I discovered this wonderful little product a couple weeks ago, and wanted to share it with you. It's called Noteboard. Essentially it is a whiteboard that folds to fit in your pocket.
I love whiteboards. If you've ever been in a meeting with me, you probably know that my brain goes into overdrive whenever I can get up and start thinking on a whiteboard. There's something about the tactical feedback, the immediacy of creation and the ability to quickly erase that helps me to think at my best. Someday, when I'm not renter any longer, I will have a home office with a huge wall of whiteboard. Until then, I will use Noteboard.
It has been really useful for meetings held somewhere other than a conference room. I've also used it to cue actors during rehearsal, and a few other random things. At $10, you can't really beat it.
All creativity has context. Any idea that you bring to life will exist amidst other ideas and be experienced by people who also have ideas. The closer you can get to your context, the more creative you will be.
The work of generating an idea, refining it, and executing it often happens when the creator is sequestered. This is natural and even necessary at times, but the farther from your idea’s ultimate context you find yourself the more aloof your ideas will be.
For example: I write plays for students (13-18) that are produced at summer camps. My context is camp. I were never to visit camp or speak to a student, can you imagine the kinds of plays that I would write? If I spent all of my time in jazz clubs and coffee houses, places known for their creative energy, and no time in the context of my audience what do you imagine is going to happen to my writing? There’s no mystery there. I’m going to get out of touch very quickly.
Personally, I would much rather spend time in a coffee house than at a youth camp, but for the sake of my creative work I need to invest some substantial time with students. I need to know what my audience thinks and feels. I need to know how they think and why. The only way I can do that is to spend time in their context. I cannot become a student. I will never be 16 again (thankfully), but I must preserve an understanding of how a 16 year old is motivated.
Highly creative people are able to move fluidly between contexts. They operate effortlessly in more than just one world. The myth that a creative person is going to be socially inept and quirky is damaging and dangerous. I believe many creative people live up to that false expectation. Don’t let yourself be one of them.
I've been on baseball overload of late, so I thought I would share. I grew up watching Atlanta Braves baseball on TBS. I was nine years old when the Braves won the World Series in 1995. This season, in a fit of nostalgia that I do not regret, I bought a subscription to MLB.tv, so I could watch the Braves once again. Today marks the release of longtime Atlanta pitcher, John Smoltz's autobiography, Starting and Closing: Perserverence, Faith and One More Year.
This video is from the Braves' home opener where one of the classiest acts in music, The Civil Wars, performed The National Anthem. The only thing missing from it, as far as I'm concerned, is a slice of apple pie.
By now you know that your ideas will be the product of your inputs. Your creativity will be formed and fueled by the artistry with which you interact. Your creativity is fed by the creativity that you consume (#96). This happens directly when you borrow ideas (#7) and indirectly when you become an always-student (#15).
You can influence the quality and quantity of your creativity by changing your quality and quantity of your inputs (#28). When you find a piece of art that resonates with your soul, interact with it as deeply as you can.
Most people remain distant observers. They watch a movie once and forget about it. They see a beautifully constructed design or hear a piece of music that inspires them and stop at that. They are inspired by the final product but are unable or unwilling to interact with the art at a deeper level.
But you are different. You consume art with purpose. You can’t afford to be a disengaged audience member. You need to get more out of each interaction with art than the average person. You need to understand the mindset and intent of the artist when the piece was conceived. You need to know the challenges faced and obstacles overcame. You need to question each artistic choice, not as a critic but as a student. You must seek to understand every nuance of the art that you consume.
Listen to the artist explain himself. Read the footnotes. Watch the director’s commentary. Seek to understand. Pull apart the ideas of other people in order to understand how they were imagined and constructed.
The more deeply you interact with that art that you consume, the more creative you will become. The process of turning abstract ideas into tangible things can sometimes seem mystical. The more ideas you dissect, the more your idea of creativity will morph. The mysticism will away, and you will discover a scientific, sustainable process for manufacturing new ideas.
If you've ever wondered what Word of Life might look like in your church's youth group or children's ministry, you do not want to miss our first annual Product Release Event on Thursday May 3rd. We will be broadcasting from right here at WOL Headquarters in Schroon Lake, NY to unveil all of the new products for the upcoming ministry year, and announce a few exciting changes. Here's my friends Karl & Hayley with the invitation.
If you already have Word of Life in your church, or if you've only just thought about it, this event is for you. I've been writing script and working on pre production for it over the last month or so, and today I am in the studio building sets for it. (Yes... the chair is going away. Sad, I know.) I look forward to seeing you on Thursday night!
Words represent ideas. The more words that you know, the more ideas you will understand. Expand your vocabulary, and you will become a more savvy handler of ideas, or in other words, more creative.
If you will indulge me one small nerd joke, I’d like to tell you about a man who gave up reading the dictionary because he couldn’t understand the plot. Sadly, he never realized that it was a collection of short stories.
Every word carries with it a wealth of information. They have a definition in the sense that they are representative of a specific, objective idea that can also be represented by a group of different words. Words also have tone and color. They each conjure a mood uniquely their own. Some words that have nearly identical definitions have drastically different attitudes. For example: close and slam, hit and bump, hang and rig, go and escape.
