My friend Pat MacEnulty has a new book out call Picara.
Here is a video interview with Pat discussing the book.
The show is up on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtCb4pTe_L4
FYI Pat and I were housemates in Grad School. She is a dear friend and an
extraordinary writer.
Book Recommendation Picara by Pat MacEnulty
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Attention Getter example
I made some "dirt" from crushed Oreos, chocolate pudding, and Cool Whip. I took a real plant and put the pot (base covered in foil) inside a larger pot filled with the edible "dirt". It looked like the edible dirt was what the plant was potted in. After introducing that we would be studying soils for the next unit, I announced that I wondered what soil (humas) tasted like. I impulsively opened my desk drawer, took out a spoon and ate some "dirt" from the potted plant. The students gasped, thinking I was nuts; then I confessed and we all ate some edible "dirt" for fun as we began to discuss soils and in particular humas. Another time my second graders were studying amphibians when I began eating some eating Tapioca posed as frog eggs. Yes
I made some "dirt" from crushed Oreos, chocolate pudding, and Cool Whip. I took a real plant and put the pot (base covered in foil) inside a larger pot filled with the edible "dirt". It looked like the edible dirt was what the plant was potted in. After introducing that we would be studying soils for the next unit, I announced that I wondered what soil (humas) tasted like. I impulsively opened my desk drawer, took out a spoon and ate some "dirt" from the potted plant. The students gasped, thinking I was nuts; then I confessed and we all ate some edible "dirt" for fun as we began to discuss soils and in particular humas. Another time my second graders were studying amphibians when I began eating some eating Tapioca posed as frog eggs. Yes
Speaking can even help your politically the way it did for Queen Elizabeth.
Elizabeth didn't just sit down with her la top and start making PowerPoint slides. She was tutored by classical scholars, most notable Roger Ascham, who held the office of public orator in Cambridge. In the Renaissance it was important to be an eloquent speaker, as it revealed to the public that you had a high degree of education. Maia Perry, a prominent modern historian of the period, said that "speech making came naturally to Elizabeth who quickly developed this skill of talking with such style and flamboyance that contemporary analysts treasured even her most casual sayings.” Yes, Elizabeth was the first Queen of the Soundbite.
And Elizabeth certainly used every speaking opportunity to gain political power. For example, on a royal tour stop at Cambridge she addressed the university, speaking extemporaneously in Latin. Today, being an eloquent speaker can also makes you look smart, give you an opportunity to be seen and gain political power, but also give you an unique opportunity to connect face to face in a normally very high tech environment.
Elizabeth didn't just sit down with her la top and start making PowerPoint slides. She was tutored by classical scholars, most notable Roger Ascham, who held the office of public orator in Cambridge. In the Renaissance it was important to be an eloquent speaker, as it revealed to the public that you had a high degree of education. Maia Perry, a prominent modern historian of the period, said that "speech making came naturally to Elizabeth who quickly developed this skill of talking with such style and flamboyance that contemporary analysts treasured even her most casual sayings.” Yes, Elizabeth was the first Queen of the Soundbite.
And Elizabeth certainly used every speaking opportunity to gain political power. For example, on a royal tour stop at Cambridge she addressed the university, speaking extemporaneously in Latin. Today, being an eloquent speaker can also makes you look smart, give you an opportunity to be seen and gain political power, but also give you an unique opportunity to connect face to face in a normally very high tech environment.
Power of Three - How many points should I have in a speech?
Chunk Information so You’re Audience Will Remember It!
An audience Sensory memory retains an exact copy of what they see or hear, but only very briefly. Sense memory only lasts for a few seconds in fact some researches say lasts only 300 milliseconds. You need to help your audience get it into the next storage unit. Selective attention determines what information moves from sensory memory to short-term memory. STM is most often stored as sounds, especially when your audience is recalling words, but it may be stored as images.
Short-term memory provides working space in the brain like RAM memory in your computer. Short memory is thought to be 7 bits in length, meaning, audiences normally only remember 7 items in their short-term memory. You can have seven points if you are doing training, but it may be to many points for a speech. Storage that is more permanent is provided in long-term memory. The brains of your audience decide whether to put what you share with them into long term me memory based on its meaning and importance to them. That is why it so important to have a Tie to the Audience where you state the relevance of the information to there needs.
The Power of Three
You’re trying to remember a friend’s cell phone number and you don’t try to remember all the digits in a long list. You remember the three-digit area code, the three-digit prefix and then the last four numbers. Why? Because three elements are easier to remember than 10. Our short-term memory loves threes. When we are young that chunking into threes and that’s why we love to hear the story of the story of the three bears.
