(39) What I learned about Creativity

This may not be what you’re expecting.

Anyone who knows me personally might assume I am going to write about artistic endeavours. Perhaps waxing lyrical about architectural design, jewellery design, graphics, illustration, fine art or any one of the many art / design / craft disciplines I’ve been into over the years. Yes I love all that stuff and could easily bang on about it as I have before, but it’s not that type of specific creativity I’m exploring today.

I find most people tend to categorise themselves as either creative or not creative. They might think back to the last time they did anything ‘artistic’ which might have been as far back as secondary school (and you know what I think about our paltry education system). But I am on about the wider sense of the meaning of creativity, which I believe we all have.

Something I have discovered is the many ways that we can express creativity, in fact, practically everything we do can be described as ‘creative’. One of the most fun applications of creativity I have come across is the act of doing business itself. Finding a niche product or service, exploring its potential, carving out markets and generating sales. Building on sales, devising additional routes to market through expansion, spotting the growth part of your product cycle and timing your next product or service to maximum effect. Experimenting with different marketing messages and mediums, communication with customers in new ways and seeing the possibilities in the increasingly sophisticated technology available to us all. Just fab. 

Other people get immense pleasure from the creativity of numbers and systems using their passions for diverse rewards as building investment portfolios, programming state of the art software or ensuring their resources are used to their full potential. Luckily for us many others find creativity helping others achieve things, either through formal teaching routes, producing the billions of pieces of free information available to access online networks and blogs or via the thousands of forums and informal discussion boards packed with useful information any one of us can freely access and benefit from.

And, as many people have discovered, there is massive creativity in times of need – when your back’s against the wall and you have to do something amazing to get yourself through a situation. Again – the creativity rises up inside and you find a flow of ideas, solutions and tactics to apply to your problem. And that is when I find creativity at its most fantastic. The human capacity to problem solve is a wonderful, wonderful thing!

Books with longevity – 8

I bought this book w-a-a-a-y back in the 90’s. Laugh if you will but I do actually use this book still to this day: Getting Things Done by Roger Black (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Getting-Things-Done-Roger-Black/dp/0718128427)

It was my first glance at management techniques and has stayed firmly in place on my shelf since. Perhaps you would imagine it’s not for everyday situations as more for use in work – but because it has personal chapter topics including: Improving Concentration, Looking after Body & Soul and Personal Standards it’s generally a good all round self improvement book. Very simple to use, each of the 100 chapters takes no more than two pages so easily digested and a handy diagnostic at the start so you can figure out what’s getting in your way in the first place. Not getting rid of this one!

(38) What I learned about Generosity

I believe true generosity comes when you’re at ease with yourself. I think that’s why we say we can ‘afford’ to be generous. Again, it can come when you’re at one with the world, knowing you can live with any repercussions of your generosity.

An example of this was when I friend of mine, Leo, designed an ad for the company we both worked for. It wasn’t anything big or showy and was being placed in our local paper. It was a great ad, effective, to the point and brought us in a lot of enquiries. Great eh? But a few weeks later a rival organisation placed an ad almost identical to ours, in the same publication. Leo hit the roof saying they couldn’t do that, it’s copyright or something. But of course they could do what they wanted and, as long as the ad wasn’t misleading, it was perfectly fair. It took me a while but I did get Leo to understand that actually it was quite flattering that a rival firm thought his ad was so good that they copied it. I told him that he was the creative one and could pull another ad out of the bag anytime, the only talent the other guys had was imitation.

Being generous with money is also a biggie for people to get into their heads around. I’m not necessarily talking about giving money to those in need, either personally known or via charity although those are generous acts. I’m talking about the realisation that there’s plenty of the stuff sloshing around and that hoarding money, or being afraid to spend in case there’s no more coming. I know several people that feel it would be morally wrong somehow to earn pots of cash. Strangely enough, these are often people who feel passionately about a cause or believe in a more green society. I say: believe in anything you want, but if you have dosh you can be more use to the causes you wish to be involved in.

So, ideas can appear out of thin air. Money can be generated. Both are infinite. So be generous with them by all means.

But perhaps the truest act of generosity is being generous with your time. Listening to someone in need. Reading your child a story. Making a beautiful front garden so that everyone who passes can enjoy it. Giving your time is true generosity indeed as, for each of us, we only have a finite amount.

Books with longevity – 7

Another little gem.

As a habitual gravitator towards bookshops I have happily read my way through probably hundreds of books in their comfy environs. And often I go on to purchase the book(s) I have been avidly reading cover to cover, after all you don’t want to buy a book you don’t like do you? And for the last few years I have been using bookshops as a kind of fortune teller – standing in the doorway and asking to be drawn to the books I need to read. Sometimes with false starts, which I realise when I’m not settled in a particular section and need to move to another category.

