What would you do if fear was not a factor?

In this video, artist Craig Costello makes a couple of points about how fear can often prevent us from taking necessary chances. If chance-taking is important for discovery, and it is, then his experiences are instructive.

There's this way of being timely and now and then just being trendy. That's where you have to take risks.... You are going to fail. At time you will fail miserably, and times you'll fail not so miserably. That's OK. You just have to keep it moving.

As a creative, Costello's point interests me because so much about today - about today's trends - is informed by the easy information absorbed inside this deep and echoing well called the Web (feel free to include this blog post in that category), which far from liberating can actually narrow a focus. Fear absorbs new information like a sponge. It also tends to confirm existing biases, which, in a state of anxiety, favor inaction over risk.

In a former life working with IT professionals I often heard that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." But while these purse holders marched toward individual retirements and pensions, the personal computer revolutionized information work. And when that realization dawned (even closer to retirement), the refrain simply substituted "Microsoft" for Big Blue. And now iPhone and Android devices have put that power into the hands of about half of the buyers of cell phones today.

Change happens with or without you.

So have faith. You have something to say. The belief that your next step won't be the last, that past is not prologue, that despite setbacks in this case, that case might prove different, can be difficult. I far too often inhabit that negative mental space, even when I have reason not to. To counteract that, I've developed a habit of asking myself at moments when I feel particularly riven by self-doubt, "what would I do if fear were not a factor?" It's a remarkably effective way of thinking about alternate futures, and it momentarily frees me from the concern at hand. It's my way of "just keep moving" and a great way to think about changes I might make to improve the odds of success.

Secondly, as someone who is interested in self-expression as a means to a creative end, Costello talks about the tension between "going out" - aka, finding the trend - and, alternatively, discovering what he thinks by making a conscious decision to make time for himself. Of course, what he thinks may not win him either lauds or profits, but it is immeasurably satisfying. The alternative, a kind of surfacing envy, the game of comparison, is a no-win situation. It just accentuates the fear of creating something worth calling your own.

This Miles Davis quote applies: “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

Give the video a watch. Costello's quiet dignity is refreshing.

Wayne

"Restless Genes" drive us forward?

The urge to explore is central to the identity of humans, not simply because it expands on the pleasure of what is already known, but because, amplified by the market, the application of new knowledge can have a social dimension, benefiting more than the discoverer.

This excerpt from National Geographic's "Restless Genes" suggests two forces that may be the most responsible for useful discovery - the convergence of our interior and exterior worlds:

[Developmental and evolutionary geneticist Jim Noonan's] research focuses on the genes that build two key systems: our limbs and our brains. 'So I’m biased,' he says, when I press him about what makes us explorers. 'But if you want to boil this down, I’d say our ability to explore comes from those two systems....'

Together, says Noonan, these differences compose a set of traits uniquely suited for creating explorers. We have great mobility, extraordinary dexterity, 'and, the big one, brains that can think imaginatively.' And each amplifies the others: Our conceptual imagination greatly magnifies the effect of our mobility and dexterity, which in turn stirs our imaginations further.

'Think of a tool,' says Noonan. 'If you can use it well and have imagination, you think of more applications for it.' As you think of more ways to use the tool, you imagine more goals it can help you accomplish....

Elsewhere in "Restless Genes," Alison Gopnik, a child-development psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that children act very much like little scientists.

...human children play by creating hypothetical scenarios with artificial rules that test hypotheses. Can I build a tower of blocks as tall as I am? What’ll happen if we make the bike ramp go even higher? How will this schoolhouse game change if I’m the teacher and my big brother is the student? Such play effectively makes children explorers of landscapes filled with competing possibilities. We do less of this as we get older, says Gopnik, and become less willing to explore novel alternatives and more conditioned to stick with familiar ones. 'It’s the difference,' she says, 'between going to your usual, reliable restaurant versus a new place that might be great or awful.'

Innovators and discoverers, it seems to me, are animated by the best of what makes us human. The idea that it just might be better around the corner - or in the morning - or across the ocean - or, as Gopnik says, with this little change to our experimental process - brings a competing and potentially beneficial possibility into view.

As we enter 2013, the IdeaFestival invites you to join us as we explore a world of possibility. If you don't already, please follow us on Twitter @ideafestival or fan our Facebook page. Sign up for an IdeaFestival University class. And make plans to attend the IdeaFestival in Louisville, Sept. 24 - 27.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Thank You for a Wonderful Year!

Spend some time in the next few days with loved ones or romp outside in the snow. Take in a movie or stand in nature's darkened theater. Find Betelgeuse. Sit down with that book you've been meaning to read. Laugh out loud.

People that accept us, destinations that call us, slowly dawning realizations that steel us, unexpected acts of kindness that lay us low - they make life worth the living.

To the many fans, followers and sponsors of the IdeaFestival, thank you for a wonderful 2012! We couldn't have this much fun without you. Be well and safe this holiday season.

The blog will take a short break until Jan. 2. So until then, please follow us @ideafestival on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. We'll be there between sips of eggnog and after the stove has warmed up the hands and fingers.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by Will Merydith

Breaking and the bricked-up heart

Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime.

Recent research suggests that language, like matter, cools as it expands, its corpus requiring fewer and fewer new words to communicate essential meaning.

Following a wonderful naturalistic meditation on the Hummingbird heart  - "the price of their ambition is a life closer to death" - Joyas Volardores concludes with this passage on the human vessel. I thought I'd share it with IdeaFestival blog readers. This spare, poetic language manages to communicate so much with so little:

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Wayne

Still

Linking to a weekend article on introspection, Farnam Street suggests we can learn something from Sherlock Holmes: discovery often depends on an ability to be figuratively still.

From the article in question, Maria Konnikova's "The Power of Concentration:"

In 2011, researchers from the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that daily meditation-like thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive, approach-oriented emotional states — states that make us more likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it.... (emphasis supplied)

Mindfulness training has even been shown to affect the brain’s default network — the network of connections that remains active when we are in a so-called resting state — with regular meditators exhibiting increased resting-state functional connectivity and increased connectivity generally. After a dose of mindfulness, the default network has greater consistent access to information about our internal states and an enhanced ability to monitor the surrounding environment.

These effects make sense: the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. That’s exactly what Holmes does when he taps together the tips of his fingers, or exhales a fine cloud of smoke. He is centering his attention on a single element. And somehow, despite the seeming pause in activity, he emerges, time and time again, far ahead of his energetic colleagues.

After time with my wife and children during this Christmas season (my tradition), I need (thanks to my introverted nature) ample time to be still without the interruption of voice mail, social media, deadlines, Twitter time lines, email tides and any other chronology that doesn't involve the rising and setting of the sun.

I need that kind of time not because creativity can't happen with a group of people - it clearly can - but because without substantial distraction-free time it's next to impossible know what it is I truly think, to give what is uniquely mine to give. As Konnikova points out, the happy outcome of this meditative state is more connectedness to the interior and exterior worlds.

Next month, I'll be leading a class in Lexington on the subject of being still, "Whatever Happened to Downtime?" The notion behind IdeaFestival University is a simple one: no one know everything, but everyone knows something. Thanks to people like Sophia Dembling and Susan Cain, I've come to understand that introversion and its way of engaging the world has something to say about the pell-mell nature of contemporary living.

I'd love to see you in class.

Wayne