Brainstorm below all the things you can think of that come in threes. Think fairy tale characters, sports, jokes, and religious references. List things that come in threes.
Here are some examples
The three musketeers,
Three goats gruff,
Three blind mice,
Three little pigs.
Three strikes
Father Son and Holy Ghost
Three stooges
Lights Camera actions
Judge Jury Executioner
The Way the Truth the Light
Englishman and Irishmen and Scotsman
A rabbi and priest and a minister
Churchill’s famous speech “I can promise you blood sweat toil and tears” that everyone remembers as three things blood sweat and tears.
Reading writing romantic
ABC’s
So why did I have you list these things. Because we can very easily remember three things. Really, after teaching Presentation Skills for over 26 years I can tell you that audiences really can’t remember more than three points that you have made in your speech. You can have more, but they will either take your ten points or make it into three points or they will remember three of your ten points. My advice is to divide your speech into three points. Create three nice chunks of information. One of my friend’s teenagers was trying to convince her parents to let her go on a field trip to Washington DC. She went on and on and I could tell they had tuned her out. I took her aside, said think about it tonight, and go back to them tomorrow with three strong reasons. She did and they let her go. Audiences turn off when a speaker drones on and on about the smallest detail. Stick to the most important things.
Chunk Information so You’re Audience Will Remember It!
An audience Sensory memory retains an exact copy of what they see or hear, but only very briefly. Sense memory only lasts for a few seconds in fact some researches say lasts only 300 milliseconds. You need to help your audience get it into the next storage unit. Selective attention determines what information moves from sensory memory to short-term memory. STM is most often stored as sounds, especially when your audience is recalling words, but it may be stored as images.
Short-term memory provides working space in the brain like RAM memory in your computer. Short memory is thought to be 7 bits in length, meaning, audiences normally only remember 7 items in their short-term memory. You can have seven points if you are doing training, but it may be to many points for a speech. Storage that is more permanent is provided in long-term memory. The brains of your audience decide whether to put what you share with them into long term me memory based on its meaning and importance to them. That is why it so important to have a Tie to the Audience where you state the relevance of the information to there needs.
The Power of Three
You’re trying to remember a friend’s cell phone number and you don’t try to remember all the digits in a long list. You remember the three-digit area code, the three-digit prefix and then the last four numbers. Why? Because three elements are easier to remember than 10. Our short-term memory loves threes. When we are young that chunking into threes and that’s why we love to hear the story of the story of the three bears.
Brainstorm below all the things you can think of that come in threes. Think fairy tale characters, sports, jokes, and religious references. List things that come in threes.
Here are some examples
The three musketeers,
Three goats gruff,
Three blind mice,
Three little pigs.
Three strikes
Father Son and Holy Ghost
Three stooges
Lights Camera actions
Judge Jury Executioner
The Way the Truth the Light
Englishman and Irishmen and Scotsman
A rabbi and priest and a minister
Churchill’s famous speech “I can promise you blood sweat toil and tears” that everyone remembers as three things blood sweat and tears.
Reading writing romantic
ABC’s
So why did I have you list these things. Because we can very easily remember three things. Really, after teaching Presentation Skills for over 26 years I can tell you that audiences really can’t remember more than three points that you have made in your speech. You can have more, but they will either take your ten points or make it into three points or they will remember three of your ten points. My advice is to divide your speech into three points. Create three nice chunks of information. One of my friend’s teenagers was trying to convince her parents to let her go on a field trip to Washington DC. She went on and on and I could tell they had tuned her out. I took her aside, said think about it tonight, and go back to them tomorrow with three strong reasons. She did and they let her go. Audiences turn off when a speaker drones on and on about the smallest detail. Stick to the most important things.
Power Point Show. This is a tip Power Points so you don't get messed up hitting the wrong button.
PowerPoint show — Bill Collier
When using PowerPoint I’ve occasionally hit the wrong button on my remote, or hit the “Escape” key on my computer, and find myself either in the Slide Sorter view or some other awkward situation which then required me to grab the mouse and get back into Slide Show mode. It kills momentum and is a distraction for all.
I learned that you can save your slides as a PowerPoint Show and use this during the presentation. This runs on its own, without launching PowerPoint. It eliminates the possibility of stumbling into other views during your talk.
To do this, use File > Save As. Then, pull down the Save as Type > PowerPoint Show (*.pps). Give it a file name or keep the same name. You’re done. Double-click on this new file (no need to open PowerPoint) and you’re ready to present.
