Feeding creativity

If I close my eyes, I can picture the large circular frame, roughly 10ft in diameter it has four aluminium U-shaped legs. Connected to the legs are eight vertical poles wrapped in black foam padding in various states of disrepair. The plastic hooks from which the net hangs, are missing from the top of two of the poles. The net itself, once described as providing ‘premium safety’ UV protection and being tear-resistant is now a sad, limp version of its former self. There is a football sized hole near the entrance zip which is also ripped and flaps about wildly in the wind.  

Extending from it is a small ladder that doesn’t quite reach the ground on one side making it unstable and essentially useless. The bounce pad has a large bird poo on it and two springs missing so it sags on one side. 

Behind is a raised bed made from old rail sleepers, which contains some sort of exotic plant that looks great in Summer but desperate in an English Winter.

I can describe all this without even looking at it because the old trampoline and this corner of my garden has been my view every day we have been working from home.

Everyone will have their own version of this. I'm lucky to have a garden at all.

One of my colleagues is far worse off. He faces a blank sloping wall, having to stoop his head whilst he’s working because it is the only corner of his house he can get decent internet and some peace from his kids.

I am envious of the people who can work remotely from somewhere more exotic because for most of us, especially parents, that’s just a pipe dream that annoys us on Instagram.

And it matters. Especially for creative people, because whilst many of us have been busy trying to BE creative during lockdown - making or baking or painting or cooking or doing DIY or taking photos or crafting (or even just getting creative with how we spend time with our own kids) - making sure we continually have creative ideas means we need inspiration from the world around us.  

Steve Jobs believed that creativity is all about making connections between diverse experiences but warned "If you're gonna make connections which are innovative ... you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does, or else you're going to make the same connections [as everybody else], and then you won't be innovative, and then nobody will give you an award."

That is really hard in a Lockdown. The result of us (literally) going nowhere, is that the world around us is smaller than we are used to, our real world experiences limited and ‘samey’. Now more than ever we need topping-up with diverse creative inspiration so our creative funnel is bright and varied and we can fire the synapses that make the connections that lead us to more original ideas and more interesting work.

The internet will never be a substitute for real world experiences, overhearing conversations, taking in new places and sights and smells - travel….

But in this strange, disconcerting time, we have to make do with what we've got. Recommendations are more important than ever - not for places to visit in the real world but for places to take our mind - new content and ideas and books and art and music and design and recipes and running routes and meditation apps and all sorts of random stuff is vital if we are able to appreciate them from home. Anything that introduces us to something new, that we may have otherwise have not seen, heard about or experienced has extra-special value at the moment. And not just on an individual level. If you work in a creative business, having your remote working staff well fed on new and interesting ideas that stimulate them beyond simply their next brief or project, will invariably lead to a better creative output.

But there is a caveat. For me at least, and that is creative inspiration takes time - to listen to, read, watch, explore, discover and importantly, digest. And time, especially with kids at home, feels in short supply. A tsunami of creativity to explore is not, in and of itself, helpful. In fact, I've found the opposite to be true. There just are not enough hours in the day to take everything in. Being curious but feeling you don’t have the time to feed that curiosity is like being the kid looking through the window of the sweet shop when it's closed.  

The desire to keep on top of pop culture, tech innovation, trends, gaming, art, music, fashion, current affairs, shows, books and a billion other ideas and publications and streams and platforms can easily change from being an exciting prospect to something more oppressive - an additional stress at an already stressful time.

There are many of us (I include myself in this) who although endlessly curious, inadvertently skim through many parts of life rather than immersing ourselves in it. We move from one thing to the next on autopilot, only scratching the surface. We scroll endlessly without taking enough in to really nourish us. We half listen and half watch and half read, our heads full of half thoughts and semi-ideas.

We’re doing one thing but our head is doing another - sometimes several others - lying awake at late at night bring the perfect example.

Of course, in the great scheme of things and against the hardships many are facing at the moment, all this is entirely unimportant. But in terms of creativity, it does have significance.

We can never be as fast as ideas are presented to us in social media or the news cycle, or in pop culture.

We will always be playing catch-up

So what to do?

What I am trying to learn and my mantra for the start of 2021 is not to try so hard.

Pause.

Which feels counterintuitive.

But pausing has been a revelation to me. It is not an idea I can claim as my own but one put to me last year by the brilliant facilitator, coach, author and creative business thinker Rob Poynton.

Rob hosted a DO lecture in November and was incredibly generous with his time and advice. 

Central to the workshop was advocating the benefits of pausing - where those benefits are as much about our mental health and happiness as they are about tangible ‘achievements’.

A pause is not nothing. It is not empty or wasted time.

It is about how we use our time, potentially to go deeper into a subject.

The build for me was about pausing some things so I can concentrate on others. That has meant carving the day into chunks of time where I focus on one thing - not multi-screening, multitasking or multi anything. Single things, one thing at a time, pausing the others.

Some physical, some mental, some social, some reflective.

Read, write, watch something new, play music, daydream, be with the kids, walk the dog, eat, sleep, exercise, talk to friends, allow myself to journey down an Internet wormhole.

I don't see this and mindfulness per se or even necessarily about slowing down, but more about being more single minded with time.

I am right at the start of this and it is easier said than done, especially if like me you haven’t focused on one thing for a period of time for as long as you can remember. It requires a bit of planning and fighting the urge to load up with a thousand thoughts at once.  

Reverting to old habits is only a Whatsapp notification ping away but I am convinced that creatively in any case, there is a simple and compelling equation worth aiming for:

(Diverse) creative stimulus + creating time to enjoy and digest it = better ideas.

We’ll see.

Happy New Year all.