Creativity

It's not about creativity. It's about focussed creativity. And creativity only becomes focussed when it is constrained, trammelled, formatted. Find a format you are happy with.

life begins when you say I am a...

What’s the biggest predictor of childhood musical genius? Innate ability? Hours of practise? Parents are musicians? Nope.

The single biggest factor is whether the kids see themselves as long or short term committed. If a child self-identifies as very long term committed to music ie. sees themselves as ‘a musician’ even though they aren’t, then this far outweighs other factors. To put it into perspective: a child who calls him or herself ‘a musician’, who practises a mere thirty minutes a week will outperform any child over any time period who practises an hour and a half a week but who doesn't self-identify with the idea of being a musician. Practise doesn’t make perfect. Perfect plus some practise makes better sense. You need the self-image first, not last. Don’t we all know this…despite its counter-cause-and-effect feel. It’s the way the real and mysterious world works. Nicholson Baker wrote how he called himself a writer even though he hadn’t written anything. I called myself a poet long before I wrote any half decent poetry. It was the image of being a poet that kept me going , but more than that it gave a scale and context to my efforts. How many pop stars call themselves musicians and then learn to play their instruments? Loads.

This insight about youthful excellence by the way comes from the superbly suggestive and informative ‘The talent code’ by Daniel Coyle. It’s full of great stuff.

Anyway- back to the main idea. We can see that ability or great talent is, in fact, an act of impersonation. Is it any surprise that great actors turn out to achieve high standards in reality- Robert De Niro was considered by real boxing champ Jake La Motta to be ‘in the top 10 boxers in America’. This was after intensive coaching for his role as…  world champion boxer Jake La Motta. Stephen Fry, in his autobiographical novel ‘The Liar’ gives a clue to his multi-talentedness- the book’s theme is that the hero despite his high achievements always feels like a fraud who is merely acting the part, and will be found out at any moment, in other words, he acts the part and then becomes it.

The clue for potential polymaths is to find out the key to self-identifying with any talent they want to achieve. This is where intensive training comes in. I did aikido three times a week for an hour at a time- but I still didn’t think of myself as a martial artist. I upped that to five days a week for five hours a day and everything changed. Over a year I got a lot lot better. But it wasn’t the practise, or only the practise, it was the fact that this was what I did so this must be what I was.

By meeting and becoming ordinary friends with people who do what you want to do you learn how ‘they aren’t that special’ ie. they are human after all. Which means you can impersonate them and become that role too. Why are so many top tennis players eastern European? Because just by coming from Czech/Serbia/Croatia you are already halfway there. I mean if you’re Brazilian you must be good at football right? This may be half humorous, but it's more than half-true.

Now, the big question is, is there a way to switch on the ‘I am a…’ button so that mastery of a subject is assured? I think there is. Start with the following:

1)Immerse yourself in the subject to one level above that at which you wish to compete.

2) Make ordinary friends with people doing what you want to do. See what they do in their regular lives not just when they are doing what they are doing best.

3) Do your thing – practise conjures up the wrong image- what I think sums it up better is ‘apply your own creativity to your own improvement’. You have to jump higher. Figure out your own way to do this first. Seek help too, wherever you can find it, but in the end you have to personalise your improvement, ‘find your own way’ to do what everyone else is doing ‘the standard way’- if doing it the standard way doesn’t come naturally at first (and it may later).

4) From the beginning call yourself ‘a writer’, ‘a poet’, ‘a photographer’, ‘an athlete’, ‘a pilot’. Do what you have to, in terms of improvised sleight of hand to half convince yourself, three-quarters convince yourself, to be able to convince others at a party, say, that yes you really are that role. And then you’ll become it. If that’s what you want.

Lucky Ludwig

Explorers need two skills in spades: the ability to lead and the ability to navigate. If you don’t know where you are, where you are going and can’t get others to follow you, things can get mighty unwholesome.

Most explorers have or take the trouble to acquire these skills. But not all of them. Ludwig Leichhardt, the first European to cross northern Australia, linking the East coast to the North, a spectacularly ambitious and successful expedition, was neither any good at knowing where he was nor much use at leading.

Some of his calculations put his estimated position in the Coral Sea they were so inaccurate. When he left the Burdekin river he went completely off course. He had two front teeth knocked out by an aboriginal guide- a friendly guide not an antagonistic one. He failed to ration his supplies and allowed half of them to be gobbled up in the first 700km of a 4800 km journey. From then on they lived precariously off the land.

Leichhardt, a Prussian of slender means, a former tutor of the children of the rich, was not very likeable, by all accounts. But he arrived in Australia aged 30 in 1843 determined to explore the interior. He got lucky when the British asked that someone try to link up what would become Brisbane with Port Essington in the north west.