One downside: If you need to leave your presentation to show a file that is not embedded, you’ll use “Escape” and will leave the show completely. To get back to your current slide you’ll have to either click through or right-click > Go To Slide. But if you stay in the same presentation the entire time and don’t need to access other computer resources during your presentation, this is a great way to avoid hiccups.
________________________________________
PowerPoint show — Bill Collier
When using PowerPoint I’ve occasionally hit the wrong button on my remote, or hit the “Escape” key on my computer, and find myself either in the Slide Sorter view or some other awkward situation which then required me to grab the mouse and get back into Slide Show mode. It kills momentum and is a distraction for all.
I learned that you can save your slides as a PowerPoint Show and use this during the presentation. This runs on its own, without launching PowerPoint. It eliminates the possibility of stumbling into other views during your talk.
To do this, use File > Save As. Then, pull down the Save as Type > PowerPoint Show (*.pps). Give it a file name or keep the same name. You’re done. Double-click on this new file (no need to open PowerPoint) and you’re ready to present.
One downside: If you need to leave your presentation to show a file that is not embedded, you’ll use “Escape” and will leave the show completely. To get back to your current slide you’ll have to either click through or right-click > Go To Slide. But if you stay in the same presentation the entire time and don’t need to access other computer resources during your presentation, this is a great way to avoid hiccups.
________________________________________
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Nine years ago one of my girlfriends invited me to Southern Voices book festival. I thought rather priggishly that the last thing in world I wanted to do was go to a library in Hoover Alabama and listen to authors speak all day! Having attended the conference for the last nine years I can say that that my favorite weekend of the entire year. The conference is run so well and the authors are so warm and funny and smart. They don't just read from their books or read a speech they command the stage and connect. Last Friday we heard the poet Laurette of the United Stated Billy Collins speak. He has a dry urbane wit and we laughed for an hour as he read his poetry. Here is a link to the site. I believe you can download audio and video of the writers speaking. This year there were great Speakers with great body language. I actually had the delicious treat of speaking briefly to Billy Collins. I was introduced as just having done several interviews on Tiger Wood's body language and Billy gave his opinion. Check out my article in Bull Dog reporter for what he said. And google Patti Wood Tiger Wood's for my other comments.
Friday, February 12, 2010
How to show love through your greetings and goodbyes.
I was quoted in the Toronto Sun today.
Here Love signals
Say hello to love.
Celebrity body language expert Patti Wood says warm, caring greetings are extremely important love signals for keeping the love alive.
“Always make a loving ritual of hellos and goodbyes,” stresses Wood.
No matter where you are in the house, drop whatever you’re doing, and greet your spouse with a kiss and or a hug hello when they come home. “Go to them immediately, even if you are on the phone, cooking or online.” This communicates that he or she is the most important thing to you.
“You are saying nonverbally, ‘You come first,’” says Wood, adding that no warm welcome actually increases the chance of arguing later on.
Goodbye hugs and kisses have a big impact too. These gestures say “I leave you with love,” says Wood. “With a touch goodbye, you anchor to your mate.”
She also recommends creating a “secret” – a non-verbal love signal shared just between the two of you. “The look can mean, ‘I love you,’ ‘I want you right now’ or ‘You look great to me’,” suggests Wood, a savvy motivational speaker.
Your secret love signal could be as simple as a sly smile, or your lips puckered up, or maybe a quick wrinkling up of the nose. It could be as simple as a tilt to the head to indicate you’d like to rest your head on his shoulder as a gesture of warmth and respect, says Wood, of pattiwood.net.
Words are not needed, she adds. “The secret love signal can recreate the love each time it is given.”
She also suggests focusing on care-taking signals to strengthen relationships, like bringing someone a glass of water or making them a cup of tea. Picking up their dry cleaning for them or even packing them a healthy snack for work.
Wood adds that standing close to one another, making eye contact and showing sincere interest by leaning in when you’re speaking to one another also contribute to a great connection.
It’s touch or go - and never too late to re-ignite that loving feeling
I was quoted in the Toronto Sun today.
Here Love signals
Say hello to love.
Celebrity body language expert Patti Wood says warm, caring greetings are extremely important love signals for keeping the love alive.
“Always make a loving ritual of hellos and goodbyes,” stresses Wood.
No matter where you are in the house, drop whatever you’re doing, and greet your spouse with a kiss and or a hug hello when they come home. “Go to them immediately, even if you are on the phone, cooking or online.” This communicates that he or she is the most important thing to you.
“You are saying nonverbally, ‘You come first,’” says Wood, adding that no warm welcome actually increases the chance of arguing later on.
