On the eve of Henry’s NYC book launch, long time podcast listener and writer, Mindy Holahan did just that, personifying one of the book’s core subjects of effectively managing your energy so that you are always ready to engage. She eloquently shared the unfolding of events in her highly entertaining blog:

“I was planning to leave the office at 3:30, run to the bank, and hit the road for New York. I was clock-watching when an email alert popped up. Ben, the head of the AC street team, posted Uh oh…Todd is delayed in Philly.”

Sharing his philosophies with hundreds of thousands through his podcasts and popular website, AccidentalCreative.com since 2006, Henry continually examines the dynamics of organizational creativity and outlines simple practices and concepts that help stimulate and support the creative process. A sought after speaker, consultant, coach and soon to be best selling author, Henry was making his way from Ohio to New York for the premier of his ironically titled book The Accidental Creative How To Be Brilliant In A Moment’s Notice hitting shelves July 7th, when torrential rains grounded him in Philadelphia with only a few hours to spare before his big debut in NYC.

“Philly? Heck, I’m in Philly and I’m going to New York too. I put up a quick couple of posts. I’m in Philly and planning to come tonight. I could give you a ride if you don’t think you’ll get out in time. Todd posted back that he had a replacement flight in 20 minutes and he’d be fine. I threw my phone number up just in case.” ~mindy holahan

In the create on demand environment, the idea of “real work” and the transcendence over mediocrity linger silently, muted by constant deadlines and new projects. The Accidental Creative Ephipheo, the video created by Ephipheo Studios, shares the epiphany that started it all for Todd Henry. By breaking the silence and tackling this elusive topic, Henry curated the stimuli that helped him pursue the creative possibility of the Holahan Mustang ride that quite possibly saved his career.

“what? Plane cancelled. I gave Todd a quick set of directions to take the train from the airport to 30th Street Station and ran out of the office to meet him there…We had to drive, which meant going through the Holland Tunnel into the city. 8 lanes of traffic dropping down to 2 lanes. We got to Jersey City in record time and then sat for an hour in the queue for the Holland Tunnel…But you know what, friends? We made it! I dropped Todd off at 7:20 p.m. for the 7:30 p.m. event” ~mindy holahan

So Todd Henry’s NYC book launch of The Accidental Creative How To Be Brilliant In A Moment’s Notice turned out to be a huge success. Reviews have been outstanding. This book will undoubtedly awaken you to tools that you did not even know you were missing from your creative toolbox. Instantly you will be drawn in by Henry’s accessible and enlightening style, as he paints the all too common picture of what creative burn-out looks like. And learn the essentials of a creative rhythm:

• Focus in on your most critical work and reclaim your attention.
• Develop stimulating relationships that will lead to creative insights.
• Effectively manage your energy so that you are always ready to engage.
• Curate stimuli that help you pursue creative possibilities
• Leverage your hours wisely and effectively to eliminate creativity drains.

Download your own copy of Chapter 1 The  Dynamics Of Creative Work and see for yourself.

“There are two definitive versions of you with Todd’s book: you before reading it, and you to the 100th power immediately after. Bottom line, The Accidental Creative offers real-world, inspirational insight on how to realize your creative best.” ~ riCardo Crespo, SVP/Global Creative Chief, 20th Century Fox (FCP).

I’m confused beyond your concept.
I am sad and sick and lost.
All I know is that I need you
To be with me at all cost.

Do not lose you patience with me.
Do not scold or curse or cry.
I can’t help the way I’m acting,
Can’t be different ‘though I try.

Just remember that I need you,
That the best of me is gone.
Please don’t fail to stand beside me,
Love me ’till my life is done.

- Unknown

by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.

The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern. read the entire article http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

	How can Facebook Change Your Business ?   With 550 million users around the world, and counting, Facebook’s influence as the leading social media destinations is undeniable. So when they recently embarked on a wide scale redesign, it was literally felt around the world. The cleaner, more uniformed layout has naturally been met with some criticism. But the dramatic switch away from Tabs and FBML (Facebook Markup Language) over to iFrames( HTML 5 frameworks), officially on March 11, 2011, is an enormous gain to it’s business community. Many of my clients have already upgraded their fan page to an iFrame page with me and are enjoying the immediate benefits of:
	Website Integration into Facebook using their own CSS
	Design Flexibility-FBML restrictions removed
	Improved List Building Opportunities
	Tracking and Metrics through their own website
	Product Pages and eCommerce on Facebook
	Nobody knows your brand better than you. As a brand owner, creator or visionary, Facebook has just opened up an entirely new audience for your business. Get on board and let your unique voice be heard.
	“iFrames allow marketers the creativity and flexibility similar to that afforded by webpages while developers can streamline integration with one process for Facebook canvas apps, Facebook Connect website widgets, and now Facebook custom Pages,” says Vikas Jain, director of business development for Wildfire Interactive.
	Your Brand on Facebook   The exciting laundry list of new Facebook features for brand-to-brand communications have revolutionized the opportunity for organic discovery and integration. The most significant is the role of Page Administrator on a business or organization fan page. Formerly, you were limited to posting merely on your own wall, well Mr. Zuckerberg has kindly evolved Page Admins into more of a Social Media Delegate. Acting on behalf of the brand itself, you can not only still post links, photos, events and status on your own wall but on other like minded walls as well. Also you can now like other brand pages,
	Focus On Your Genius…We’ll handle the Rest
	When you partner with meStudio, you are connected with your own Virtual In-House Creative Team. Our co-creative process takes your business at it’s current state and infuses it with brand equity, an enhanced company image and an elevated level of expertise among the people who matter most… your target market.

