This post is part of the Break Through Your Creative Blocks series.
If you have a creative block you’d like some help with, tell us about it – details in the first article in the series.
Artists and other creative people are not renowned for their powers of personal organisation. “A cluttered desk is a sign of genius,” we like to say, when challenged about our working conditions. And plenty of us can relate to Albert Einstein, whose wife had to chase him down the street to remove the coat hanger from the coat he was wearing, as he was too preoccupied with higher thoughts to notice such mundane details.
So I wasn’t surprised that several Lateral Action readers admitted to struggling with organisation when we invited you to tell us about your creative blocks.
Click to Continue Reading »
Table of Contents for Break Through Your Creative Blocks
I was walking down the street near my home in Berlin a few days ago when the image at right caught my eye in a shop window, and I couldn’t resist snapping a picture through the glass. ‘Kreativitat’, as you may have guessed, means ‘creativity’ in German, and the idea that it could be bought in a spray-bottle and kept on hand to be deployed as needed, appealed to me somehow.
Of course things aren’t quite that simple; the irony was presumably intended, but it got me to thinking: what if they were? What if it really weren’t that complicated? What if it could be? What if, just possibly, for some people, some of the time – what if it really were that easy?
As human beings, we love stories. We love to hear them and we love to tell them. We are always telling stories – sometimes to others and sometimes to ourselves.
Another good reason to learn to tell better stories is because people don’t make rational decisions. They make them emotionally and then rationalize them by selectively focusing on everything that supports the decision they have made.
Learning to tell good stories is not an overnight exercise. However, you can start by observing good stories. I have chosen a few videos that showcase storytelling in action.
1. The Story of an Apple Seed
A short 2-minute video by Johnny Kelly that explains the story of an apple seed.
With the coming of the information age a fad called multi-tasking was also born. Somehow it was perceived efficient to be able to do many things at the same time; read your emails, talk with your spouse, eat bubblegum while walking… The reason I call multi-tasking a fad is that research shows that multi-tasking is actually detrimental to productivity, and apparently can be worse on your IQ than pot smoking. How about that?
Instead of concentrating on doing many different things at the same time, you should choose a single important task and immerse yourself completely in it. This approach has been paraded in multiple productivity blogs and books, including here at Lateral Action. Indeed, the real power of human mind is the ability to focus on single things for extended periods of time. When and if that focus is interrupted, it may take up to 25 minutes to regain it. And if those interruptions happen multiple times a day, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see how disastrous this is to productivity.
When Mark tossed out the challenge of sending in our creative blocks, I hit the keyboard faster than a speed demon in a red wagon. I was determined. I was going to tell someone. Once and for all.
We’ve all heard someone say things like, “Everyone is an artist” and “We’re all born naturally creative.” But most of us smile and nod (and think to ourselves, “Yeah, right!”) when we hear something like that, much in the way that we do when someone says something like, “Everyone is beautiful – fat, thin, tall, short, etc.”
I was walking down the street near my home in Berlin a few days ago when the image at right caught my eye in a shop window, and I couldn’t resist snapping a picture through the glass. ‘Kreativitat’, as you may have guessed, means ‘creativity’ in German, and the idea that it could be bought in a spray-bottle and kept on hand to be deployed as needed, appealed to me somehow.
With the coming of the information age a fad called multi-tasking was also born. Somehow it was perceived efficient to be able to do many things at the same time; read your emails, talk with your spouse, eat bubblegum while walking… The reason I call multi-tasking a fad is that research shows that multi-tasking is actually detrimental to productivity, and apparently can be 
How about that? 
