Smeagol's "precious" process won't get it done

Scott Berkun nails this point about doing meaningful work. Don't be Precious (with your ideas):

Obsessing about every little choice is a sure fire way to prevent great work from happening. Try a bold choice. Put the beginning at the end, or the top at the bottom. Blow your work up into jagged pieces and put them back together. You might just find this opens doors you didn’t even know were there.... [Otherwise] you'll never call anything finished, denying yourself the essential experience of looking back from a distance and learning from what you’ve already made.

The last sentence is particularly interesting to me. Like many of you, I know perfectionists who will pour over the details, never releasing the final idea or product into the wild. But in doing so, they are, as Berkun points out, doing a huge disservice to themselves. They'll never benefit from an honest accounting by others of what they've done. And of equal importance, they'll deny themselves the personal perspective that could, given a willingness to let go, reveal the way forward.

Reflected as we are in the things we do and make, that kind of attention makes of us a cracked image. It called to my mind the one posted here.

You will inevitably be embarrassed by version one of any successful idea. So let go.

Stay curious.

Wayne

image: Some rights reserved by me5otron

Creative advice: Ignore everybody

Brand consultant and cartoonist Hugh Mac­Leod has some good advice if you're in the business of being creative (you are).

Rule number one, posted by Douglas Eby on his blog on creativity:

Ignore everybody.

It sounds counterintuitive, right? But the more unusual or different your vision is, the less others will be able to help you with it. Heck, YOU may not even know where the thought is headed.

Reading the advice, I was reminded me of this Howard H. Aiken quote:

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats

The sad truth is that original ideas are often difficult for others to grasp and the usual boxes people will try to put them in have virtually nothing to say about the idea's potential and lot more to say about how uncomfortable real change is. So don't be put off by the resistance you encounter. Yes, it's possible your idea or creative vision won't work. But it's certain, if it is an original, that nobody knows that now.

Stay curious!

If you haven't bought your Festival Pass, you'll need to act now. They are going fast.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by f_mafra

The world is too big to know

We are drawn to edges, to our own/parapets and sea-walls. - Robin Robertson

I wasn't going to blog this piece, but having run across a related post that helpfully makes a point I had missed earlier, I will. This ranking of the world's most influential thinkers "uses network analysis similar to Google page rank" to compile its results.

Fair enough. The key word, though, is "influential."

According to "The World's Most Influential Thinkers Revealed" at Technology Review - yes, there is some sarcasm in that lede - influence comes in descending order beginning with economists and political theorists, which in my current charitable frame mind is not the best way to start any list of big thinkers. Technology Review hastens to add that the list is dominated by thinkers in the west and that the source material was generally written in English. It doesn't mention the fact, raised in the comments section, that the overwhelming majority of those that are listed are men. That of course has to change.

My point is that to have influence one must have standing. But as you read this, there may be a mind trapped by mental illness or chemical dependency that nonetheless holds within its folds a workable theory that unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity, or, because this influential mind of the future is only now discovering the talent, might be able to lay down meter with the spare, haunted and elegiac geometry of a Robin Robertson. Her influence will be aesthetic. And if I may: we need poets now more than ever.

In fact, we need every kind of mind.

Moreover, the world, like any "best-of" list, is much too big to know with any completeness. I am as heartened by that fact as I am saddened by people in possession of One Big Idea. I'm also certain that the wonderfully talented and influential people first mentioned by Technology Review share this common trait: they have restless and curious minds. Not knowing drives them toward vast expanses that empty ever onward, and like many before and many to come, they are motivated by reasons they may not understand and by finds that will demand from them answers, the only suitable ransom for the new questions they now have. They are pricked and poisoned. They are urgent, these people. Some find themselves at the IdeaFestival.

We hope you will too. Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

The IdeaFestival is a brain altering substance

The most interesting things come from people interested in things. - artist Hasan Elahi at IdeaFestival 2012

Is the IdeaFestival a brain altering substance?

No, no. I don't mean that kind of alteration, although being buzzed for days afterward is one common side effect of attending the IdeaFestival.

