Nollind Whachell

Creativity is like a river. And like a river, at certain times of the year its flow will be strong and at other times of the year its flow will be weak. To maximize the effectiveness of this river you need to realize its daily, if not hourly, cycles and take advantage of it when its flow is strong and also when it’s weak.

My awareness of this naturalness of creativity arose when I was reading an article a couple months back on Ze Frank in which he discussed his own creative process.

What’s your creative process look like, with that in mind?

I have a general workflow, which is, if I have an idea I try to execute it as quickly and faithfully as possible. That means that if I have a number of ideas all at once, I’m gonna bundle them together. I don’t like sitting on an idea and squeezing it till every little last drop comes out. I’d rather get it out there and move on to the next thing. I don’t want to get too philosophical, but in a sense you’re given this gift, this sort of creative force in you, and I think everyone has it, and it’s completely unique to you. And you as a person have a little bit of a responsibility as its shepherd, if you choose to incorporate that into your life. The other thing I learned is it’s really good to be undeniable. So if you want to get into the creative world, you have to just keep flogging away even when nobody’s paying attention. Because then when somebody finally does pay attention, it’s certainly a lot more interesting when you have a ton of stuff to show.

Two natural aspects of creativity he talks about in the paragraph above are the importance of flow and the awareness of blockages. In effect, when your creativity is flowing, you need to take advantage of it and reap its rewards as quickly as possible while its flowing because it won’t last that long before it subsides to regenerate itself. In addition, if you ignore this flow of creativity within you, especially when it feels like it is flowing, it will feel like a river hitting a dam, building up under pressure until it eventually overflows or bursts the dam itself. I’ve noticed both aspects of this within my own life.

In terms of blockages and buildup, I’ve noticed in the past that if I don’t try to release my creative energy or tension in a constructive way, eventually it builds up until I feel like I’m going to explode (which in turns makes me grumpy and aggravated). To relate to this, imagine moments of your life where you’ve felt like you’ve wanted to communicate something but didn’t feel like you had to words to express what you’ve felt. This in a sense is creative tension within you building up and wanting to be released. It is for this very reason that I have both a personal journal as well as a public journal. My personal journal allows me to communicate things to myself that only I can fully understand thus allowing me to release my creative tension and energy on a daily basis.

In terms of flow, I’ve recently noticed the amazing power of maximizing this creativity in the moment and to its fullest potential. Like Ze Frank said, when creative inspiration strikes, I try to utilize it and savour every last ounce of it before it fades, so as to create something sustainable with it before it disappears. The hard part though is that inspiration often strikes at unexpected times. Thus tapping into this energy requires you be ready for it when it strikes. Things like keeping a notebook with you are critical because trying to remember what you were thinking and more importantly feeling is extremely difficult to do, especially if you get distracted by other aspects of your life.

What I’m finding interesting though is that after releasing this creative energy and capturing it down in some form, it almost becomes like latent creative energy that I can tap into again to re-energize myself and open up that creative valve again. I find it’s never as powerful as an “original flow” though but it still allows me to continue a creative flow that I’ve started early. That’s why it’s always best to maximize that original flow of creativity in the moment it occurs though. If you can delay other aspects of your daily life at that moment and constructively utilize that creativity, you’ll find yourself far more productive. It’s one reason why I find getting up earlier in the mornings to be more effective for me because it allows me to creatively release and record so much of this energy before my day even begins that I feel far more positive and productive for the rest of my day.

Do what works best for you though. For example, besides my personal journal, I also tap my creative energy into visual form using iPad apps like Paper and Inkpad. But in the spur of the moment, even finding a scrap of paper to tap your thoughts into can be a boon to you, thus allowing you to release that creative flow later when you’re ready to do so.

Belief is a powerful thing. It is one of the core aspects of my life that has changed it completely. The more that I believe in myself, the more that I find I can tackle larger and larger challenges that previously would have seemed insurmountable to me.

Like most of my life, my power of belief emerged playfully from my video game experiences online. While playing Counter-Strike, I curiously questioned what was possible within the game world by defining self-limits and seeing what I could achieve within those limits. My personal mantra for this is “Limit yourself to expand your possibilities.”

For example, I decided to consistently utilize the MP5 submachine gun so as to attain a mastery over it. For many within the game, the MP5 is a crap gun that has no penetration power. I, however, looked at its strengths (low cost, high stopping power) and maximized them to my advantage. At my peak, my mastery of the MP5 stunned many opponents as I had the capability of dropping them at long range with extreme accuracy, something that was normally reserved for an AK47.

The MP5 effectiveness was maximized at close range though so I continually practiced closing rapidly with an opponent. Again at my peak, I mastered the ability to use erratic maneuvers to out predict the targeting of many opponents. My favorite way of showing my effectiveness in this area was by closing with a sniper opponent who was continually firing me as I closed the distance with him and dropping him less than ten feet away.

The culmination of these abilities and the strength of my belief was in creating a maneuver which I named after my online character’s name, “Gentle Nova”. My goal wasn’t actually to drop an opponent but to “flow” and move through them so that I could hit their other teammates from behind after encircling the map. For this to work, it required a combination of techniques similar to jujutsu, whereby you’re using the opponents own firepower and crossfire to their disadvantage by “dancing” into the midst of them and through them.

Later in my life, I decided to take these same principles of belief and put them into practice within my work life. While doing freelance web design work utilizing the Squarespace web publishing system, I was severely frustrated by the lack of functionality of the system and continually blamed the company for its lack of vision. However, once I stopped blaming them and empowered myself into believing I could come up with a solution, it was as if walls starting dropping all around me and solutions starting revealing themselves almost overnight.

