Courageously Creative

Be more creative in your own way

Best of the Best – Your Second Chance

By

Lion Dance Sheko

Lion Dance: King of the Jungle?

新年快乐! Kung hei fat choi! As China welcomes the year of the rabbit, westerners have a second chance to make a New Year’s resolution and may I suggest something of global proportions.

There is talk of countries using creativity to increase competitiveness through innovation. That’s fine for whole countries but what about us? Individuals are also starting to look around and realize they are not the only ones running the race.  What steps can we take to become personally more competitive?

Although globalization has fans and opponents, it’s nothing new and has been around since before the Phoenicians sailed the Mediterranean or caravans traveled the Silk Road.  Today’s phenomenal growth in the East is partially the result of centrally planned capitalism, for example, China has thrived by looking at their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) and using this to target industries to put their resources.

Year of the Rabbit (SWOT Analysis)


Strengths
Weaknesses

Cute, Fast, Soft

Small

Multiplies

Poor Language Skills

Four Lucky Feet

Damages Gardens

Excellent Hearing

Owns Easter

Bugs Bunny Franchise

Opportunities

Threats

Silent Spokes-model

Foxes

Entertainment

Wile E. Coyote

Gaming

Competition from:

Pets

Dogs and Cats

Surveillance

Fur Coats

It’s no longer good enough to be the best rabbit on your block or your neighborhood, today; we must be the best in the world. What steps do you need to take to get in the top 1 percent of people within your skill set. We can start by asking what do like to do? What am I especially good at? Where do I add the most value?

List a few things by asking: What do I need to do to get on next year’s top ten list? How do I win the gold medal in cost accounting? What do I need to do to win the Oscar for most efficient software coding, or the daytime Emmy for most positive influence on children, or the people’s choice award for most caring of my patients, or the best supporting customer service rep? Think about what business you are really in – Apple is not in the computer business but information sharing.

Find the best teachers and first-class partners. Find the intersection between your chief skills and your collaborators unique abilities. If we happen to be the best auto mechanics and team up with a great farmer, maybe our competitive advantage comes from improving tractors.

Being the best in no longer about vanity or bragging rights, it’s about survival.  If you take steps to identity and refine your skills now: “You’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest,” as Dr. Seuss said.

Your Space and Time

By

Not yet sunset.

Not yet sunset.

Where do some of your best photographs come from? When traveling, after we arrive at our destination, everything is new and we capture our first impressions. After staying for a while, our perceptions deepen and we notice things we never would have on first glance.

After spending a week in Krabi, I learned the terrain and how to take advantage of local weather and lighting conditions. Even after a short time, our perception develops.

We prize child prodigies for their gift and honor young artists or writers for seeing things in a new way, but you can almost hear Rod Stewart singing: “I wish that I knew what I know now. When I was younger.” What if we approached subjects armed with a lifetime of experiences and a deep understanding of the world and human nature? Wouldn’t this give us more tools to be creative?

“The normal adult never bothers his head about spacetime problems. Everything that there is to be thought about, in his opinion, has already been done in early childhood. I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and time when I was already grown up. In consequence, I probed deeper into the problem than an ordinary child would have done” explained Albert Einstein.

Whether or not they started as tots, many creative people made their greatest contributions latter in life using  seasoned approach to produce profound innovations. Every time you look at the same painting or watch the same performance, you see it differently base on your accumulation of experiences. What long settled assumptions will you revisit with the eyes of experience?

Barriers can be Ladders

By

step laddder

Blocking the way or a step up?

You create something that took an hour, a day, or a lifetime and someone comes along and expends five seconds of their time and tells you what you did wrong. It seems much easier (and more fun to some) to stomp on sandcastles than to build one. But sometimes, among the ruins of the castle we can find valuable grains of constructive critics.

Because they are concerned about “What people will say,” many people avoid the risk of creating anything new for fear of criticism, and some are even embarrassed by praise. Sometimes a river is a not an obstacle but a source that sustains life, and sometimes a high wall can be climbed to provide a better view. What people say does not have to be frightening and feedback can enable you to climb.

