Surfing the Creativity Pipeline
 

I've been thinking about the flow of creativity a lot lately. I
always have a fairly steady flow of creative business ideas (not
necessarily GOOD ideas, but creative nonetheless), but over the
last year or two that flow has steadily increased.

If I had to pin this increase in creativity to a single cause, I
would have to say that it is mostly a result of opening up the
creative pipeline.

The concept was introduced to me by a singer/songwriter named
John Gorka. I saw him in New Jersey in 1999.

I was sitting there watching him and just
tremendously enjoying his music. He got to a point in his show
where he was talking about creativity and how, for him, it's like
a faucet. When it's open, everything flows. When you turn off
the faucet and stop the flow, everything in the pipe stops.

What he was really referring to is the fact that when he has a
song idea, no matter how bad or ridiculous it is, he has to write
it. He spoke of this almost as if it was a burden, because some
of the songs that he wrote, he obviously wasn't very happy with.
In fact he probably would have been embarrassed to perform them.

But, what he learned to do to keep his creativity flowing was to
write every one of those songs. No matter how bad. He explained
that this doesn't mean that he finishes the song; he just has to
completely flush the idea out of his creativity pipeline. Then
it's written and he can do with it what he will. Sometimes it
ends up in the trash bin. Sometimes it gets rewritten.
Sometimes it comes out as a perfect song and he adds it to his
repertoire.

You see, what happens to him if he doesn't write the song is that
all the great songs that are behind the bad ones get stopped up.
The root cause of this creative blockage is trying to work in a
creative mode and and editing mode at the same time.

I've found that when I follow John's lead and:

1) Keep the flow going
2) Create first then edit

I'm much more prolific from a creative standpoint

Here's to your creative success!




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Re: Paul Myers Does ....
 

That's brilliant.

Actually, I just started using a micro cassette extensively and I'm sold. It forces me to create first and edit later.

The article at the top of this thread was one of the first. It took a lot less time to write and flows much better than articles I type directly.

Another trick I learned from a Robert Persig book "Lila" was to write random thoughts on 3x5 cards as they come. You can then categorize each thought by labeling the top of the card.

It's truly amazing to see how the thoughts fit together when you go back and review a stack of cards that are sorted by category. What seem like just random thoughts start to follow a logical sequence.

Now I'm re-inspired to keep this process at the forefront.


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