Was luck, then, the lesson we can draw from Leichhardt? (His luck ran out in 1848 when he disappeared in the interior of Australia). Or is it simply being in the right time and the right place (even if later you can’t exactly say where that place is)? Leichhardt was short sighted, temperamental, not physically impressive, incompetent and yet he made a truly great journey. Personally I think he stands as a necessary antidote to the ambitious hordes tugging their sledges to both poles and their rucksacks up Mt Everest. Exploration isn’t primarily about physical toughness, it’s about mental toughness allied with supreme optimism. Leichhardt really believed. No one else did which was why the journey hadn’t been made before. Nowadays such self belief is bolstered by sat phones, GPS, EPIRBs, air rescue. Journeys made in the old way look tame now, just as walking a six inch plank is easy when it’s on the ground. Try doing it when it is raised a few hundred feet…

Sheer unadulterated optimism, hope, belief that it can be done, that a way will be found: that’s the lesson of Ludwig Leichhardt.

what's your currency?

Time or money? Or maybe something else?

opportunity

From time to time do a task you consider is beneath you.

the keys to the kingdom

If self -help books really worked wouldn’t every half concerned parent be forcing their kid to read them?

If self-help books really worked wouldn’t the authors be doing other stuff HIGHLY SUCCESSFULLY rather than writing endless new self-help books?

Apart from Benjamin Franklin, and the extraordinary Clement Stone, who made a $100 million selling insurance before he wrote a self help book, I can’t think of one self-help writer whose ‘success’ isn’t the rather incestuous kind of writing highly successful self-help books.

ie. selling hope sells really well.

The problem, if I may be so bold, with books like Stephen Covey’s 7 habits of highly effective people is that they don’t work.

Yep. Big claim I know but here's why I make it:

I’ve been reading self-help books all my life. I love ‘em. But they don’t do what they say on the tin. They aren’t a manual for achieving what you want to achieve.

They are good for many other lesser things though. Not negligible things either.

Self- help books can give you a real boost, a pick me up that can last several days.

They can give you a framework for making sense of an enterprise.

They can introduce you to the helpful idea of not blaming others for your current situation.

They can provide very useful tips when you are stuck.

In other words self help books bear much the same relationship to ‘life success’ as how-to-write books do to successful writing.

Writing I know about. To succeed at it you need to have a book or books in mind that you really like and want to copy or emulate. You need two, or preferably three, hours of completely uninterrupted writing time five days a week. You need something you care about to write about. And that’s it bro’.

Not much of a how-to book is it?

The nub of the matter is actually doing the activity not thinking about it, talking about it or reading about it.

Here’s what I did.

I loved the idea of long distance walking as a kid. Yet every long distance walk I did I gave up on, except one of fifty miles I did with the scouts aged 14 where I had the support of my fellow hikers. Fifty miles – not far eh? But it was enough, a slim shard to hang my next attempt on.

Scroll forward ten years. I had tried to write books and not finished one. I had made two short films and then failed to finish a third. Another year threatened to slip by and I didn’t want to be sitting up on new year’s eve thinking, “yep another dud year with nothing achieved.”

So I thought, “Forget what I WANT to do and focus on what I CAN do and what would make me proud and happy too.”

Walking. I can walk. So I set out and walked a combination of the High Route, the GR 10 and the GR11 from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic along the ridge of the Pyrennees. It took me 42 days to do about 700km and I loved it. It wasn’t all easy. At a couple of points I almost gave up, but that thought of yet another thing given up spurred me on. In the last 24 hours of the walk I covered 60 miles over hilly terrain and slept for two hours - I was that pumped up about finishing.

Then I wrote, in cafes mainly, a book about this walk. It wasn’t a good book. It was rambling and dull but it was 60,000 words long. On the last day I wrote 8000 words in about ten hours to finish it. It was kind of like the last dash at the end of the walk. And writing each day was like doing my three or fours walk before lunch and then three or fours hours afterwards.

I’d cracked writing by applying the ‘success method’ I used in walking.

Then I did a year long martial arts course which involved four to five hours training five days a week for a year.

I knew I could keep going because I had kept going during the walk. So the notions of persistence I had ‘grown’ doing the walk I was able to transfer to the course.

Then I wrote a book about spending a year doing martial arts. The method of writing- mainly in the mornings, four to five hours a day was a direct copy of the timetable of the course.

This and subsequent books all succeeded.

But still I didn’t know what was going on. I had a hazy idea. But though I had ‘cracked’ walking, learning a physical art and writing I thought other areas, such as business or even everyday life were a bit beyond me. As such I stumbled along admiring those who seemed far more efficient and organised than I.

