Great Creativity Tool
Mind maps are great tools for planning, organizing, problem solving, or brainstorming. Hold a paper in landscape view and start with one word of your idea or problem in the center of the page. Connect lines to other thoughts. Tony Buzan suggests using many colors and symbols as you you work from the center out. Recently, I used this method during a 15 minute break at my job and discovered the structure that I needed for an article. This productive use of a small bit of time helped me to move quickly when I sat down at the computer. It is one of those activities that you can add to your list of things to do for your creative project when you only have a short slot of time. Use it when the answer to a problem eludes you. It combines the whole picture with details. Therefore, I am not sure whether it is a left brained or right brained activity. It certainly frees up areas of your unconscious as you work in a non hierarchical manner. In the end, you see connections and structures.
Sunday, February 16, 2003
Career Advice
I like this bit of career advice from George Monbiot. He aims the advice to journalists, but I find it inspirational for all creative people. He claims that the typical career advice in school "teaches you to do what you don't want to do, to be what you don't want to be. It is an exceptional person who emerges from this process with her aims and ideals intact. Indeed it is an exceptional person who emerges from this process at all." He outlines three approaches to do the work you want to do. None are easy or quickly lucrative. "The first is simply to start how you mean to go on. This is unlikely, for a while, to be self-financing, so you may need to supplement it with work which raises sufficient money to keep you alive but doesn't demand too much mental energy." He warns against working in a job that leaves you with "no time or energy left to develop the career path [you] really wanted to follow. And you have to develop it: it simply will not happen by itself." He makes good suggestions to journalists trying to find markets for the work they want to do.
Finally, this wonderful quote: "You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?"
I like this bit of career advice from George Monbiot. He aims the advice to journalists, but I find it inspirational for all creative people. He claims that the typical career advice in school "teaches you to do what you don't want to do, to be what you don't want to be. It is an exceptional person who emerges from this process with her aims and ideals intact. Indeed it is an exceptional person who emerges from this process at all." He outlines three approaches to do the work you want to do. None are easy or quickly lucrative. "The first is simply to start how you mean to go on. This is unlikely, for a while, to be self-financing, so you may need to supplement it with work which raises sufficient money to keep you alive but doesn't demand too much mental energy." He warns against working in a job that leaves you with "no time or energy left to develop the career path [you] really wanted to follow. And you have to develop it: it simply will not happen by itself." He makes good suggestions to journalists trying to find markets for the work they want to do.
Finally, this wonderful quote: "You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?"
Poet Power
Have you ever doubted the power of art? Poets intimidated the First Lady and a poetry reading was cancelled when it became evident that many of the creative wordsmiths were antiwar. While one poet planned a subtle protest on her silk scarf, many poets planned to read poetry against the Bush planned war in Iraq. Imagine the conversations between Laura and the poets if she had not cancelled the reading.
Have you ever doubted the power of art? Poets intimidated the First Lady and a poetry reading was cancelled when it became evident that many of the creative wordsmiths were antiwar. While one poet planned a subtle protest on her silk scarf, many poets planned to read poetry against the Bush planned war in Iraq. Imagine the conversations between Laura and the poets if she had not cancelled the reading.
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