thekenshow's blog

This morning I came across Steve Sailer's Creativity vs. Personality post challenging the conventional art history treatment of Picasso's Bull's Head. Sailer finds it extremely unlikely that Picasso was the first person to combine bicycle parts in this way and therefore it's hardly creative let alone art. He goes on to suggest the reason this piece is studied at all is because it fits the Picasso/artistic genius narrative.

Next, I found Freedom behind bars: bicycling and creativity on the drawing on experience blog. He finds all manner of creative beauty in bikes themselves but is writing about the effect of cycling and aerobic exercise on creativity. Some of the evidence indicates it significantly affects our creative capacities for as much as two hours.

I wasn't in the least curious about bicycles and creativity, but I noticed a relationship between these two loosely juxtaposed posts and now I've brought them to your attention. Is that creative? 

In Greater Good, David Elkind reports on the dwindling amount of play time in recent years, despite its many well-known benefits:

Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

As Elkind hints, we're crafting an increasingly solemn culture with longer work hours, global anxieties, exercise "regimes" and frazzled relationships; a culture that pays little heed to the call of play except to sell ads in support of a multi-billion dollar professional sports industry.

This is the kind of devaluation John Cage was referring to when he said, "It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction." Each successive step, from making to repeating to listening to distracting, takes us further from creative play.

Luckily, play is an ever-present possibility, a choice that is freely available to us at any time. Today would be a good day to choose play. Tomorrow looks promising as well

PS. I've written before that one way we subvert the pure play Elkind describes is by making boredom "wrong", when boredom is often exactly the right stimulus. If you can't bring yourself to choose play, at least allow yourself to be bored.

Barry Gordon writes about intelligent memory on AARP.org:

We can take advantage of this natural learning booster by believing something is important. If we try to learn without interest, very little gets saved. But if you can force yourself to treat what you are trying to learn as important, your brain will become your ally and trigger the learning circuits. The difference is astounding. Without interest, people learn perhaps 10% or less of what they're taught. With interest, over 90%.

This article is a bit technical but it's definitely worth a read if you wonder why learning sometimes comes easily while at other times it can be such a struggle. It also supports my notion that following threads of interest can be an organizing principle for our life. Simply put, learning and creativity are enhanced when you're fascinated and passionate.

This may seem obvious, but then it's worth looking at what creates interest for us. How do we assign importance in our life? And how much of our day is spent replaying – and therefore strengthening – emotionally-charged scenarios that we feel stuck in?

As the article points out, these "miniminds" we create through practice and learning can help or hinder depending on how well they work and what purpose they serve. Sorting them out, adding new ones, improving the useful ones and pruning the ones that obstruct can be a very powerful process.

Seth Godin on the trouble with normal:

Jennifer and George may be extraordinarily good looking movie stars, but you don't get to work with them. By buying into a standard of expectation for what's normal (or great or very good or trustworthy) we shortchange ourselves every single day.

Rejecting normal isn't necessarily creative, but ignoring it is.

Sean Doyle writes about how we embrace or resist the developmental stages available to use as we grow older:

Through the Study of Adult Development at Harvard, Vaillant was able to track people as they changed over time from adolescence into great-grandparenthood. In general, the people who mastered adulthood’s life tasks – Identity, Intimacy, Career Consolidation, Generativity, Keeper of the Meaning and Integrity – lived longer, were more fulfilled, had more friends, and were happier.

PS. I'm back from Big Mind training in SLC, but it's going to take some time to get back into serial essay mode. In the meantime I'll post interesting bits as they show up. Your patience is most appreciated

That you carry yourself forward
and experience the myriad things
is delusion.
That the myriad things come forward
and experience themselves
is awakening.
- Dogen Zenji