I hope this finds you well and enjoying the summer. In the last few years I’ve been putting more of my creative energy into writing books, and another one is coming out here in the UK on August 1: "Marketing for Entrepreneurs." I’ll tell you more about it in the next bulletin.
I’ve also landed a New York agent for my novel and have my fingers crossed that he will find a publisher who will fall in love with it – watch this space!
For now, here are the items I’ve found the most inspiring and useful lately:
1: Don’t let the woods be silent
Michael Michalko is one of the top creativity gurus, and a long interview with him by Molly Childers at creativity-portal.com contains lots of good tips. But what struck me most was a story he told about his godfather, John Haffich, a poet who tried to encourage Michalko to write poetry, too. Michalko tried, but never felt they were good enough. He picks up the story:
"When he was in a nursing home and dying, I visited him and told him my thoughts about my inadequacies as a poet. He could barely whisper at the time and asked for a pencil and paper. He wrote the following poem and gave it to me with a smile.
Use what talents you have.
The woods would be silent
if no bird sang
except those that sang best.
Michalko says, "I carry that poem in my wallet to this day as one of my most treasured possessions. It was one of those little things that changed the direction of my life."
Action: Is there something you’d like to do but have been holding yourself back because you don’t do it as well as the best? Could it be time to do it anyway?
2: That extra fifteen minutes can lead to gold
Speaker Scott Halford relates the story of Olympic Gold gymnast Peter Vidmar, who led the U.S. gymnastics team to a gold medal for the pommel horse competition. "What was his secret to edging out the other atheletes? He stayed an extra 15 minutes after practice and did his routine one more time. Stay and practice a little longer and it eventually it adds up to your own version of a gold medal." Halford advises, "Read one more article, take one more class, have one more discussion or call one more prospect."
Action: What would help you the most if you did it for an additional 15 minutes a day? What will you stop doing for 15 minutes a day to make time for that?
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3: What’s your question of the day?
Motivational author Romanus Wolter suggests that when you get stuck, develop a question of the day. State the obstacle in the form of a question and ask colleagues and friends or search online for the solution. Sooner or later you’ll find someone who has tackled the same issue and found a way around it. Wolter suggests not stopping with the first good answer because there may be a better one.
Even before you start searching for the answer, getting yourself to formulate the issue as one question is a great way to get in touch with the core of the problem.
Action: If there’s an obstacle you’re facing at the moment, what question would capture it? Who would be the best person or what would be the best online source you could consult?
4: I suspected this didn’t work… (and here’s what does)
I’ve always been skeptical of the self-help advice to use affirmations such as, "I am thin," if you are overweight, or "I make a million a year," when you’re barely able to cover your rent. Now a study published in the journal Psychological Science confirms it.
The author of the report said repeating positive statements worked only if it reinforced what the person already genuinely believed to be true. If the person knew it wasn’t true, the counter-argument ("Actually, I’m fat," or "A million? I’m broke!") overwhelms the positive.
Action: One method that I think does work is to figure out what behavior would move you in the direction of your desired outcome, then visualize yourself doing it before you do it for real. For instance, if you want to lose weight and have been invited to a friend’s place for dinner, picture yourself saying "no, thank you" to the dessert. It works even better if you imagine it twice: first as though you’re watching yourself on a movie screen, then through your own eyes.
5: A new way to generate ideas
Designer Nate Williams described on his blog (www.n8w.com) a new twist on generating ideas. I’ve adapted it slightly, and here are the steps:
1. State the outcome you want. For instance, let’s say it’s "Writing an educational, entertaining book about creativity."
2. For each of the key words (writing, educational, entertaining, book, creativity) generate a list of ten other things associated with them. For instance, for "educational" I might list class, encyclopedia, lecture, atlas, parable, advice column, and so on.
3. Next randomly combine these – one from each of the lists – to see what interesting new combinations come up.
Here are a few for my example:
Letter – online course – theme park – inventions: Organize the book as though it’s a trip through a creative theme park and I could offer it first as an online course.
Blogging – advice column – tourism – Apple Macs: Get a bunch of creativity-related blogs to ask people all over the world what their creative challenges are and organize the book as a series of answers to those questions.
Diary – lecture – cartoon – ideas: Write the book as a series of lectures illustrated with cartoons, along with examples of how I applied the ideas during the period that I was writing the book.
Action: Intrigued? Give it a try. As you can see from my example, you don’t need to use every word in the combinations, sometimes combining two of the words is enough to generate a new solution.
6: And a quote to consider:
"An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he’s in…the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work." – Charles Kettering
Until next time,
Jurgen
PS: If you haven’t looked at my blog lately you’ve missed posts on the importance of never growing up, whether grammar matters, how many creative ideas you can have in a day, and many more. To visit the blog now, go to www.timetowrite.blogs.com. You can also sign up to get the posts every day via email.
If you want to a free course (eight mini-lessons, one per week) on overcoming procrastination, just sign up at www.tameyourinnercritic.com. You’ll also find a wealth of right-brain breakthrough ways to achieve your goals in my newest book, "Focus: the power of targeted thinking." The Website for it is www.focusquick.com.