The first step in sifting out the gold is to qualify the critic. A good question to ask is “did the critic spend an hour, a day, or a lifetime acquiring the knowledge to make their judgments?” If they are knowledgeable in the field, you’re in luck, but sometimes even without a lifetime of knowledge, a critic can be helpful. Even a child can warn that a giant wave is about to crash on your head, but less apt at commenting on your business plan.

Next, can you do anything useful with the advice? Can you use it to improve your project? Or your next project? Like/dislike does not say enough. Is the criticism too late? Is it accurate?

Knowing when to dismiss, delete, and erase from your mind is an important skill. Destructive criticism can be thoughtless, mean and sometimes motivated by other’s agendas and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Much is a matter of opinion where critics unknowingly state their personal values. If their values and objectives happen to coincide with yours, their words could be useful.

Is the criticism given in public or private? Beyond heckles, public criticism is directed to a wider audience and provides information for others: “that was a good movie,” or more qualified, “if you like sci-fi and don’t mind seeing blood,” but not necessary directed toward the producer. Public criticism provides you the chance to respond back to the public, not the critic. “It’s more than sci-fi, it’s also a love story and the violence is limited to one scene.”

To give others useful criticism or advice, speak from your experience and set aside your self-interests. When you receive this kind of criticism, use it to climb the wall for a better view. When there is no feedback, it’s good to assume everyone is deliriously happy.

Destructive Criticism

By

Past to the future

Past to the future

It’s amazing how many people are commenting on the controversy sparked by the book about eastern parenting styles called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Like most people, I have no experience raising teenagers girls of Chinese decent in America and did not read the book – but read an excerpt called “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”- and some of the reaction are taking on a life of their own.

The theme of the debate is not whether tigers eat their young but instead can be simplified as: eastern (discipline, academics, and obedience) verse western (self-esteem, independent thinking, play) methods of parenting.

In the 1980s, there was a mystique surrounded the principles of “Japanese management,” and today we start to look toward Chinese values (could happen #3) because of the mystique  surrounding China’s Asian miracle of growth and  lifting their people out of dire povertyis admired.  It’s also amazing to watch a sprouting bamboo  grow an astonishing 24 inches a day in the spring, but this is unsustained and the plant levels off before summer.

There is not a single method for parenting and most reach a healthy balance between being demanding and being permissive, with an aim not to prepare children for our world,  but  for the world they will live in. Criticism can be constructive, but it can also stifle creativity and be destructive.  Use of creativity is needed by young adults to adapt to a world that will change beyond their parent’s imagination. Asia has not changed for centuries but is rapidly changing now. I wonder what kind of upbringing those leading the change in China had. Continuing with traditional parenting prepares children for a world that is confined to  (could happen #1) museums.

Perhaps a controlled upbringing with traditional Chinese values, may have been the best way to prepare a child for an agrarian/manufacturing society where collective rights are valued more than individual rights. Of course academics and discipline matter, but so does developing self-esteem and independent thinking to adapt to an unpredictable future. So do you stake-and-tie your tomatoes or let your chickens run free? What do you think?

Adventuring in the International Aisle

By

dry food market

Moveable feast

Many of us prepare the same rotation of meals week-after-week and order the same menu item from the same restaurant. When was the last time you tried an entirely new food?

At best, it can be an opportunity to find a new regular and at worst can help you to appreciate your old favorites. When living in Asia, I had the fortune and necessity to try lots of delicious and unidentifiable foods. If you ask what you are eating and are told, there is no English translation; you probably don’t want to know. The Mexican buffet in India was an obvious mistake as were the eggs scrambled with what seemed to be worms – they happened to be very tasty and the Chinese waiter assured me they were “small fish” – my fever broke after only five weeks.

Why are small fish more palatable than worms?   Reframing questions and being open to new experiences leads to creativity. In Hong Kong on each trip to the market, I would buy at least one new ingredient – then Google the name to figure out how it could be used. Some of the foods I adopted can’t be easily found in the US but here are some less exotic ones that can:

Pomelo kind of like a grape fruit but not as sour, great in salads with feta/lime/peanuts

Miso Paste – for sauces.

