Be Creative – Or Else!
There’s a fine line between wage slave and creative genius. People on the wage slave line have steady jobs, reliable incomes, and all the excitement they can handle. The world needs wage slaves. Without them nothing would get accomplished. Children need stable and reliable parents. Bills need to be paid and food needs to be put on the table. In spite of the derogatory term I picked, “wage slaves,” people who conform to this type are good, necessary, and helpful people.
People on the creative genius side are often artists, poor, and they manage to have more fun than they can handle. Sometimes they’re even diagnosed as having ADHD, personality disorders, or just downright freaking wacky. Drug use happens here more often than not, as does variety of crimes. Scary, isn’t it? But without these people we wouldn’t have art, books, music, or even technology.
John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, has a 36 minute YouTube video where he tells a boatload of light bulb jokes. In between jokes he discusses creativity and how to get in the mood to be creative. More importantly, he then goes on to tell how to get out of that mood and do something about it. Watching that rang true to me with a lot of things I’ve discovered, but never found a way to put words to.
To sum it up, Mr. Cleese asserts that it takes about 90 minutes to have a good creative brainstorming session. Ninety minutes sounds great to me, but I’ve found I can do it in a lot less. It’s how I write, and how I keep the infamous “writer’s block” at bay.
For me writing is a relaxing process. It allows me to slip into a meditative or zen-like state. I start writing and let my mind go, channeling my thoughts through my fingers. Even if I’m not sure what to write, I can start writing something else (e.g. a blog post) and by the time I’ve finished it I’m ready to keep writing. It’s a drug, in fact, although it’s all natural.
I’ll go out on a limb here. Have you ever found yourself thinking about something and all of a sudden something wakes you up, so to speak? The daydream is over and you have to respond to someone that asked you a question, stop the car for a runaway cow that’s standing in the middle of the road, or answer the question from a police officer about why you have a bloody axe in your hand. All of a sudden your yanked out of that warm happy place you were just in and you really want to go back there, but in some cases you can’t even remember what it was you were thinking about. That’s the creative zone. The happy place. The mode where productivity goes to die but inspiration flourishes.
By using my fingers to think for me I trick my inspiration into being productive. I daydream while I’m recording it. Some days I’ve even had my eyelids flutter closed as I nearly fell asleep while writing. I’ll come back later to do a self edit and find some really wacky crap in those areas, but it’s never so wacky that I can’t use it. Heck, sometimes it’s the best part! It probably helps that I average 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night (sometimes less).
I honestly believe the most successful people in the world – the ones that made a living do what they enjoy and not by solely inheriting a trust fund – do so because they know how to be selectively creative, and selectively productive. They can straddle the line between creative genius and wage slave. Sure, there are hundreds or thousands of other variables out there involving luck, right place, right product, right time, and others but being able to dream up a thing and then find a way to do something with it is the key.
To learn more about Jason Halstead, visit his website to read about him, sign up for his newsletter, or check out some free samples of his books at http://www.booksbyjason.com .