Goodbye hugs and kisses have a big impact too. These gestures say “I leave you with love,” says Wood. “With a touch goodbye, you anchor to your mate.”
She also recommends creating a “secret” – a non-verbal love signal shared just between the two of you. “The look can mean, ‘I love you,’ ‘I want you right now’ or ‘You look great to me’,” suggests Wood, a savvy motivational speaker.
Your secret love signal could be as simple as a sly smile, or your lips puckered up, or maybe a quick wrinkling up of the nose. It could be as simple as a tilt to the head to indicate you’d like to rest your head on his shoulder as a gesture of warmth and respect, says Wood, of pattiwood.net.
Words are not needed, she adds. “The secret love signal can recreate the love each time it is given.”
She also suggests focusing on care-taking signals to strengthen relationships, like bringing someone a glass of water or making them a cup of tea. Picking up their dry cleaning for them or even packing them a healthy snack for work.
Wood adds that standing close to one another, making eye contact and showing sincere interest by leaning in when you’re speaking to one another also contribute to a great connection.
It’s touch or go - and never too late to re-ignite that loving feeling
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Haiti:
I have a painting I bought in Haiti I call Elvis's children. Painted on a piece of plywood in bold primary colors are hundreds of little black angles with white robes and wings all playing musical instruments and flying in a bright blue sky. The men all have Elvis Presley like side burns, hence my name for the painting. I love this work of art.
I remember the sunny blue sky day on the private beach in Haiti when I bought the painting. Scattered across a shady part of the beach were hundreds of bright blobs of color. This painting, with its tiny angels immediately captured my fancy. Its full of details. The sky is filled with musicians with wings, but it also has a river filled with long brown boats filled with tiny natives and at the rivers end a tree of life loaded with not just one kind of fruit, but every fruit and vegetable you can imagine, and also birthing big red, purple and green balloon's just for fun.
I asked the man hovering over the section of painting where I found this piece of art if he had painted it he smiled wide, nodded his head said, "Yes!" enthusiastically." When I asked him his name his body bent out over the painting to get an upside down view of the signature. He struggled to read the name of the artist and make it his own. We laughed as he tried to say the artists name and I handed all the money I had with me for the trip to him to him to take it home.
It hung in my house for many years. A house with running water, a full refrigerator and pantry filled with food. It's a true conversation piece. A memory of a golden afternoon on a tropical isle conversing with a happy art trader.
Since the disaster in Haiti I have thought about that man. Is he safe? Did he survive? I have wondered about the man or women who painted all those little angels. Are the two in Haiti, looking for food and water, struggling to survive? or are they playing tunes with Elvis children, little angels in the bright blue Haitian sky?
I just read a moving article on a survivor of the Haitian quake in "The Week." I highly recommend that you read it. You can find the original article titled, Haiti: A survivors' story at Salon.com
I have a painting I bought in Haiti I call Elvis's children. Painted on a piece of plywood in bold primary colors are hundreds of little black angles with white robes and wings all playing musical instruments and flying in a bright blue sky. The men all have Elvis Presley like side burns, hence my name for the painting. I love this work of art.
I remember the sunny blue sky day on the private beach in Haiti when I bought the painting. Scattered across a shady part of the beach were hundreds of bright blobs of color. This painting, with its tiny angels immediately captured my fancy. Its full of details. The sky is filled with musicians with wings, but it also has a river filled with long brown boats filled with tiny natives and at the rivers end a tree of life loaded with not just one kind of fruit, but every fruit and vegetable you can imagine, and also birthing big red, purple and green balloon's just for fun.
I asked the man hovering over the section of painting where I found this piece of art if he had painted it he smiled wide, nodded his head said, "Yes!" enthusiastically." When I asked him his name his body bent out over the painting to get an upside down view of the signature. He struggled to read the name of the artist and make it his own. We laughed as he tried to say the artists name and I handed all the money I had with me for the trip to him to him to take it home.
It hung in my house for many years. A house with running water, a full refrigerator and pantry filled with food. It's a true conversation piece. A memory of a golden afternoon on a tropical isle conversing with a happy art trader.
Since the disaster in Haiti I have thought about that man. Is he safe? Did he survive? I have wondered about the man or women who painted all those little angels. Are the two in Haiti, looking for food and water, struggling to survive? or are they playing tunes with Elvis children, little angels in the bright blue Haitian sky?
I just read a moving article on a survivor of the Haitian quake in "The Week." I highly recommend that you read it. You can find the original article titled, Haiti: A survivors' story at Salon.com
Personality Traits of Creatve People.
