The Lure Of The Cobra

Why does everyone stop in their tracks to look at the Cobra?

There is something divine about it. Sensual, erotic, in touch with itself. Beautifully drawn and designed. It is a shape that we can engage with. It has a human quality. This photograph is of a replica version but still everyone who arrived in the lot stopped and gazed without knowing exactly why. There is no exactly why.

The photograph totally fails to do justice to the power of it in real life. The original Shelby Cobra needs no further eulogy from me but oh boy what a stunning triumph of creativity and engineering. There is something innate in us that relates to these qualities. This indefinable stimulus of the senses.

Enough said.

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Part Three: Rules Of Thumb for the 21st Century

Creativity is at the intersection of audacity, integrity and discernment. That incredible place where you dare to believe in that which your unique perception has caused you to stumble into. Initially it’s fog, then mischievous then a blast of clarity so profound you question its reality. Then it feels like a naturally occurring element. It must always have been there. We just hadn't noticed it before.

So the final set of things to challenge our days with...

1. Change your tune. Start having a new way of tackling the same old issues. Try figuring out what the new theme and dialogue might be. Rehearse it until you get it right bit always keep your pitch fresh.
2. Humor. Without it the world is a tough place. Humor is a great and creative act. It draws on all the above ideas. It can be swamped by work so its vital to make a space for it. There are moments when it sparks the next wave, the actual breakthrough or just ensures we don't take ourselves to seriously.
3. Stand back and shoot yourself to pieces. You are a work in progress. It’s never finished. Don't ever stop. After that last success or failure forget it, use it bend it but never stop improving it. This will guarantee you the status of prime irritant but it will lengthen your life, your relevance and the likely success of all around you. Stay creative!
4. Structure and Perspective. Not two different things but related ideas. Without a frame the mind isn't choosing between ideas. It is too wide for us to cotton onto the stuff that's flying around. Imagine solving a problem without the brief. In order to 'fly' the frame well you need perspective. Built from experience but unleashed from it the perspective is what adds the uniqueness. I love the idea that there are multiple great answers to the question. That's creativity.
5. Teamworking can work but not without structure and souls mating. I've witnessed countless examples of creativity and creative teams. Collaboration to solve a problem is one of the greatest traits of the human. The trick is finding the shared soul. Sometimes this is a clash of opposites. Its a paradox but its true. Great work can come from teams that actually dislike each other but add that something in that peculiar way. At a special time. Genius often is a lonely path but it ignores the players on the path at its peril.
6. Audacity In Everything. Just try stuff. Walked around a completely amazing historic town straight out of the guide book to stunning. In that town were feasts for the eye at every turn. I stumbled upon an artist in residence in one of these beautiful buildings - his art was wretched. Poorly assembled clip art from a million failed art school exam papers. He was selling out. Sold down a river to nowhere. He didn't sell to me. No audacity. No hope.
7. Carry a camera. Forget whether the images are any good for a minute and start recording things that catch your eye, then your minds eye, then worry about whether the image was any good. Then start again after it made you think what had happened. Why. Does it make you look at stuff differently.
8. Associate scenes with smell and taste. Associate smell and taste with scenes. Your mind can't help doing that to a certain extent anyway. Try and capture that in words or images. Add the extra feeling somehow. How did it go? Keep at the idea. Acuity, observation, memory and moments in time. Make your own word for it.
9. Create a 'philosophy' - a structure to understand and live things through. Creativity requires a kind of stress. A positive stress without which no challenge, without which no noble cause to drive us on. We need to build that 'native way', that approach that has understood itself. A grace. A feeling of being at peace with chaos.
10. Write. Even though no-one may ever read it - or get the same energy as you have from the act of writing stuff down, do it. It has a powerful way of putting structure into your thinking. It changes your ideas for the better. It allows you to see and feel what you actually mean. It stops you from believing your own hype because when written it has to add up. Don't worry that no-one may ever read it. It's for you. It's a creative act.
11. Aim to simplify but not over simplify. It’s obvious that not everyone will immediately get your creativity. However it shows up. The minute you make it simple there will be those who want the underlying complex rationale. Remember to stay true to the idea. Respect the demand for both simplicity and complexity but figure out quickly which kind of audience you have.
12. Contemplate the newer words. Attention, Reflection. Grace. Charm. Persistence. Honour. Symbolism. Social Media. Ingenuity, Experience. Okay they are not new words but have you contemplated them recently? Add your own but make them different.