I have a friend, a TV producer who is probably one of the most efficient people I know. She once said to me, “Nothing makes me happier than that feeling I get when I tick things off on my ‘to do’ list.”

Weird or what? I thought. For a long time.

Then I applied a little translation, the kind of translation I had done when I converted my success at walking to success at writing. I realised there was NO DIFFERENCE between what she had said, and what I sometimes think when I have done 3000 words in a good session, printed it off, and written the tally on my daily word count sheet. No difference.

And then I thought about all those people I have met who complain about how hard writing is. When I question them I realise they are MAKING it hard by putting loads of obstacles in their way. For example: not setting out sacred amounts of time – instead they write ‘when they have free moment’- get out of here!; or they don’t have a quiet place to write- instead writing in room where there kids can come in and annoy them- impossible.

I realised I was doing the same thing in everyday life. I wasn’t giving it enough respect, time or obstacle free-ness if I can use such a term.

When I applied the same rules as I did to writing: uninterrupted time, deadlines and goals, celebrate and record progress- it was all plain sailing.

So the keys to the kingdom are simple.

Find something you can finish. Maybe it’s restoring an old car. Maybe it’s getting a grade in a language exam- but outside school if you are still a student- so you have to be a bit self motivated. Maybe it’s like me- doing a long walk. Or climbing a mountain. It can be anything as long as you finish it.

Then you transfer the ‘oomph’ that you have acquired, the skills of setting aside time and energy for a real attempt, the focus and determination, to whatever you want to do next.

It’s that simple.

the Amundsen factor #4

So far, in the interests of simplicity, I have characterised the Amundsen factor as ‘not overloading the mission’. In other words, keeping the goal defined and simple and without sub-missions along the way. This, has of course, been said before in various ways: keep it simple, focus, do one thing at a time and so on. Nevertheless, it is such a natural human tendency that it needs to be repeated again and again: don’t overload the mission.

However it is interesting to look at other aspects of Amundsen’s achievement.

Connected to, and, indeed, nurturing the single minded mission is the ability to learn from mistakes. The feedback time from making a mistake, to realising that something different must be tried, can vary enormously. In some people it can take years before they realise they have in fact made a mistake. The truly wilful blame everything and everyone but themselves. Scott, whilst attending a dying pony, ordered eight more ponies to be sent back to the Discovery hut across dangerous sea ice. This resulted in the loss of seven animals. Bowers, who carried out the orders for this folly, wrote:

“It just had to be…let those who believe in coincidence carry on believing. Nobody will ever convince me it was not something more.”

In fact, Bowers had not followed Wilson, who changed course when he saw what a rotten state the ice was in. If Bowers had, the ponies would have been saved. Scott may have initiated the error in given the orders, but Bowers had made a mistake in the way he executed them and yet he could not admit it.

The contrast with Amundsen is instructive. After finishing the laying of depots at 80 and 82 degrees latitude all the men crowded into a tent to have their say about what had gone right and wrong. The tents were uniformly condemned- these were two man tents that Amundsen had thought would be warmer. They were not; and cooking in a cramped tent, and then carrying half the meal across to the next tent had been a disaster. Boots were also found to be far too stiff and small. The solutions were found immediately. The tents were joined together to make a four or five man model. Pieces of leather were added to the toecaps of the boots to enlarge them, whilst sections of the sole were removed to make the boot less stiff.

The whole tenor of Amundsen’s trip is one of humility in the face of a great challenge. Plans and preparations are made far in advance but if things go wrong a solution is sought. Learning is not inhibited by command structures or ego.

Though it sounds a trifle obvious to recommend that people learn from their mistakes it is actually far commoner to observe the opposite: people making the same mistake again and again and calling it by another name: ‘bad luck’, ‘someone else’s fault’,  ‘that’s just my way of doing things’, ‘it’s not important anyway’. The latter is probably the most insidious. A mistake is recognised- but not as something of importance. It is overlooked because the mind is elsewhere. To have a simple unloaded mission also helps focus on what mistakes really are important and which are not.

It is interesting to note that Amundsen’s works show a sense of humour, Scott’s do not. Humour, apart from being very welcome, is an essential requirement in judgement. Humour rests on the ability to pick out the incongruous, the thing that doesn’t fit. Scott lacked Amundsen’s judgement- that is very obvious. He would spend a entire night tending a dying pony whilst neglecting the transport of his living animals. It might be unfair on Scott to criticise his inability to learn. Perhaps he couldn’t. He just didn’t have the judgement to know what was important and what was not.