Creativity

Creator vs Employee: Why don’t you get a real job?

Rich Kirkpatrick0456 views

Subscribe to the audio blog on your favorite podcast app: Subscribe Have you ever wondered why work seems meaningful to some and not to others? Perhaps it has to do with how we see ourselves. Are we creators or employees? There are a few recordings that playback in the mind of innovators and creators and they begin early in life. In grade school, the teacher says, “Sit still, color within the lines, and stop daydreaming.” They scolded us for the doodles on the edge of the folder and shamed us for our sensitivity. In the old days, teachers simply put you in the corner of the room. The mission of education, in the mind of a myopic society, aims for conformity and uniformity. Sticking out threatens the general order. Things are simply the way they are and if you want to challenge it, you will pay the price. The schoolyard…

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Why Brainstorming Meetings Suck and How to Make Them Better

Rich Kirkpatrick0483 views

Subscribe to the audio blog on your favorite podcast app: Subscribe If you want to see eyes roll, tell the team you planned a brainstorming meeting. The hope is to practice innovation, foster teamwork, or prop up low morale. Motives, whether sane or desperate, propel such a meeting to the calendar. The effectiveness of these types of meetings is another story, however. Be honest. They suck. Let me jog your memory. The dreaded no-idea-is-bad on the whiteboard turns into three people dominating the meeting while the rest watch the clock, hoping to get to the break room microwave first to warm the leftovers they brought for lunch. After an hour’s work, the whiteboard has the thoughts of these three people, and the no-bad-ideas promise fails. Passing objections and restrained snickers frustrate the goal of non-judgmental civility, however. The leader writes lists of ideas on the board, filtering, categorizing, and labeling them in…

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Creativity Finds A Way: Creating During the Darkest of Times

Rich Kirkpatrick0319 views

Like life, creativity finds a way. In fact, we are not unique in surviving a pandemic. The poet and playwright William Shakespeare offers an example of how creative work continues in the darkest of times—whether it is the 1590s or 2020s. English professor Travis D. Williams, says, “The word ‘poet’ comes from the Greek ‘to make.’ Shakespeare used language and thought to make a path for himself through the miseries of the plague and the resulting economic depression. Creating and making during lockdowns are nothing new. What is new is this: most of us haven’t experienced it before. Our desire to move on from difficult times is strong. For example, we forget AIDS is still an epidemic. It’s likely we will, in our lifetimes, collectively experience more of this kind of weariness. However, we continue to make things, write poems, and sing songs. I recall many years of directing Christmas…

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How does the creative process work?

Rich Kirkpatrick1332 views

I am writing a new book about the creative process Many of my readers may not know that I have been writing a book about the creative process. It’s an idea I have chewed on and studied for several years. What is my progress? As of today, I have written a manuscript of about 60,000 words and am in the third draft of edits. My new book has a working title, too: MIND BLOWN: Bridging science and magic to unlock your creative genius.  How does creativity actually work? I am curious. How does creativity work? How can we get better at it? A lot of books give us habits and systems to follow. I hope to explain well what I have found under the hood–the engine behind creativity! It is about bridges, connecting between opposing things. I have distilled it into three steps: The Dream, The Sandbox, and The Story. The…

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