Sam Van Aken's Tree of Life

Sam Van Aken, an art professor at Syracuse University who grew up on a Pennsylvania farm, will speak on creativity and disruptive thinking at the IdeaFestival.

He was recently profiled on CBS' This Morning program.

His "Tree of Life" project grows 40 varieties of old stone fruits on a single tree using a process known as grafting, a technique used by orchardists to bud sports of desirable fruits and nuts onto a compatible root stock. The root stock supplies energy for growth. The grafted limb bears the desired fruit.

His project, I have to say, has a special poignancy in this summer of violence and conflict. It instantly brought to mind the soundtrack from the film Tree of Life, particularly the haunted and operatic beauty of Lacrimosa. If you get a chance today, listen to it, and then go read Walt Whitman's O Me! O Life! and be reminded that life is good and precious.

I hope to see you at the IdeaFestival! Please be aware that prices for a festival pass will increase on Sept. 2, so if you're planning to attend now is the time to reserve your spot.

Stay curious.

Wayne

"Merit" Today: Curiosity

Interviewed earlier this week by On Point, William Deresiewicz, author of "Excellent Sheep," talked at length about how too many top schools are failing their students.

Asked at one point what a reformed merit-based admissions process would look like, he said it would focus far less on achievement driven, academically rigid accomplishments and take, rather, a hard look at the applicant's curiosity, adding that curiosity and resilience were tied to future satisfaction in life and careers.

That sounds about right to us.

Reviewing the book, the New York Times made a similar point recently. "The Lower Ambitions of Higher Education:"

Mr. Deresiewicz spends a long time considering college admissions because a vast number of crimes, he suggests, are committed in its name. We’ve created kids who throughout their high school years are unable to do anything they can’t put on a résumé. They’re blinkered overachievers.

Once they’re in college, they don’t know what to do with themselves, so they jump through the only hoop that’s bathed in a spotlight: finance. He argues that many miss truer and more satisfying callings....

Little of what Mr. Deresiewicz has to say is entirely new. Ezra Pound got there first, 80 years ago, with the metaphor that supplies this book with its title. Real education must be limited to those who insist on knowing, Pound said in his book “ABC of Reading.” "The rest is merely sheepherding.”

My ears always perk when "those kids" rate a mention, but with its endless information churn and the tortured expertise of fault finding, of one-upsmanship and of unmasking error, "blinkered overachievement" seems to curse adult life and work as well.

It's not what you know, but what you do with what you know that matters.

So I couldn't help but relate Deresiweicz' view to the mission of the IdeaFestival, which is to cultivate curiosity, not self-satisfaction, to insist on knowing, not informing, to think anew as we seek an entree with the people and institutions in our own lives about the objects of our choosing and the activities that have meaning. Succeed at that and all the work will be worth it.

Deresiweicz, by the way, delivered an incredible address on leadership and self-knowledge to West Point Plebes in 2010. It's a must read.

I hope to see you at IdeaFestival 2014! Stay curious.

Wayne

Image of John Barker speaking at IdeaFestival 2012, Geoff Oliver Bugbee.

Don't Focus on the Puzzles, But the Mysteries

While looking for interesting material to tweet and Facebook yesterday, I came across this Creativity Post article on stoking the fires of curiosity. One quote stood out.

A society or organization that thinks only in terms of puzzles is one that is too focused on the goals it has set, rather than on the possibilities it can’t yet see.

I thought it echoed an important point heard last year from IdeaFestival presenter Ariel Waldman, whose entire presentation can be watched here.

At the heart of something good there should be a kernel of something undefinable. And if you can define it, or claim to be able to define it, then in a sense you have missed the point. John Peel

It's one of my favorite IdeaFestival 2013 quotes because it goes to the beating heart of discovery: it will always be the work of the curious, individuals for whom the "something good" is never an ending, but a new beginning.

While Ariel Waldman spoke at length of her love of space, the loosely drawn inner connections from her work with Science Hack Day also resonated with me because every discovery springs from an openness to experience, a willingness and capacity to feel things anew. It's what the IdeaFestival is all about. This is what I wrote last year, live-blogging her talk:

Segueing into Science Hack Day, an event for which she is probably more well known, she says that its mission is to regain a bit of the old excitement, of sheer possibility. The people who show up at one of those events are amateurs. They don't HAVE to know where their idea or project is going. She describes several hacks - building a wind tunnel to test a series of letters that will make a new typeface; or a lamp that lights up each time an asteroid passes the Earth; or a mask that would simulate synesthesia, aptly named, given the creepy image she display, 'syneseizure;' or a cocktail made with DNA. On the latter she issues a warning - 'it tastes disgusting.'

What if, she continues, one could listen to mapped sounds of high energy particle collisions? And in fact, she points out, one such instrument has been created, 'particle wind chimes.' There's more: given license to roam freely, to make new and maybe unorthodox connections, the creator of the particle wind chimes may have created something with real diagnostic potential in the hands of physicists. Formerly abstract concepts have been made available to the senses of researchers.

