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Archive for the ‘Arts’ Category

Link: on thinking creatively

Posted in Arts, Society, Writing, tagged on July 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

Lo and behold, I announce a themed week about creativity, and one of my favorite bloggers, Justine Musk, comes out with a post all about thinking creatively today.  Ask and ye shall receive?  Go check it out!

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Creativity: an Undervalued Skill

Posted in Arts, Life, Society, tagged on July 19, 2010| 11 Comments »

Last week, Newsweek ran an article all about creativity.  It’s about how creativity is declining in America, and it also includes a lot of recent research and theories about creativity and learning creativity.  Interesting stuff.  Especially interesting for me, because reading this article really brought my personal misconceptions about creativity into the spotlight.

I was a creative child: I excelled at creative writing in school, I engaged in the sorts of play described in this article as being associated with high creativity on a daily basis, I daydreamed and devoured books whole, I loved composing as well as playing music, etc.  My greatest desire from age seven on was to be a writer – a desire I relinquished once it was made clear to me how impractical a career course this was.

What interests me is that until quite recently, I never valued my own creativity particularly highly.  I valued my intelligence, yes, my organizational skills, my memory, my problem-solving skills, and my analytical and synthesis skills.  But I would have never stated that one of my core strengths was creativity.

Why is this?  Two reasons, I think.  First, I was never taught that creativity was useful for anything except artistic pursuits, ie the arts.  And second, I was taught that the arts as a whole are impractical and therefore the skills associated with them aren’t as valuable as other skills.

That’s a loaded paragraph, isn’t it?  Imagine believing the two assertions made above, and then reading the following from Newsweek’s article:

The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

The mind boggles as reason number one (creativity is only useful in the arts) is shredded into tiny pieces.  Let’s throw away my faulty understanding and look at my two reasons in this new light, shall we?

  1. Creativity is an extremely useful and adaptive skill that when applied, can lead to innovative and *practical* solutions to an entire host of problems.  Ah ha!  Maybe this is why I excelled at starting and running my own business, or how I found ways to travel around the world on an extremely limited budget, or why coming up with multiple solutions to a small problem seems trivial to me while to others it appears to be a struggle.
  2. Even if one accepts as true that the arts are inherently impractical(1), they are, at the very least, the perfect training ground to foster and train the valuable “leadership competency” of creativity.  Not that there aren’t other ways to train this skill, but the arts are certainly a very obvious path.

I don’t think I’m the only one who used to believe creativity’s practicality was limited.  I remember in college speaking to a creative friend of mine who told me that everyone had told him to enter an advertising firm, because “that’s where creative people go to work if they want to make money.”  At the time, I believed this assertion completely.  The choice as laid out for me was to either enter the arts and eschew a stable future, or sell out and work in advertising.

Think what creative people could accomplish if, instead of being presented with this false dichotomy, they were educated in where their real strengths lie: solving problems, thinking outside of the box, coming up with multiple solutions and combining them for maximum positive effect, analyzing systems to figure out what change would have the most impact.  Starting nonprofits, increasing communication between disparate groups, disseminating powerful ideas that  grow to influence communities, decision makers, and potentially entire societies.  Inventing innovative machines, systems, gadgets, more efficient ways of accomplishing a task.

It’s fine to choose the arts in the face of this knowledge.  I have no regrets about my choice.  But when I’m told that the United States prizes creativity, I have to call foul.  If that’s true, why wasn’t I told what my creativity meant?  Why wasn’t I told what I could accomplish?  Why did no one mention the possibility that I could make the world a better place with my creativity even if I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body?

If there is a creativity “crisis” in this country right now, it’s because creativity as a skill hasn’t been valued nearly enough.

*****

(1.) This idea is founded on one basis only: the reality that a career in the arts can be unstable from a financial perspective.  We see here the shadows of my upbringing telling me the most important criteria for determining an activity’s value is in its money-producing capability (and as a corollary, its relative stability).  Never mind for the moment that I know many working artists who do quite well, or that I myself was able to found a successful business completely based on, you guessed it, the arts.  This also overlooks the possibility, a reality for many, of the day job as a support for serious pursuit of the arts.  Or the choice to pursue the arts due to other intrinsic values, and financial stability be damned.

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Dealing with Disappointment

Posted in Arts, Life, tagged , on July 8, 2010| 14 Comments »

As a response to my post last week on planning, I was asked to speak more specifically about managing disappointment, and I promised to write this post.  Ever since, I have been simultaneously rubbing my hands together in glee and shaking in my culottes at the prospect of talking about a topic I find so important and difficult.  Disappointment is something that needs to be talked about more – and at the same time, it’s often an uncomfortable place to go in a conversation.  So I’m hoping to open up this blog to talking about it in a nonthreatening way.