This is only a little book so I could read it in about 45 mins. Then I bought it and now it pretty much always travels with me tucked in a bag or pocket: This Is It – the art of happily going nowhere by Maurice Fullard Smith (http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Art-Happliy-Going-Nowhere/dp/0232526931/)

Various pages have been folded down for reasons over the years but today I read this passage and realised it reflected what I was talking about in my Universe blog earlier in the week:

“Everything is. We are – and we know we are – part of the is”.

Perfection in a book.

(37) What I learned about The Universe

Hold your hat – another spooky one.

Well possibly quite boring if you’re not into this hippie kinda stuff.

Well, by now you know me well enough to hear me banging on about my Universe, cosmic ordering, asking for what you want, co-incidences etc etc. But today I wish to de-bunk or even re-bunk all that and simply say:

I realised My Universe is not outside me, it’s inside.

I was going through some great mulling some time back and, as ever, externalising everything, putting it out there and leaving it to the will of the gods. When I realise I had been pushing away all my power and giving it ‘out’. A sudden dawning and it occurred to me that I am the functioning life force in my life and that if I manifest this energy and power I should be claiming it for myself. And the strangest thing happened. I immediately experienced a vision of the Universe being both inside and outside of me. A flow. A connection.

And it’s here with me now. Whenever I would have habitually said ‘Ask the Universe’ or ‘The Universe provides’ I now understand that it’s me that provides and me that makes the ‘magic’ happen in my life. Not because I’m mystical or gifted in any way. But because I’m human, I’m alive and I simply know it can happen so therefore I see it when it does.

So now I seem to have swapped my trusting / half-believing  talisman of My Universe for a much more workmanlike yet still a bit spiritual understanding that My Universe is Me.

Books with longevity – 6

Change of pace today.

I bought this book as a present for someone in 2004 and liked it so much I kept it!

No Plot ? No Problem by Chris Baty (http://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Plot-Problem-High-velocity-Low-stress/dp/0811845052/)

This project kicked off in San Francisco in 1999 when Chris decided he needed to write a novel in a month – without having any idea of plot or even where he was going to start. He set about getting other writers involved and the first NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was born. And been going strong ever since. 

The idea is simple: just sit down and write anything, every day for a month. The magic number of words is 1,667 per day. And at the end of it you have a ‘work’ of 50,000 words. A reasonable sized novel by all accounts. Now I never thought I had a novel in me at all, I’m much more fact than fiction. But I was amazed. When I sat down over Christmas 2004 and wrote my 1,667 words every day the characters and the plot just emerged and wove around each other.

Yes – I did write a novel in a month. Surprise yourself and give it a go . . .

(36) What I learned about a good old hug

It’s another Grandma story:

I went to visit my grandmother some years back to introduce her to my new husband. I didn’t get up to see her often, we spoke nearly every week on the phone, but I thought it was worth a visit to show them both the new members of their families (each other!). As my grandma came out of her house I rushed over and gave her a huge hug and she said how lovely it was to have a hug as, when you get older, people don’t hug you as much anymore.

I’m not sure if that’s true, but it must have been my grandmother’s experience so it set me thinking about touch and the importance of physically connecting with people. As babies we do not do well without touch. We may physically live, but experiments have show we do not thrive if we are not held as infants. As we get older it’s easy to see how much enjoyment small children get from each other physically, my young daughter positively hangs off her young friends in the playground. But the habit of reaching out to touch people (appropriately!) seems to diminish as we mature. Hugs and kisses are left only for children and brief greetings with friends and family.

I’ve always been far too tactile for most people’s comfort and I must admit I’m even more so now that I understand the restorative powers of a good hug. The continental ways us Brits seem to have adopted when it comes to greetings – a kiss on the cheek, even one both sides – has brought us a bit further out of our reserve but I must say nothing beats a proper clinch. And I don’t care if people are a bit shocked by it. It’s something that gets easier with practise so I recommend adopting the persona of someone that hugs. Because it’s nice when people begin to hug back . . .

Books with longevity – 5

 This book has been on my shelf so long I can barely remember what life was like before I found it. To me, with all the self-help claptrap I’ve read over the years, this one was one of the first and best books I ever came across:

Follow Your Heart by Andrew Matthews (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Follow-Your-Heart-Andrew-Matthews/dp/0843174919/ )

It is a simple, light-hearted read, easily digested and full of Andrew’s upbeat cartoons. But some of the insights are profound and many have stayed with me because I like his simple style in getting his thoughts across. Other books have come and go – but the basis of all self-help is all pretty much contained here.