not just in a few fixed products or actions.

The Art of Change

Think of all your actions, all your passions, everything you spend time in life creating.  Maybe your art is not in some traditional sense but instead in the art of change?  I know that personal development and life learning require change and if change can be sparked by creativity, then embrace your creative actions, extend them in all directions of your life and see the results in your own personal art of change!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 20 Comments »

Please jump back to the first two articles in this series if you missed them.

• The Imaginative Mind: Mental Creativity
• The Imaginative Mind: Social Creativity

This article explores how the mind and it’s imagination is useful for innovation.  Innovation to me is about the pollination of ideas. Not only that they are spread to others but also how that innovation provides gains and benefits compared to what was used or available before hand.  I’ve explored how your own mind’s creativity can be enhanced as well as the creativity powered by a social atmosphere and now this explores how that kind of creativity can be put to use for improvement through innovation.

Incremental

The first area of application where creativity from an imaginative mind can drive innovation is in incremental improvements and change.  This is a popular one for me and obviously through my writing here at LearnThis since personal development is largely about incremental change.  Those active in it strive to innovate new methods and teaching styles to reach and expand their influence to bring that incremental change both into our own lives and the lives of those we connect with.

Many businesses also look to gain from incremental innovation by building continuous improvement programs and training.  It’s a crucial part of change and adaptation that every strong business should have.

Radical

The next level of innovation intensity is that involving more radical change.  This is needed when larger systems / beliefs change or when a change has a much bigger impact to a person or organization.  The radical aspect of this is sometimes seen as shocking or unexpected as well since it requires outside the box thinking and improvements to be put into place.  It is much more than simple or continuous incremental changes and it requires a major step change to jump from one way of doing things to another.

Radical innovation is something that is risky and requires some courage to create.  It’s far outside any comfort zones and it isn’t something you can hide under the surface whether its a personal innovation or not.  Radical innovation will be seen by others and have enough impact on your life that the change will be a significant one.

Revolutionary

The final kind of innovation is a revolutionary one.  This level of innovation is so large that it causes change well beyond your direct environment or self and causes a wave of change well beyond the circle of direct influence.  Revolutionary thinking is of course thinking that encompasses each of the other types but what sets it apart is that it is for an innovation that affects a wide group of people, an entire region or perhaps a whole industry or market.  It is such a massive change that once it is in place, its very difficult to go back since the new innovation engrains itself into society and the lives of those within.

Take Creativity Personal

So, I hope this short series on the imaginative mind and creativity sparks you to look at where you allow your creativity to surface in your life but also how far you are willing to take it.  We all have creative thoughts and so its what you do with them and how you let them work in your mind that will drive change around you and in your life.  Don’t settle in and suppress your imagination, instead, embrace it, activate it in your own mind, in your social sphere around you and turn those innovations into action!

Please, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic or any of your own creations or innovations.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 14 Comments »

This article continues with the topic of the imaginative mind and today I’ve cover another look at creativity, but from the social aspect this time.  If you missed the last article, here it is:  The Imaginative Mind: Mental Creativity

Cycles of Creativity

Creativity is very much a process, not a single event and so there are cycles of creativity in our actions and thoughts.  Some days creativity just flows and others, it seems so distant.  These cycles exist within our minds in all the same areas covered from the previous section on mental creativity but now we’ll look at it these cycles in a larger social environment.  The same type of cycles where creativity is obvious, encouraged, built on, extended and heavily supported occurs in all kinds of social arenas.

• friendships and relationship
• organizations and clubs
• businesses and work groups

Even larger segments like geographic regions, industries, municipalities or media exposure groups can experience these up and down cycles of creativity.  All of these cycles occur because of creative influence that either inspires or suppresses creativity throughout that social sphere and it cascades the effects.  The same reasons why brainstorming is useful to the mind to spark new ideas and keep associations active in the mind applies here to social creativity.  Each idea feeds the ideas of others, expanding the creative impact to larger groups.  Things that stifle creativity make a similar impact by slowing down or eliminating the connections for creativity to grow.

Impact on the Mind

Understanding how these cycles impact our work, lives and environment gives us a more accurate model to predict and control the swings that social creativity is impacted by.  Keeping active with the actions that spread creativity and avoiding some of the typical problems areas that kill creativity works in a social environment to ensure the imaginative mind has a sandbox to explore.  I believe the mind is at its best when learning, growing and building itself and it can only do this to its fullest when the imagination is active with as many options for creativity as possible.