That’s it! Enjoy the creative life!

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Part Two: Rules Of Thumb for the 21st Century

Study Apple. There is a company that has broken the mould. Stayed true, thought beyond the traditional to revolutionize all around it. In a recent Fast Company article they explained the 10 reasons for the success: 

1. Magic doesn't happen in an echo chamber. Don't listen to the peer group, that's not what's going to make the difference. Create your own thinking space, your own lab and make that a real world.
2. It's okay to be king. It's important that someone just decides how different its going to be. Get all the planned, prepared, complex stuff out of the way. Clean, simple decisive. Do it.
3. Transcend Orthodoxy as long as it makes sense. Believe it or not there is a huge raging battle about the closed or open nature of iTunes. Who gives a crap its a great platform, it works its easy. It will change. Get over it. Its served a tremendous purpose already. In the beginning everyone who could shout said it wouldn't work. Now who's smiling?
4. The default answer is no. Being a filter for what shouldn't be done is miles more important than what could be done. Easy to add more features when the one or two really important ones are already there but then they get clouded. The focus goes fuzzy. The customers get confused. Think about that.
5. Serve your customer. No, really. Imagine a free repair service on site, no matter what the question no matter where you bought the product, no matter how long it might take. Right there - right now. Doh. How many other services do that? Not many right. That's the aptly named iGenius. I’ve just been. It really works.
6. Apple is Religion. Everything is Marketing. The brand is so powerful and the range so thoroughly designed and beautiful. Each product has its 'thing' the buds on the earphones, the start up sound, the logo that lights up on the back. As long as they can think beyond the great thing we will mostly stay hooked. It needs to stay insanely good in the 21st Century.
7. Kill the past. Looking at Apples patents filings you can see 3D computing, large scale touch and projection screens, desk free computing - why are we surprised? Well we aren't. Its killed previous versions of operating systems, the floppy disk and many other things. It isn't always right bit it makes for always embracing what's next, not what's gone.
8. Turn Feedback Into Inspiration. Don't ignore customers requirements but don't be slaves to them either. They don't actually know what's possible but they will be a great guide. That guidance is the best of all worlds as long as you know how to stay ahead and still perform the alchemy.
9. Don't Invent. Reinvent. Apples speciality is the remix. It takes multiple and threaded ideas and does a stunning job of jazzing with them into a wholly new category or 'type'. It avoids the linear step change and makes the leap radical. Total rethink completely dismisses the inbuilt barriers, the embedded layers of what's stopped earlier revolutions. Think differently. Change the paradigm. Delight the world.
10. Play by Your Own Clock. Create the long plan. Easy when you are Apple. They have achieved the enviable position of being able to write the roadmap. Each wave of product learning from the last but now creating the platform for the next launches. We don't know what that me be just now but we can see the clues in every product, every platform. It just gets better and better. 

More on the next post...

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Part One: Rules Of Thumb for the 21st Century

They say - “Garlic is to Food as Insanity is to Art.”

I would add - as Alchemy is to Creativity. Thought transformed into form. Add to all this that the ‘literal’ explanation of anything is to creativity what traveling through an airport system is to a positive experience.

We're all, to a large degree, influenced by what goes on unconsciously. Stuff we don't truly understand.  Trying to define everything all the time makes no more sense of it. It’s foolish. It’s much easier to explain certain things symbolically.  A symbolic definition not a literal one.  A metaphor, an analogy. It’s very hard to explain what or how we are actually thinking and therefore why we make certain decisions. Especially the 'creative' ones. People often look askance at the creative in the room and ask  - “What the...?”

It's this intangible and inexplicable part of us that just 'does' things.  We are all creative. A burst of something, something chemical - an electrical charge goes off in our heads and bang, a new idea, a brushstroke – an outburst – a decisive act.  A new spreadsheet. (Joking)

Creative people just 'feel' things and do stuff that comes natural - it can be seen as curious behavior. It messes things up for the people around us occasionally. For me it's a major part of what I try to do in striving to be creative. It would be very boring to know what drives us and to be able to explain everything wouldn't it?

