Don't Be the Jackass Whisperer

Found today while skimming the news deposited in my feed reader, this important public service announcement on creativity and innovation from Brene Brown was too good to pass up:

Don't try to win over the haters; you are not a jackass whisperer.

At the IdeaFestival, we talk a lot about the importance of thinking laterally and its relationship to innovation. One just never knows when and where an idea will originate, and it's important for the mental attic to be well stocked. That's why speakers as diverse as Claudia Hammond, Lee Billings, Jason Felts, Debbie Millman, Steve Pemberton any many, many more soon to be announced will appear at IdeaFestival 2014.

The effect is cumulative. And we often hear stories about unexpected connections made over a three or four day period. In fact, some people have been inspired to do some truly bizarre things, like get rid of cable.

But away from the IdeaFestival where the hard work of realizing your vision will inevitably takes place, it's important to remember that there will always be people who think you're nuts, a fool, a crackpot. And you may be nuts, a fool, a crackpot. But here's the genius of the Brene Brown quote, and it goes to the beating heart of any truly original idea.

The critics don't know that now.

If you're fortunate to find people who understand your business idea or creative project, great! You will need allies and friends along the way. But if others simply can't wrap their heads around your goals, don't sweat it. They'll be back if and when you succeed.

Be nice. In the meantime, stay curious.

Wayne

Peter Sims' image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Even Generals and Senators Stumble into Passion

In the weeks since Cosmos returned to our television sets, I have run across a variation of the following question from frustrated humanities professors. I thought I'd share it with you now.

Where is the Neil DeGrasse Tyson for the liberal arts?

Cosmos is a hit, again. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a pop science star. Thanks to him, kids dream about expanding human knowledge of the phenomenal universe. Now: Where's a liberal arts rockstar to make people care about human culture that much?

And later in the same piece at Gawker on the need for such a spokesperson:

The humanities breed curiosity. A certain epistemological humility. And as a result, empathy. Language matters. Stories matter. Art matters. History matters.

Because it offers us an unfiltered and accurate take on reality, science (and its Cosmos cover man, seemingly) offers us reassurance in the face of the unimaginable. As such, science's epistemological privilege is secure, even when the work is incomplete. Standards of repeatability and falsifiability that apply now will apply in the future.

The inherited mysteries of the human race, on the other hand, admit no such resolution. For reasons that are now and may forever be immune to scientific method, each of us enjoys a first-person, self-referential view of the world. One of the many consequences of this state of affairs is that faced with the unimaginable, the mind can only point and suggest a metaphor.

Something like that happened there.

The good news is that we're all working from inside the same flawed chemistry. With such a low anthropology, we're all spokespersons. Read the last two sentences in this otherwise stirring passage from a The New Republic piece and see if you don't agree.

The humanities are thriving, but not in the academy. Homo sapiens has always hungered for story and song. We are narrative and rhythmical creatures. Music and rhythmical language awaken our intelligence, as has been observed since Aristotle. We construe our meanings through plot: Who dunnit? Why? What happened next? And we sift our meanings—often the meanings we can hardly articulate abstractly—through song, poetry, images. Why else would we be glued to our screens, large and small, following the adventures of endless fictional characters, whether in video games or films, and why else would we mosey through the streets with digitized music and delirious rhymes flooding through our earphones? We hunger to make sense of our experience, we hunger to understand right and wrong, we hunger to name and plumb our feelings, whose intensities often blindside and bewilder us. Even generals and senators stumble into passion. We have not stopped being human, so we still need 'the humanities.'”

Please remember, IdeaFestival 2014 Festival Passes are on sale now through April 27 at the lowest price they'll be all year. I hope to see you in October!

Stay curious.

Wayne

Cropped Image: Some rights reserved by Sarah Elliott

Limited Early Bird 2014 Festival Passes Available Now!

We are pleased to announce that 2014 IdeaFestival Festival Passes are currently on sale at the Early-Bird rate of only $350. Limited quantities are available now through April 27th at 11:59pm.

IdeaFestival 2014 is shaping up once again to bring you world class presenters, sessions and affiliate events  that will keep you curious, provide you with new tools, connections and a growing IF community to help you think disruptively about life, work and play!

If you need some motivation to act quickly, here’s a sneak peek at a few of our confirmed presenters for this year’s event.

Get your Festival Pass today and don’t forget to add on Thrivals and IF Water tickets, too! We look forward to seeing you in Louisville in September. Until then,

Stay Curious.

Kris Kimel

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Brian Eno on the Creative Act: Surrender

When we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power.

This quote at Brain Pickings on the gift of failure stopped me in my tracks yesterday.

While much has been made of a willingness to fail as essential to the development of any worthwhile idea, whether it be entrepreneurial or purely a matter of self expression, the idea of surrendering adds an entirely new emotional dimension to the creative act.

Failure is no longer an ending, but a beginning. New experiences, new ideas and new ways of thinking are open to us because we have stopped resisting old ones.

I couldn't help but be reminded by this video of Brian Eno, who talks about the value of art being its unique ability to accept our surrender, and to return to us a new start.

Have a great weekend.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Plato at the Googleplex

From a book review of Rebecca Goldstein's "Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away" in The Atlantic:

Goldstein’s Plato, like Socrates before him, is less interested in teaching those with whom he converses than he is in helping them see that they don’t know what they think they know. In sending Plato to Google, Goldstein deftly exposes the conceptual presumption at the heart of what looks like the latest high-tech methodology. On his visit with the new masters of gathering human knowledge, Plato considers a (fictional) algorithm they have developed called the Ethical Answers Search Engine, or EASE, which does just what its name suggests: it crowdsources answers to ethical problems, the same way businesses now employ crowdsourcing to predict political outcomes and stock-market fluctuations, or to select marketing strategies. But ethical solutions are not as, well, easy as the search engine might have its users believe....

Plato certainly did not think the crowd was a reliable source of ethical insight. It was the crowd, after all, who put Socrates to death.

Goldstein's purpose in having Plato pay a visit to the Googleplex is, among other things, to demonstrate that knowledge is much more than information, a "conceptual presumption" about connection that today has inspired a new generation of makers and tinkerers to prosecute an analog rebellion, and phrases like "digital detox," which has become nearly synonymous with burnout. On the relative privilege we accord the sciences and its objective findings, the reviewer elsewhere approvingly quotes Søren Kierkegaard, who writes that "no generation has learned from another to love." Goldstein's Plato still sees shadows.

So to that still-here category of philosophy, I might add the arts, the humanities, the world's historic faiths, an exquisite meal and that charged, out-of-body electricity you felt one everlasting moment before your first kiss.

Your arms, you learned quickly, held tight.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by Tilemahos Efthimiadis