Contributing to Creativity

There are a number of ways to contribute to social creativity.  The ones I think have the biggest impact are the following:

Eliminate Criticism and Complaining

Criticism and complaining are really the quickest things that kill creativity.  Criticism can emotionally shut down a person so quickly that the only creative thoughts they will have is of escape or revenge.  It is something that naturally transforms our minds into a completely new state unless we learn to handle criticism and control our response and state of mind consciously.

The social impact this can have can reach many people at once and unfortunately this bad behaviour can also be quite contagious.  The best thing you can do with these items to contribute more to social creativity is to eliminate criticism of others, of ideas and of actions.  The same goes for complaining since it encourages a very negative thought process not helpful in activating the imagination in any way.  Obviously eliminating these is not easy, but they can certainly be reduced and they can definitely be done in private at least in order to minimize the influence to any audience available.

Brainstorming

While I covered this in the previous article on mental creativity it is certainly applicable here in a social atmosphere as well.  Brainstorming in a group activates the imagination of the whole group and quickly allows ideas to germinate with each other and spread between everyone’s minds.  It can be done as a group on purpose with a specific topic or goal in mind or it can happen through other media with no initial intention of doing it!  Social media and viral systems are perfect examples of this as a group gains access to shared thoughts and ideas, they become enabled to share more themselves which continues to feed the process.  This type of social brainstorming happens a lot with online social groups like twitter and stumbleupon , as with all the other social networks.

Asking Questions – Question everything

Questions come about from curiosity and of course curiosity broods creativity.  Therefore, questions are a powerful action to contribute more to creativity as well.  Everything a person questions, they can learn from and gain some kind of insight from.  Questions about how and why something is how it is, leads to seeing more pieces of any puzzle and that puts the mind into a state where it has to think beyond the logic to imagine the solution before all the pieces are understood.

Questions are a huge part of a healthy learning process and they will trigger the mind to explore and wonder with curiosity at things.  I’ve written about using questions for learning and training others in this article here, Using the 5W Questions to Provide Training .  Questioning the things around you has other benefits as well, it is a useful tool to expand your relationships as well.  This is because it shows curiosity to another person.  Read about that here, Open Ended Questions .

Avoid Perfectionism

My final point in looking at social creativity and the ways to contribute to it is to avoid perfectionism.  Perfectionism slows down any creative process and it quickly strangles any new ideas from emerging as it keeps the attention on an original subject or topic while it is closely scrutinized and perfected.  There is some room to explore perfecting something with a creative look, but it is usually too focused on one thing where new ideas have no place to be explored until the first topic or item is first perfected.

Getting past perfection so that more ideas can be explored gives way to identify more possibilities and have more options to approach things with.  This applies in everything from simple day to day life plans and tasks, to complex engineering design problems or even social planning. The Perato principle is useful with social creativity as well and that is where you apply the 80/20 rule.  Perfectionist try to get things to that 100% level and they spend most of their time and effort making very little progress once past that 80% point.

So, next in my next article, I’m going to explore how the imaginative mind is applied for innovation, which I consider to be the application of creativity.  If you are not signed up yet and don’t want to miss any future articles, please sign up for my RSS feed here or by email here .

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 13 Comments »

Creativity is one of my most favored traits and any activity with creative components is one I can easily value.  My engineering role in designing software, developing others as a manager in new and creative ways and my writing and 3D graphics I create on the side are all examples of how I enjoy letting creativity spill out in life.  I personally believe I’ve been crafted with the gift of creativity (as is everyone) and so there is great purpose and value in employing creative tasks in your life.

There are many ways to explore creativity and it really is a part of any learning experience and new task so its an endless topic, which excites me a great deal because ultimately, the exercise of writing about it is also a creative exercise.  This article looks specifically at how one can build an imaginative mind using creativity.  An imaginative mind is one that can visualize beyond direct input and one that can explore things outside of the immediate reality and vicinity.  To me, this is a great ability and one I am quite passionate about so, lets explore it a bit deeper!

Initializing Thoughts

Our thoughts are nearly continuous and tuning in to them can be done specifically for creative juices.  Often we suppress our own ideas or thoughts in a split second without ever letting it surface to a voice or considered item.  We often put a validation screen on our thoughts and bias everything we let surface by the judgments we assign or expect others to assign to that thought.  This limits our mental creativity and kills a thought that would otherwise become the start of a great associative linking of thoughts and advanced creativity.  We need to let any thought be developed and explored as our mind makes the neural connections and associations with more and more thoughts.  This can happen in moments or it may take hours but it most imaginative if you let a thought continue to build and linger, don’t dismiss it or kill it on purpose.  Ever.

