Reintroducing Creativity & Storytelling
So I’ve talked about how entertainment is filtered through a series of changes and agendas that industry gatekeepers enforce in the narrow world of big name movies and big name budgets. I called it the knowledge filter.
I want to discuss the solution this week… reintroducing creativity and storytelling.
I grew up before the accessibility of all kinds of film and digital media technology. And artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionize what was already overturned by the fact that Smartphones have turned everyone into a potential movie director. But the vast majority of cell phone cameras and content have been focused not so much on story - but on personal attention. As in, a teenager telling the world about their life for likes and follows.
This isn’t storytelling in the traditional sense… and it probably won’t ever fill the need for an actual movie or form of entertainment. But an entire generation has grown up on this as their form of entertainment and even news. And that’s a little scary - because they don’t have a storytelling format in their mind. Its impacting their ability to concentrate and complete tasks. Some have been able to hack their attention spans and can focus on about three different things at once. But the brain research on that shows that for every multitask you add, your ability to work and concentrate on things as a whole, decreases.
The solution is re-introducing storytelling.
Its not a method that schools teach because - I’m going to sound conspiratorial for a moment - but creativity once unleashed is not something that is a controllable force. What I mean by this is that creativity is not an exploitable measurable enterprise that can be manipulated into a consistent result. You can’t measure it. You can’t control it. You can’t say its successful by a common test. You can’t solve it like a math problem.
Schools are supposed to teach life skills. The result is that they focus on what is measurable. And those measuring standards have continued to drop, because passing scores are tied to funding.
People who think outside the box can be perceived as threats. They don’t always do well in schools. Yet societies desperately need creativity to survive. Inventions come from creativity. Problem solving for social issues comes from creativity. To look at the world in a slightly different methodology is to open the eyes of someone around you.
I was chatting with a volunteer group leader and I said, “Well… the way I plan is to say, ‘what’s the least amount of product I can put out to appear to be the most efficient?’ And then I answered it. ‘Once a month. So we have one episode a month. That means we only need twelve episodes.’”
He’s a successful small business owner. He suddenly blurts in the middle of my planning explanation, “That’s genius!”
I made his goal doable by introducing a planning system that was achievable, due to the fact that I asked a question from a different angle. This is creativity.
When we reintroduce storytelling, or teach our kids and ourselves different stories - that trains the brain. And kids naturally have imaginations… imagination is like any other muscle, the more you use it, the better you get.
You’ve also seen as we’ve gone through this series and my other blog posts, how vital storytelling is for healing. Its a skill we all need and its a skill that can change the world.
It doesn’t rely on big budgets, or gaining attention, it relies on you, and you alone, changing yourself and eventually those around you with a story. And that goes back to our earliest ancestors sitting around a campfire - creating the cultures that would become civilization.
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