But having read over the years how the brain physically changes in response to stimuli, how it's malleable and oh-so plastic, it's not so surprising that our neurons might work overtime during what in Louisville has become a full week of events that emphasize the joy in discovery. We know, for example, that people skilled in meditation can alter the size the brain responsible for empathy, which means that monks can physically grow more compassionate. I love that idea. Likewise, as judged by the activities of mirror neurons, power, or the feeling of power, can affect how we infer motive and thereby short circuit what we can learn.

What specific kind of change, then, can one expect at the IdeaFestival?

I know from personal experience that listening to Daniel Tammet explain how his mind and mine aren't all that different, or to Jane McGonigal gently insist that play is central to creativity, or watching Daniel Simons illustrate just how easy it is to miss what's right in front of our noses - I know that the festival can produce a feeling of being humbled. In some cases I've been nearly overwhelmed or awed by what I've heard. As Oliver Burkeman confirms in this recent video interview, awe is not always comfortable, but it does provide a sense of scale and place that is uniquely suited to subsequent mind opening. The people who speak at the festival are all very accomplished and, generally, scary smart.

Be still. I predict that the specific change you'll experience is a new found desire to ask questions, which at some point in the week will be quickly followed by this internal whisper.

So that's it.

Festival passes are going fast! If you're planning to attend this year, you may want to act now.

Wayne

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

The IdeaFestival's one and only rule

I love meeting people who discover the festival and decide then and there that they just HAVE to be a part of it.

I was once that guy.

Yesterday, I took part in a couple of IdeaFestival meetings with various organizers and interested people. Following the second get together late in the afternoon, I was approached by someone who was new to the whole idea and wanted to know more. Over the years, I've learned that the most common question we get when meeting with people about the festival is this one.

What is it?

Here's my answer to that question. The IdeaFestival is a celebration of the central fact of early 21st century life, which, paraphrasing Daniel Pink, is that it's become a whole-brain world. Reason and logic will take you a long way, but whether you're an artist, businesswoman or scientist, an ability to envision an alternate path, to imagine, to connect the factual dots as it were, will get you where you want to be. In this world, the meaning makers win.

The biggest struggle most of us have in our day to day lives is the struggle to refocus, to escape the routine and the rote answers the routine brings. It's work to just look up from whatever and whoever might be on our minds at the moment.

With lives emulsified with more and more data, with demands on our attention and with old businesses being replaced with the new - anyone remember Kodak? - being curious is the difference between the ordinary and extraordinary. For people like me the frontiers are internal. The hard problem of consciousness, for example, is endlessly interesting. For others they frontiers are external. True, a restless mind guarantees nothing. But without a desire to walk toward the unknown and a certain tolerance for uncertainty, nothing of value ever happens.

To be an expert one must take risks.

The terrible business truth today is that doing the same old thing may get you the same old result. It could also drive your business or organization into extinction. Apple is the most capitalized company on the planet because it created whole new markets. It broke the rules. And now it gets to make the rules. I've since forgotten the statistic, but more than - probably much more than - half of its revenue is derived from products that didn't even exist as recently as 2007.

Every IdeaFestival fan or organization that makes its way to Louisville for one week in September makes a faith statement. As Kris Kimel explained to the afternoon audience yesterday, we don't do tracks. There is no business track. There is no arts' track. There is no day set aside just for physicians, accountants or marketing professionals. One presentation on mindfulness will follow another on what nature can teach us about complex systems will follow another on what magic says about belief and everyday life.

No person who goes to the festival knows what she will find. The measurables, the metrics and measurements (gah!), have almost nothing to do any answers supplied by the incredible people who show up year after year to speak. The only measurable is the electrifying connection you will make, let's say three hours and fifteen minutes into the second day of the nerdocalypse when you realize that what speaker A and speaker B were saying has a lot to do with your situation C.

That flash of insight is all yours. But you must do one thing and one thing only to have that moment.

Stay curious.

I hope to see you in September.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by eflon