First, I have to acknowledge the first advice I’ve heard from many people about disappointment: manage your expectations and create concrete goals that depend on yourself to complete and are therefore more in your control.  So for example, you set a goal to attend ten auditions this season instead of a goal to be cast in a leading part.  This is good advice; if you can shut down disappointment before it even happens, you’ll be a happier person.  But it’s also advice that ignores the deeper emotional heart of the issue, which is that sometimes we’ve planned perfectly well and we’re still plunged into the depths.  Sometimes things go horribly wrong for no reason; sometimes things go horribly wrong for a perfectly good reason.  Sometimes we mess up, make huge mistakes, get our hearts set on something we simply can’t have right now.  It happens, and sweeping these experiences under the rug invalidates the very real suffering they cause.

It’s not just a problem for those following artistic pursuits either.  Relationships go south.  Family behaves in unaccountable ways.  Vacations get canceled.  People move away, or are too busy to see us.  We get passed over during the promotion cycle.  The last episode of Battlestar Galactica was a travesty.  And on and on and on.  More often than not, we pretend to the outside world that none of this is going on.  But it is, trust me.  Disappointment is a fact of life.

So what are some ideas of ways we can deal?

  1. Have a support system, or at least a support person. I tell my husband about almost all of my disappointments.  He quite possibly gets sick of hearing about them, but it makes me feel a whole lot better to know there’s someone on my side no matter what who will urge me to keep going.
  2. Get the disappointment physically out of your body. Scream, cry, take up kickboxing, run around the block, jump up and down, hit your pillow.  In my experience, this becomes more important the bigger the disappointment you are suffering.  If I receive a short story rejection, I just sigh.  That one breath is enough for me to let it go.  If, on the other hand, someone is unkind to me, I might need to rant about it for awhile to get it out of my body.
  3. Allow yourself to feel the disappointment, and then give yourself a treat to acknowledge that you took a risk and made an attempt. This can be sugar, my personal favorite, or something you buy for yourself, but it can also be something simpler that doesn’t cost money or calories: Give yourself an entire evening to read a good book.  Take an outing to the ocean/park/mountains/your favorite scenic destination.  Take a hot bath.  Spend quality time with your pet.  Paint your toenails.  Play your favorite video game.  Play the piano.  Whatever floats your boat.
  4. Embrace your stubbornness. I’m not kidding, and I love this one, having been termed stubborn since I was a small child.  “They” say that the opera singers who succeed are not the ones that are most promising in terms of ability as much as the ones who will persevere through anything.  So embrace this personality trait, and keep it in check by being careful to set realistic goals.
  5. Allow time to pass. I hate this one, because there’s nothing you can do to make it happen except wait.  But the passage of time does have the amazing effect of putting your disappointments into perspective.  In the meantime, you can be proactively working on something else.  Sometimes, as in the case with writing, you can start work on the next story or novel.  Sometimes, as in an ended relationship, you can focus on some other aspect of your life that’s been neglected (ex. start spending more time with your friends, give more time to your hobby of painting/discgolf/fill in the blank, etc.)  Give yourself the reassuring feeling of forward momentum while letting the passage of time work its magic.
  6. Learn from your experience, and use it to help yourself grow. This one is the most important for me personally.  After I’ve suffered a disappointment, I ask myself: How can I do better next time?  What can I practice next that will help me improve?  What could I change in my behavior that might make this go better next time?  Are there warning signs I can look out for that I didn’t recognize this time?  What are my priorities here?  Is there a system I can institute that would solve this kind of problem in the future? (This last one was particularly useful for running a business, let me tell you.)

The reason I think these questions and this period of self-reflection is so important is that it allows me to transform my disappointment into a learning experience I can regard positively.  Sometimes this works even if I didn’t learn a whole lot, just by going through the cause and effect chain.  So when I look back on it, instead of thinking only of how horrible it was, I also think, “But if it weren’t for this happening, I wouldn’t have been able to do _______.”  If I hadn’t written the musical which never got produced, I would never have had the courage to write my first novel.  If I hadn’t worked at a lot of office jobs I didn’t like, I wouldn’t have considered opening my own business.  If I hadn’t learned all those interpersonal relationship skills, I wouldn’t have as happy a marriage now.  If I didn’t get all my stories rejected so often, I wouldn’t be as good a writer.  When something bad happens, which is a marker for disappointment, I try to use its momentum to push myself forward instead of allowing it to hold me back.

All right, I’m going to open the floor.  I’m really interested to hear about disappointments you’ve had and how you’ve overcome them.  Or alternately, you can talk about disappointments you are currently facing and things you might try to deal with them.  Be kind, be courteous, and be real.  And thanks for joining me in talking about such a difficult topic.

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