I just read a wonderful article on creative people in Psychology Today.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-personality?page=3
Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. What makes us different from apes—our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology—is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.
When we're creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."
Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.
1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.
This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always "on." In fact, they rest often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy; it's not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. This is not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error as a strategy for achieving their goals.One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality. At the same time, a certain spartan celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. (This sounds like me.) How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the "g factor," meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who make important creative contributions.
The earliest longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real life. Later studies suggest that the cutoff point is around 120; it might be difficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but an IQ beyond 120 does not necessarily imply higher creativity.
Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.
Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue. People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.
Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one, and this selectivity involves convergent thinking.
The Creative Personality Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.
By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published on July 01, 1996 - last reviewed on October 14, 2008
•Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is "her home," nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:
"This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means 'not like this' and 'not like that.' And the 'not like'—that's why postmodernism, with the prefix of 'post,' couldn't work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one."
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But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: "I'd say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They'll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it's going to be interesting. It's not predictable that it'll go well."
•Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:
"I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help."
•Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow's words: "Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them." A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.
Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.
Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.
Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.
•Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.
Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: "Tell anybody you're a sculptor and they'll say, 'Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.' And I tend to say, 'What's so wonderful?' It's like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don't wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn't fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?"
Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: "When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail. If I'm in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it'll take a week. What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, 'My God, it's not working,' and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence."
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Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: "What a beautiful thing is this perspective!" while his wife called him back to bed with no success.
•Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this "escape" is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.
Most of us assume that artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.
•Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted. We're usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.
•Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton's words, "on the shoulders of giants." Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They're also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they're usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them. At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.
•Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.
This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person's ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.
•Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is "her home," nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:
"This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means 'not like this' and 'not like that.' And the 'not like'—that's why postmodernism, with the prefix of 'post,' couldn't work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one."
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and more!
But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: "I'd say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They'll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it's going to be interesting. It's not predictable that it'll go well."
•Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:
"I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help."
•Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow's words: "Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them." A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.
Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.
Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.
Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predic
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From Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published by HarperCollins, 1996.
I just read a wonderful article on creative people in Psychology Today.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-personality?page=3
Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. What makes us different from apes—our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology—is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.
When we're creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."
Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.
1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.
This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always "on." In fact, they rest often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy; it's not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. This is not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error as a strategy for achieving their goals.One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality. At the same time, a certain spartan celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. (This sounds like me.) How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the "g factor," meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who make important creative contributions.
The earliest longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real life. Later studies suggest that the cutoff point is around 120; it might be difficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but an IQ beyond 120 does not necessarily imply higher creativity.
Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.
Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue. People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.
Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one, and this selectivity involves convergent thinking.
The Creative Personality Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.
By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published on July 01, 1996 - last reviewed on October 14, 2008
•Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is "her home," nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:
"This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means 'not like this' and 'not like that.' And the 'not like'—that's why postmodernism, with the prefix of 'post,' couldn't work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one."
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Find a Therapist
Search for a mental health professional near you.
Find Local:
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and more!
But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: "I'd say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They'll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it's going to be interesting. It's not predictable that it'll go well."
•Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:
"I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help."
•Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow's words: "Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them." A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.
Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.
Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.
Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.
•Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.
Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: "Tell anybody you're a sculptor and they'll say, 'Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.' And I tend to say, 'What's so wonderful?' It's like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don't wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn't fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?"
Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: "When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail. If I'm in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it'll take a week. What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, 'My God, it's not working,' and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence."
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Search for a mental health professional near you.
Find Local:
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Massage Therapists
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and more!
Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: "What a beautiful thing is this perspective!" while his wife called him back to bed with no success.
•Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this "escape" is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.
Most of us assume that artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.
•Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted. We're usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.
•Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton's words, "on the shoulders of giants." Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They're also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they're usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them. At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.
•Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.
This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person's ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.
•Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is "her home," nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:
"This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means 'not like this' and 'not like that.' And the 'not like'—that's why postmodernism, with the prefix of 'post,' couldn't work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one."
Related Articles
The Metanormal in Fantasy Literature
The Great Paradox: Daydreaming vs. Mindfulness
Farewell to a Popular Culture Icon You Probably Never Even Heard Of
Friday Night Lights: Positive Institutions and Contagious Happiness
How to Work Your Daydreams
Find a Therapist
Search for a mental health professional near you.
Find Local:
Acupuncturists
Chiropractors
Massage Therapists
Dentists
and more!
But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: "I'd say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They'll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it's going to be interesting. It's not predictable that it'll go well."
•Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:
"I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help."
•Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow's words: "Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them." A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.
Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.
Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.
Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predic
« first‹ previous123next ›last »
From Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published by HarperCollins, 1996.
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