Brainstorming

Putting the mind to an exploratory session like this is also known as brainstorming.  Brainstorming is often considered something you do in groups and while that is true, it needs the same guidelines in your mind to let the imaginative mind explode with its full capacity and creativity available. Brainstorming at its best means that anything thought of on a given topic is valid.  Anything goes. Any idea is considered no matter how obscure or off-base it may first seem to the logical mind.  Logic is often the nemesis of creativity as we tend to judge our ideas and thoughts the moment they begin and we simply don’t give our imaginative mind a chance to develop them.

1. Explore as many possibilities as you can
2. Any idea is worth exploring at least for a short time
3. Sometimes you need to give ideas time and let the subconscious work away

Outside the Box

The other effect our logical mind has is to keep us bounded into what seems reasonable.  This unfortunately has a very negative consequence on our imagination as its very difficult to explore outside this box of reason or box of logic.  The logical mind is bounded by what we know as well so anything outside this box is suppressed by any logic at first consideration.  It’s important to get by this and let the creativity and idea be unbounded and originated from well outside the box.

The imagination is an amazing thing and you can certainly allow it to take hold of you in visualizing, day dreaming or full on dreaming.  We’ve all experienced the power of the mind’s creativity in dreams and its possible to enable that same creativity in waking life if it’s practiced and repeated instead of suppressed.  Let your mind wander, have fun with it, just imagine what that seemingly crazy idea might actually be like if you explore it further in your mind.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 17 Comments »

Author: Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Well there is no wonder this book became very popular in a short time. It’s a wonderful book to read with lessons in communication and marketing that put immediate changes into your way of thinking about your influence in what you write and say.

The brothers, Dan and Chip Heath have put a set of studies on communication and human nature to the test and drawn not only useful, but easy to absorb and apply steps to make your ideas that you present to others more "sticky".  That is to say, they will be remembered, have more impact and increase the chance of causing lasting change.  The concepts written about in the book are applied beautifully by example in the title and cover as well as the duct tape patch job has actually been embossed out on the books cover.  A brilliant idea that ensures the title of the book at first glace will even stick in your mind.

While the book might seem from the topic to fit only the presenting, marketing or sales type of roles and personalities, it is certainly not limited to those groups of people.  It is an entertaining book that will enable anyone to share their ideas more effectively and to explore the reasons that an idea will last, whether that is in a story you tell, or an idea you have to share.  It will definitely transform your thinking when it comes to your communication and it will engage your mind on simple principles that will enable you to have more winning ideas applied in a way so your message will stick!

The book is segmented into 6 pieces that the authors say are the principles behind any sticky idea.  They are:

• S implicity – make ideas simple by who it’s presented to and how it is described and delivered, regardless of what complexity it is drawn from
• U nexpectedness – using shock or surprise to draw attention and then taking them deeper through genuine interest that will last
• C oncreteness – putting ideas in a perspective anyone can understand and relate to, while making them obvious and hard hitting
• C redibility – use common or believable evidence (people and things) to make your idea easy to access and something that can quickly be trusted
• E motions – ideas can benefit from having a deep emotional connection to morals, beliefs, values or relational bonds
• S tories – put your ideas into memorable and interesting stories to realize the advantages of story telling with your ideas

Many stories are used as evidence and they include urban legends, low-fare airlines, mission to the moon, soap operas, genetics, Disney, nuclear war, classic tests, famous people, state missions, fast food diets, smoking and many many other topics demonstrating brilliantly the sticky ideas that worked in each. They prove these principles and clearly demonstrate why they are so memorable and effective.

The authors make real these concepts by stories as example, but they also explore data from studies and surveys in many areas as evidence as well.  They do this the whole way through with a touch of humor, easy reading, valuable topics and making what could be made very complex, quite simple.  I love how they show so well in their writing exactly it is that they are in fact, writing about and the book is one you will remember, the concepts live on with techniques to apply them and I’m sure you would enjoy the book if you have any interest in it’s message at all.

Like any book, it is only as useful as you take application of it.  I did however, find there is much more applicable content and guides from Made to Stick than there was in similar books like the Tipping Point or Blink .

You can grab a bunch of free outlines and content by the authors here .  It’s good content and quite useful whether you’ve read the book or not, so do check that out!

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 7 Comments »

This article is part of a series called, "Maximum Productivity " in which I’ll explore the topic of attitude.