The more words that you have committed to memory, and are able to wield successfully, the more your own mental dexterity will develop. Your vocabulary will hold open the door of inspiration and let the ideas flow in. Similarly, you will be able to communicate your ideas to other people with a precision directly proportionate to the size of your vocabulary.
There is an undeniable yet mysterious connection between technology and creativity. When a new form of technology is adopted by artists and creators in a holistic way, it can be hard to imagine life before that particular piece of technology existed, but it did. Believe it or not, graphic design was happening before Photoshop was released.
While technology is not required for creative progress, there is no doubt that technology does open the door to new and different kinds of creative thinking. Technology is about possibilities. As technology develops, more and more possibilities become available to the creator, and sometimes these new possibilities are so compelling that an entirely new genre is created because of an emerging technology. An example:
In the 19th century, a French company figured out how mix paint with linseed oil and store it in pig bladders. This was a big deal because prior to this discovery, each artists mixed his paint pigmentations by hand. You couldn’t just go down to the store and buy blue paint. You had to make it yourself by grinding up natural pigments. Oil-based paints could be manufactured in all different colors and were quickly being sold commercially. The mainstream art community rejected this new paint out of hand because it removed an element of the artistry. The practice of mixing raw pigments made painting very difficult. Oil paints removed the barrier between the "true" artists and the populous. This was unacceptable to the artistic elite. But there were a handful of renegades who jumped onboard the oil-based paint movement. They learned that the relative convenience of pre-packaged paint meant that they were not confined to painting in the art studio. Because of this new technology they could set their canvas alongside a river in the French countryside and paint outdoors. This portable painting method brought with it new challenges. The artists mixed colors quickly by combining together multiple shades. The new oil-based paints were found to dry much slower than the tradition paints, so the artists were forced to drop paint over still wet paint. The result was an entirely new style of art. The mainstream establishment sneered that it was a shortcut method that produced lower quality. The new style finally got a name when someone wrote a scathing op ed piece in a Paris newspaper. They were called Impressionists.
Seurat, Degas, Renoir, and Monet were among the rebellious group of youngsters who took advantage of the new technology and launched an art revolution that touched every major discipline including painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and music.
Growing in creativity sometimes means learning how to use new tools and technologies. Creativity is certainly possible apart from new technology, but mastery of technology will open up new creative possibilities.
Gertrude Stein once posed the question, "Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?" Books like Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry answer emphatically that there is no reason. The written word is utilitarian, in that it accomplishes the task of communication, but in the hands of a skilled artist, prose can also be captivating, beautiful, and even transcendent. The best sequences of words are both useful and pleasurable.
Most of the fiction that I read is sensational in some way. Often filled with bizarre characters, my 'for fun' reading is usually infused with a synthetic form of love, mystery, terror or all of the above. Many of the books that I read are composed in otherworldly settings are either the product of absolute fantasy or, while claiming to be historical, are manipulated to deliver the greatest degree of excitement. Hannah Coulter has none of these things, but I thoroughly enjoyed it none the less. Reading this book is like drawing in breath after breath of clean country air. To some it is wondrously foreign, to some it is a welcome escape from the urban jungle, and to some it is home.
Told through the eyes of a twice widowed farmer's daughter now in her eighties, the story is real. So real in fact, that I found myself forgetting that the characters and farming community contained on these pages are all imagined. The best fiction will do that. It will draw you into itself and compel you to leave your world behind for a while. Hannah Coulter did this for me. It also called me to ponder a few things that I haven't in a long time. Things like the beauty of the mundane, the price of technological progress, the virtue of gratitude and the symbiotic connection between people and their place in the world.
This novel was my introduction to Wendell Berry, a Kentucky native, whose ability to conjure a community full of multifaceted characters is reminiscent of William Faulkner. Both Faulkner and Berry favor rural, southern settings. Both men employ a writing style that is rich, almost indulgent without seeming stuffy. Their prose invites readers to savor vivid descriptions and ideas big enough to occupy any mind, but not so big as to be repulsive.
I listened through Hannah Coulter as an audiobook, exclusively in my car over the period of two weeks. Rushing each day from home to work and back again, I found my commute getting longer and longer as I settled into the book's calm. I am confident that this book lowered my blood pressure.
If you usually read books about wizards, zombies or teenage vampires, you might spend all of your time waiting for this book to get started and miss out on all of its beauty in the meantime. This work, like its title character, does not have anything to prove. It just is, and I for one, love the way that it is.
Books, movies, art, music, design, and the crazy theories of egomaniacal philosophers are all on the menu. The size of your appetite is directly proportionate to your current capacity for creative thought, and like creativity, your desire to sample new fare can expand, but not everything is going to appeal to you.
We all have preferences. Even the most broadly read among us have consumed a story somewhere along the line that did nothing to light the fire within them. It’s okay to not like something.
Our culture is so militantly inclusive that sometimes it can seem uncouth to admit that you don’t care for a piece of art that someone else claims as their favorite. There is a growing pressure for universal acceptance of all forms of creativity. The trouble is, not everything is going to please you. While there might be redemptive elements in a particular piece of art, if you don’t like it, it isn’t going to feed your creative soul.
If you want to be more creative, you will exercise your right as a human being to not-like some things. Feed yourself, and only you are going to know what will do that.
I discovered this wonderful little product a couple weeks ago, and wanted to share it with you. It's called Noteboard. Essentially it is a whiteboard that folds to fit in your pocket.