Knowing everything in the conscious part of our heads is only partially to do with creativity. It is no good to only know stuff in our minds. Creativity comes from other parts of our body. It’s in every sense. Looking for evidence, literal proof is wrong in this sphere.  And counter productive. Creativity is felt. It comes from the heart, the mind and the whole of the body. Deep inside. It’s neural, chemical, pathological. Profound. Lacking codification. (just yet).

I find it extremely difficult to explain 'why' some things are the way they are and why they emerged. Impossible to articulate. The more I'm asked to explain or transfer the knowledge of a creative act/thing or why it came to be - the more I realize that by defining the thing the harder it is to explain the thing.

It's often so much of a difficulty to define that words become bizarre or woolly so I will avoid the question/change the subject. It just is.

So to get through I have compiled my list of laws and rules of thumb for the 21st Century. Here are the first 10. I will post the rest.

Remaining sane and creative while Google Burns. Random things to inspire creative thinking in the 21st Century.

1. Develop a magpie mind. Steal from everywhere and then mess with what you find. Hoard it as it will be bound to be useful sometime. Share bits. Don't defend any of it. Chuck it about. Jazz with it.
2. Pick things up that you don't normally. Look at them hard. See something new. Find a great thought inside every one of them. Ask it hard questions. Twitter that idea. Do it. Do it lots. Write stuff about it - even if it's not good.
3. Read 20 different magazines from Barnes & Noble every month. Waxpoetics, Kosmos, Filter. Carpe Articulum. That kind of stuff. Popular Science.  The Beano.  Write down inspiring bits. Feel what is presented not just the words or the pictures.
4. Visit stores that aren't normally you. Try out the small shops that are out of town or in the less typical spots. See. Remember. Question. Buy a mad thing.
5. Stop talking about how things used to be as if that was something. They aren't now so what are you saying. Try and mingle the lessons of those bygone days into what is going to happen next. And after that. And then after that. Be positive about that.
6. Move away for a while. Get out from under the spells of others or the normal for at least a week. Don't do the expected things. Try different places, parts of your neighborhood. A whole new neighborhood. Catch fish.
7. Understand the definitions of what you mean. Especially the big things that really do drive you. Words you use define you so you had better really know and feel the ones you trot out about yourself. Leader. Manager. Innovator. Coach, Expert. What the heck do those words mean? Determined, spiritual, hard working, cautious.  And just what does that say about you?
8. Raise your aim. And not just by a little bit. By a thousand times and see if you can think about that. What does that tell you. What would you do differently. Try that.
9. Have very different conversations. Deliberately create conversations that aren't the ones you normally have. Try listening to yourself in those conversations. Were you neutral? Discursive? Interesting? Argumentative? A pain? Boring? Creative?
10. Get over your own opinions and yourself. Try to project the really part of you. Explain what is driving your point, not just banging on your point. 

More on the next post...

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Toxic Truth and Systemic Stupidity

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21st Century Progress.

Disruption is a phenomenal tool.

Remember this song?

“In the year 2525, If man is still alive, If woman can survive, They may find ... ” - right through to - “In the year 9595, I'm kinda wonderin' if Man is gonna be alive. He's taken everything this old Earth can give, and he ain't put back nothing. God is gonna shake his mighty head. He'll either say, "I'm pleased where man has been" Or tear it down and start again. Now it's been 10,000 years, Man has cried a billion tears, For what, he never knew. Now man's reign is through. But through eternal night, The twinkling of starlight. So very far away, Maybe it's only yesterday.

Gives a lie to the feeling that there is nothing new, we may not learn fast enough and life will simply start of another cycle.

Back in the 60’s (Source Wikipedia) the song suggested a world doomed by its passive acquiescence to and overdependence on its own overdone technologies, struck a resonant chord in millions of people around the world in the late 1960s.The song describes a nightmarish vision of the future as man's technological inventions gradually dehumanize him.

The song also references examples of technologies that were not fully developed but were known to the public in 1969, such as robots, as well as future technology that would come into existence long before their prediction in the song, the science of test tube babies and genetic selection by parents of their future children.

Such a concept had been explored in a few science fiction novels but had not yet, for the most part, been mentioned in the mainstream media.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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