Yesterday I talked about my journey to ArtThinkMake.
It’s led me to reflect on the dynamic that’s required if curiosity and creativity is ever to have a fighting chance in your life again.
When we rush right back in with doing the traditionally-trained, conventional thing, curiosity is not given the chance to have any role in your decision making.
Yes, I may have taken many years to start publicly building something but I was giving my innate curiosity the time and space to resurface and take root. Curiosity, especially in the face of it having been removed from one’s life through formal systems, requires a ton of nurturing and space for it to return to the surface.
So, my curiosity lay dormant for approximately 10 years across a few corporate gigs and then took another 14 for it to grow slowly and discover the conditions for helping it to flourish.
Wow! It’s been 14 years almost to the day that I started down the path of rediscovering my curiosity and creativity. It was this time of year in 2012 when I took that first career sabbatical and explored other ways of thinking and working.
What I will tell you is that in a system where pausing is frowned upon, if you don’t pause, you are very unlikely to pursue anything remotely curiosity-peaking or creative. At best, it’s an “artistic” thing you do outside of work, whenever you can find the time, in order to establish some sense of balance between your self and the systems.
Who knows if it’s by design. All we can learn is what we need to do to start navigating back in the direction of curiosity and creativity.
In my humble opinion, there is no reason for curiosity and creativity not to be an integral part of education and work. In fact, the entire point of ArtThinkMake is to realize just how integral curiosity and creativity is to any improvement or transformative endeavor. They are the foundational elements and their existence / non-existence greatly influences the direction in which your thinking goes and what gets translated out into the real world experience.
I’d say that I was about 7 years into this 14 year journey when I ran across an interview transcript that justified my pace. I have since lost the link and can’t seem to find it any more but it has stayed with me since as a foundational thing to keep in mind. It was an interview of Francisco Varela and what I remember about it was the suggestion of “suspending activation”…or that’s at least what I came away with.
In this approach, you are challenged to suspend what you think you know, redirect your thinking to other things or perspectives…and here’s the catch…let go of any initial ideas to “externalize” onto the world.
The way I read it is to cycle back through the suspend - redirect - let go loop a few times before you decide what to bring into the world.
It makes sense. The quicker you move to launch your greatest next idea, the more likely it’s tied more to the market as it exists vs. originating out of any innate penchant for human curiosity and creativity. The other thing that happens when you rush to launch something is that you are biased to make that thing stick, no matter how much it lacks innovation, how poorly it functions, or how poorly it meets real-world needs and desires.
Thus, the more times you delay launching your “solution,” the more you will start to understand more about the space and the more curiosity and creativity that will be born out of this intentionally delayed approach.
It’s become too easy to just constantly pitch stuff into the market and let it be waste that someone else has to clean up. I mean this in a physical sense and a digital sense.
Do I think it will also take you 14 years to transform how you envision and start to change how you act on the world?
Nope. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone…especially if you have a family, house, and bills! It’s been a bit scary at times but I kept threading the needle somehow.
Now, with all of the benefit of the hindsight, I see an accelerated way to help others shift mindsets and perspectives…and to give curiosity and creativity the space it required for it to exist in the world.
It’s to immerse yourself in an “art.” Art shifts the context away from the market and the artifacts of outdated business models.
The artist’s mindset always puts curiosity and creativity first! These are the foundational elements for re-inventing human-made systems or re-inventing your personal approach to them when they don’t change.
For me, it will be about using photography as the medium and vehicle but it could be any other art medium. Drawing, sculpting, landscape designing, etc…anything that gets you looking at a space as it currently exists and envisioning new ways to think about or interpret it based upon innately human curiosity and creativity.
The vision is the art.
The thinking is the model for honoring and implementing the art in whatever form the vision is in.
The making is getting out there and doing it…but only after you’ve done the art and think work first!
ArtThinkMake offers a mindset shift in navigating personal, professional, or organizational change through highly interactive and immersive photography lessons, workshops, and experiences. It’s more than simply being about the imagery that is produced. It’s about the mindset that is instills.
By the way…
Join us as I talk about my own transformative journey for the first time publicly.
Scan the code in the image to join us!
There will be a fun assignment on perspective shifting!
I hope to see you on the call!
Oh wow!
I rediscovered the reference! It's now bookmarked anew!
https://pi-2022.s3.amazonaws.com/doc_varela_2000_32d1683924.pdf
To add...the first image that popped into my head after I read this was to handle our ideas like a Globetrotter handles a basketball. If they ever hold onto the ball too tightly, it would make it very hard to complete the next move / trick. So, they apply a "light touch" so as to remain ever ready to pass or receive.