LET’S TALK

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager’s schedule, they’re in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, operate on the manager’s schedule. But Y Combinator runs on the maker’s schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she’s gotten into sync with us.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there start to be more companies like us. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching from jeans to suits.

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker’s schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager’s schedule within the maker’s: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we’ve funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.

When you’re operating on the manager’s schedule you can do something you’d never want to do on the maker’s: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.

Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They’re effectively free if you’re on the manager’s schedule. They’re so common that there’s distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to “grab coffee,” for example.

Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you’re on the maker’s schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager’s schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day’s work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.

Till recently we weren’t clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I’ve realized what’s going on, perhaps there’s a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.

Those of us on the maker’s schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager’s schedule is that they understand the cost.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

The 10 Dimensions of Creative Complexity

This is taken directly from Liz Strauss’s blog, I loved it and had to share: “I find that these 10 paradoxes explain a lot the creative folks I work with. I also use them to understand what’s going on when things aren’t going well, particularly when we have a creative project going full speed under tight deadlines. That’s when I review this list to look for pairs that are out of balance. When I find and adjust the imbalances, the stressful moments fade away.

The 10 Dimensions of Complexity of the Highly Creative Personality. That’s what Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls them. I call them the 10 Reasons that Creative People Drive Us Crazy. Each item is a paradox, a complexity, a contradiction that’s frustrating to others when they exist together at odds in one human being. Take a look and then I’ll tell you how knowing them has helped me keep my sanity, or at least relieve some stress.

1. Creative individuals have great physical energy, but they become extremely quiet when they are at rest.
   This restful period can lead others to think that they are not feeling well or that they are unhappy, when the truth is they are fine.
   
2. Creative folks tend to be both highly intelligent and naive at the same time.
3. Creative people are disciplined and playful simultaneously. In some creative people, this can mean that they are responsible and irresponsible at the same time as well.
   
4. Creative minds move between a spectrum of fantasy and imagination and a firm grounding in reality. They understand the present and need to keep in touch with the past.
   
5. Creative individuals seem to be both introverted and extroverted, expressing both traits at once. An image to explain this might be that they are shy showoffs, if you can picture that.
6. Creative people are sincerely humble and extremely proud in a childlike way. It requires ego to have a risky, fresh idea. It takes self-doubt to hammer it out to a workable form.
   
7. Creative folks don’t feel as tied to gender roles. They feel distinctly individual. They don’t feel the barriers of authority or the rules of what they are “supposed to do.”
   
8. Creative individuals are thought to be rebellious. Yet, in order to be creative one has to understand and have internalized the traditional culture. Therefore creativity comes from deep roots in tradition. Creative people are traditional and cutting edge.
   
9. Creative people are deeply passionate about their work, yet can be extremely detached and objective when discussing it.
   
10. Creative people are highly open and sensitive, which exposes them to pain and suffering, but also allows them to feel higher values of joy and happiness.

“Being Creative” Photo by Mark andrew Webber
Being Creative: so i came up with this, whilst trying to actually think about creativity..
“being creative makes you a weird little beast, because everything seems so bloody interesting for some strange reason” http://www.markandrewwebber.com

AP Photo/Alan DiazProfessor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who wrote Flow — also wrote the pivotal book on creativity— Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. The book covers a 5-year study of 91 individuals over 60 years old, who had a creative impact on the world.

The seed is within us all

Nurture the seed. When the seed of imaginative artistic ability is stunted and deprived in our youth, it forces their root to seek redemption outside it’s societal norms. Without instruction, without brushes, graffiti artist are merely tapping for air, water and light.

Nurture the seed. When the seed of imaginative artistic ability is stunted and deprived in our youth, it forces their root to seek redemption outside it’s societal norms. Without instruction, without brushes, graffiti artist are merely tapping for air, water and light. Given the limited or sometimes non existent public and academic support for art education, artists have used graffiti as a vehicle to transport their ingenious talent into careers in graphic design, illustration, architecture and countless others.

Britannica online defines art as “the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.” The emphasis here focuses on the quality of artfulness being unleashed as graffiti as opposed to those who’s motive is quantity.

photo by martin godwin / installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

The overwhelming response to the Céleste Boursier-Mougenot exhibition this weekend came as no surprise to it’s host Barbican Curve Gallery in London. Patrons graciously waited over 90 minutes to see the recent Youtube phenom and experience his showing. Reviews were favorable of the 40 zebra finches and their 8 electric guitars; Which justifies the almost 700,000 hits his “Jimi Henchicks” video received on Youtube.

“The finches land on the strings in the way that birds rest on telephone wires,” said Lydia Yee, the curator of the show.

French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways. Boursier-Mougenot’s installation for The Curve, his first solo exhibition in the UK, takes the form of a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a random and captivating soundscape.

Also included in the installation is a series of videos that feature close ups of hands playing electric guitars. However, the sounds that accompany the footage do not emanate from the guitars. Instead we hear an insect-like drone produced by the amplification of the video signal. -Curve Bunker Blog