See the rest of the series here:
Intro: Maximum Productivity: Series Introduction
Part 1: Maximum Productivity: Perspective
Part 2: Maximum Productivity: Attitude
Part 3: Maximum Productivity: Focus
Part 4: Maximum Productivity: Persistence
Part 5: Maximum Productivity: Adventure
Part 6: Maximum Productivity: Connections

Every avenue of life has one variable that allows you to have a unique experience from it.  That is your attitude.  You can experience the exact set of events as 100 other people, but you will have your own unique experience, as will each of the other people.  The way you experience something and how you think and feel through that is what makes you, YOU!  The attitude you have and demonstrate completely shapes not only your actions at that specific moment, but your entire personality and character.  Similarly, it shapes the way you look at productivity and that’s what we’ll look at here.

Self Confidence

The biggest area I see suffering when people do not have a healthy attitude is self confidence.  I don’t want to label an attitude as good or bad as that seems to superficial to me but what I do want to do is lean those terms to what I would call a healthy or unhealthy attitude.  A healthy attitude when it comes to maximizing your productivity is one that further enables a person to accomplish the things they put their mind to.  An unhealthy attitude is one that diminishes that.  The things that affect that are really a collection of the thoughts, words, expression and body posture.  All these things make up your physiology and it leaves in your mind, your own interpretation of what you think of yourself.  Looking at that over a variety of actions and time is what really shapes your self confidence.  If you look to build that confidence by choosing and steering your mind and make visible the actions you want, you have direct control of what becomes your attitude.  There are many ways to choose and control your attitude and instead of getting into many details, I’ll simply reference a few articles I’ve written before that should help to control and set the attitude that is healthy for maximum productivity!

• Beliefs: They’re Entirely Yours to Control
• Goal Setting: Setting and Identifying
• Passion: Find your passion in life
• You Choose Every Response
• Stop Complaining To Instantly Improve Your Life
• A Guide to Mastering Your State of Mind

Motivation

A big part of productivity is about understanding motivation and to see where your attitude ties in with that.  I recently wrote an article about How to Find and Develop your Own Internal Motivation and this is a major step in shaping a productive attitude.  The things that motivate you in a positive way with regards to attitude is anything that leads you closer to your productive actions and results.  If it steers you away from or deters you from those then it’s not a productive motivator.  If you are to stop and list all the things that motivate and demotivate you towards being more productive, you can then begin to choose to engage in the helpful things and stay away from the ones that hinder you.  The more you experience the things that help motivate you, the more you will see progress and improvements in your productivity and this continues to cascade.

Creativity

Another aspect of a healthy attitude for maximum productivity is with your creativity.  Creativity is something that enables people to get unstuck in difficult circumstances, see solutions to problems that might otherwise hold someone back and it gives you an opportunity to try new things.  It is an important trait of any highly productive person and so exercising your creative mind strengthens it and continues to build an attitude of working towards an end.  Carrying through with that and learning from creative work is what enables you to make quicker judgments and decisions on similar circumstances in the future, which continues to increase your productivity.

Health

I included health as an important aspect of building a productive attitude because I constantly see how health affects people.  It is certainly related to self-confidence but I believe it is a strong enough component on its own, it’s worth including.  Health is more than just your physical health, it also includes your mental health, spiritual health and relational health.  These areas all highly impact people’s attitudes and any one of them can quickly shift a person from a great day and mood to a terrible one, or vise versa.

If you want to examine ways to improve your attitude, then these 4 areas are great starting areas.  Identify the things you love in each and do more of it.  The things you don’t like, stop.  It’s fairly simple.  For example, if you find that your mental health is affected because you like to learn, then spend more time learning.  This will improve your mental health and can help your attitude.  Not only that, but it’s a powerful way to see that you can steer your actions which applies to other productivity areas as well.

Happiness

Last and certainly not least, I feel that happiness plays an important role in attitude which further shapes a person’s ability to be productive.  Everything that happens to us influences us, but how we react and how we let that affect us is a direct reflection on our choices and IF we let it change our mood.  You have a choice whether you want some sad news to make you sad as well or if you can continue to see positive things and be happy even amongst sad circumstances or events.  A person with a happy attitude can generally deal with bad circumstances more effectively because they are able to keep a positive mind and look for ways to improve and get back to a happy state.  If you let yourself become what you experience, you will likely find yourself having a lot of difficult days with regular poor moods.  That inhibits the mind from seeing positive solutions and getting attentive to do productive things.

When people who are very happy encounter unhappy circumstances, they take responsibility to change that and make things better.  This applies with productivity as well and is a superb training grounds to not only look for ways to improve and get better, but for overcoming situations that would otherwise get in the way of you reaching your maximum productivity!

Posted by Mike King under Life | 14 Comments »