Edamame beans in shells – steamed with a shake of salt.

Daikon radish – shredded raw or boiled for turnip cakes.

Kaffir lime leaves – For Thai food – Remove leaves before serving.

Rooibos – Caffeine free tea from South Africa.
Try a new restaurant, and new menu item, or a pick up a new ingredient in the international aisle of your local market. What is the most unusual food that you like?

9 Things that Could Happen to Arts and Entertainment

By

rocket car

made in china

Sometimes it’s difficult to know what happened yesterday and predicting the future is anyone’s guess. Here are some long range guesses mostly related to arts and entertainment.

1)      National styles will disappear and styles with no link to geography will emerge.  Renaissance festivals, reenactments, candle making, South Pacific dance, and Geishas will be preserved in  museum-like settings supported by some passionate individuals and subsidies.  What does it means anymore to be a “French” or “Cuban” style painter?  With global access to ideas (and materials) we no longer learn only from our neighbors. Traditions in food will be the last to fuse.  Common experiences and practices will become more global but also more fractured. You may find more in common with people scattered across the globe who shares the same hobbies and musical tastes, than with the other people at your bus stop.

2)      Aging population in western nations will create more of a demand of entertainment and have more of an influence on what is produced. Today, older people buy more music than teens. The key word is “buy” and the smart marketers will cater to the paying customers.

3)      China will be an emerging force in the entertainment world. As the Chinese gain wealth and leisure time, they will increasingly consume entertainment. Today, much of their entertainment is an import. As a country with a rich history, they have their own stories to tell. Expect the Chinese to start exporting their values by telling their own stories.

4)      E-readers will give traditional newspapers and magazines a run for their money, but paper books will endure and we will continue reading for enjoyment.   However, ebooks offer the opportunity to transform the media. They will begin to be designed with color, interactive features, hyperlinks to footnotes, 3D rotatable diagrams, audio and videos etc.

Books and movies may start to merge allowing the user to pause the action and to read more about a character or a situation. Imagine having the chance to affect a story by choosing a local restaurant where the characters will have their fight scene. While you watch you can check the Zagat rating, look at the menu and order your dinner, or see what else happening down the street, and overhearing what is happening nearby by scrolling to another table. Of course all this takes a lot of effort to create and will have to be paid for somehow. Will you tolerate an ad for soft drinks while in the midst of a page turner? Will the phrase page turner lose it meaning? What will we put on our book cases?

5)      Creating movies will be a new form of literacy. We all know how to watch, but do you know how to make and edit a video? Youtube type of sharing is here to stay, so much of the information we gather is through short sound bites. Making a video is more than pointing a camera and pushing the red button –  refining our ideas to a few words is more important than ever when using a format that can spread. Now anyone who has a computer and can type can make an animation with Extranormal software, but currently all the characters that you can choose have sarcastic sounding voices.

6)  Cloud computing have a chance of storms. Cloud computing allows data and software to reside on remote servers instead of your own pc. It has many benefits but may cause some problems especially related to automatic and unannounced upgrading. Its like every time you go to cut your lawn, you find a different lawnmower in the shed. Sometimes gas, sometimes electric, sometimes self propelled, sometimes your catcher fits, sometimes not.  Dynamic changes to software means you find a different tool each time you logon?  Will it be compatible, will the learning curve constantly throw curves?

7)      The spot light will continue to shrink and so will the message. News organizations don’t have the resources to cover more than the most entertaining newsmakers, increasing competition for attention. How do we get accurate and useful information that’s relevant to us with so many sources? This lifts the elevator speech to a higher floor. The shorter we can refine our message, the more effective it can be – as evident by all the attention paid to those 140 character tweets.

8)      When the economy recovers, sadly not every boat will rise with the tide. Some people will be left behind if they do not develop and maintain the skills to be competitive. Creativity is needed more than ever.

9)      What are your predictions?