Find some time today to watch the video, which includes a terrific Q&A with MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin. You won't be disappointed.

Make plans now to encounter at IdeaFestival 2014. The price for a Festival Pass will increase on Sept. 2, so don't wait! I hope to see you there.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Forgetting Important to Creative Flourishing

Though Europe's new "right to be forgotten" rules have created an uproar, it's easy to forget just how new the idea of total recall is. Writing at TechCrunch, Natasha Lomas contributes a couple of important points to a discussion largely moored to what is still a new phenomenon, a phenomenon that would see documentation and data live on in perpetuity.

I like how she connects the issue to creative enterprise:

Total recall shuts us down. It encourages conformity and a lack of risk taking. If trying to do something results in a failure that follows you around forever then the risk of trying is magnified — so maybe you don’t bother trying in the first place. It’s anti-creative, anti-experimental, even anti-entrepreneur. To cite a Steve Jobs-ism, it’s anti-foolish.

Name the human society where total recall is considered the norm. It’s far more human to forget. Forgetting allows for new beginnings. As a creative medium, a little forgetting goes a long way. While too much recall smacks of dystopia, or prison, or the dragnet digital surveillance programs set up in secret by our own governments. It’s hardly an accident that corporate power and state machinery are aligning along the same digital fault lines here.

An ability to forget, whether it's simply to move beyond a business failure or avoid information overload, is important to human flourishing, as Lomas writes. And the notion that total recall, rather than liberating us, would "shut us down" rings true to me. There are of course real public policy and legal questions being sorted out in Europe as Google tries to comply with the new continental rules. But the temptation to believe that the next piece of information or data point will make the argument or prove beyond any doubt the veracity of any particular belief is a particularly human weakness, and one that is exploited, for example, by social media. It's why long hours scanning Facebook updates leaves so many people so anxious. The picture is never complete. Even science, which many mistakenly believe seeks certainty, depends, rather, on an accumulation of evidence, not on finality.

The dogged entrepreneur and artist alike must be fools. They must believe in their specific cases that the past doesn't matter. True, depending on that past it may or may not prove beneficial in the long run. But in general, the habits that have always characterized humanity at its best - a grace under hardship or a willingness to extend mercy where none may be merited - have always required on a willingness to forget. It's effective precisely because it is extralegal.

The alternative, I think, would enslave us to reasons.

Wayne

Festival Passes are on sale now, but please don't wait too long! We're expecting to sell out again this year, and the price for a pass will go up on Sept. 2. The complete agenda and speaker line-up is available on the IdeaFestival web site.

IdeaFestival to Host Zombie Study Group. Lunch Not Provided

This is a repost of a blog entry from earlier this summer. You have been warned.

In case you were wondering, the United States DOES have an action plan for the zombie apocalypse, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Buried on the military's secret computer network is an unclassified document, obtained by Foreign Policy, called 'CONOP 8888.' It's a zombie survival plan, a how-to guide for military planners trying to isolate the threat from a menu of the undead -- from chicken zombies to vegetarian zombies and even "evil magic zombies" -- and destroy them....

Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for Strategic Command, acknowledged the document exists on a 'secure Internet site' but took pains to explain that the zombie survival guide is only a creative endeavor for training purposes. 'The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario,' she wrote in an email. 'This document is not a U.S. Strategic Command plan.'

The IdeaFestival was caught off guard recently when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reached out to gauge the festival's interest in becoming a designated civilian training and planning center, tasked, among other duties, with understanding the adaptability and spread of harmful viral and beneficial organisms, and calculating the probabilities for human survival the future undead world. The federal agency, curiously, also asked for our thoughts on Sheldon Cooper's roommate agreement as a model for relationship between antagonistic parties with limited emotional range, a definitive statement on whether John Travolta's role in Battlefield Earth could be called acting and what the prospects for a reunion of the Fantastic Four might be. It was a serious conversation.

The expertise of the IdeaFestival in developing "fictional training scenarios" has also been recognized at the highest levels of the United States government. A joint statement from the White House and Congress said, "because of their unmatched commitment to imagining an alternate future, we find that the IdeaFestival and its attendees are uniquely suited to rebuild and expand economies following the outbreak of this virus. The old rules simply no longer apply. We commend them for having the foresight to draw from business, from the arts and from the sciences to think about what the future may hold," adding, "help us Obi Wan Kanobi, you're our only hope."

All of this is, of course, absolutely true with the exception of the part about cooperation between the White House and Congress, which deny ever working together.

Stay Curious.

Wayne

Festival Passes are on sale now, but please don't wait too long! We're expecting to sell out again this year, and the price for a pass will go up on Sept. 2. The complete agenda and speaker line-up is available on the IdeaFestival web site.

Image: Some rights reserved by eliduke