The greatest single use of belief in my life though was when I finally stopped looking at myself as being part of the problem (i.e. a victim of fate) and started looking at myself as part of the solution (i.e. a catalyst of change). You see, my entire life I had felt like I was out of place, an alien within a strange world. It wasn’t until I realized that in my youth I had felt normal and natural growing up within the countryside of Alberta that it dawned on me that I wasn’t the alien but the natural entity living within an unnatural societal system that sorely needed cultivating and balancing to bring it back to its roots of human nature.

All said and done, my advice to others in this area would be stop seeing yourself as a victim of fate, adrift on a chaotic sea with no sense of navigation or control. I realize this is extremely difficult to do within our world today especially with marketing and advertisements telling you that you aren’t a complete person unless you buy their product. You are naturally whole though. Everything you need for your journey is within you. Thus disregard the Sirens of Disempowerment and Distraction that continually call to you and believe in your self, your inner identity. Once you do, a momentum of belief and empowerment will build and emerge within your life like a great wave that you can ride upon.

Just had a major epiphany. For the longest time, I was perplexed by a quote below from Margaret J. Wheatley’s book entitled Finding Our Way. Particularly my question was “Why do we have this innate desire for relationships and to be within groups or communities?”

Life takes form as individuals that immediately reach out to create systems of relationships. These individuals and systems arise from two seemingly conflicting forces: the absolute need for individual freedom, and the unequivocal need for relationships.

I obviously intuitively knew the answer but I wanted something that I could easily articulate to others. The answer to this question, strangely enough, lay within another book by Margaret Wheatley entitled Leadership and the New Science.

What occurs in these systems is contrary to our normal way of thinking. Openness to the environment over time spawns a stronger system, one that is less susceptible to externally induced change. What comes to dominate over time is not outside influences, but the self-organizing dynamics of the system itself. Because it partners with its environment, the system develops increasing autonomy from the environment and also develops new capacities that make it increasingly resourceful.

I say this is contrary thinking because we usually act from the reverse belief. We believe that in order to maintain ourselves and protect our individual freedom, we must defend ourselves from external forces. We tend to think that isolation, secrecy, and strong boundaries are the best way to preserve individuality.

Paradoxically, it is the system’s need to maintain itself that may lead it to be come something new and different. A living system changes in order to preserve itself.

Simply put, we are constantly seeking out and forming relationships around us so as to share and obtain information which allows us to flexibly change and preserve our identity in the process. This again is the trinity of natural self-organizing systems at work: relationships, information, and identity.

A living system changes to preserve itself.

Margaret Wheatley

What I find remarkable about this is how it compares to my earlier research on business culture and how it often differs from the culture of the Web. For example, anyone who has read The Cluetrain Manifesto can see this defensive stance that Margaret talks about mirrored perfectly with the internal culture of most corporate businesses today. And yet for anyone who has used the Web extensively, they can see the positive, almost natural, culture of the Web itself, whereby many of us self-organize around topics of interest to share information, so as to better ourselves. So through the simple invention of the hypertext page and its associating hypertext link, the Web itself gives us the ability to naturally self-organize in ways very similar to nature itself.

The thing that scares me the most about this though is that most businesses, particularly corporate minded ones, would probably rather die than give up their command and control culture in exchange for a more natural self-organizing one. Alas, if they don’t change with the times though then they will effectively be committing suicide by cutting off the blood or air that can literally support them and allow them to change, again eloquently put by Margaret Wheatley.

In classical thermodynamics, equilibrium is the end state in the evolution of closed systems, the point at which the system has exhausted all of its capacity for change, done its work, and dissipated its productive capacity into useless entropy.

Simply put, the system reaches a state of zero activity and thus ceases to exist. Man, does that bring back memories of the Dot-com bubble days.

Things seem to be falling into alignment. I picked up a revised edition of Margaret J. Wheatley’s book entitled Leadership and The New Science the other day and I’ve been devouring its contents with relish. There is so much in this book that relates to my research that it’s almost uncanny. In particular, one chapter entitled Change: Capacity of Life resonated with me quite deeply because the three critical areas of the system that she mentions seem to match with the three goals of my greater vision that I have laid out for myself.

My colleagues and I focus on helping a system develop greater self-knowledge in three critical areas. People need to be connected to the fundamental identity of the organization or community. Who are we? Who do we aspire to become? How shall we be together? And people need to be connected to new information. What else do we need to know? Where is this new information to be found? And people need to be able to reach past traditional boundaries and develop relationships with people anywhere in the system. Who else needs to be here to do this work with us?

As a system inquires into these three domains of identity, information, and relationships, it comes more self-aware. It has become more connected to the truth of who it is, more connected to its environment and customers, more connected to people everywhere in the system. These new connections develop greater capacity; the system becomes healthier.

Identity to me is the cornerstone of the system. It allows an individual or organization to know and stabilize itself in chaotic times. In effect, it defines your passion and purpose, the ship with which you sail upon and the star that guides you. It is the context within which all are choices are made. I feel like I need to help both individuals and organizations discover their true identities. What I’m finding surprising about this though is that figuring out individual identities is extremely difficult, probably because people have a hard time observing themselves from a third person perspective. Organizational identities, in comparison though, seem much easier to decipher, probably due to multiple perspectives within the group, which is why I’ll probably focus on them first initially.

Relationships are the foundation of life itself. In effect, the interaction of the parts is actually more important than the parts themselves. I feel I have the knowledge contained within me to help organizations run radically different and better than they do now. What’s more, I don’t even have to prove it because I’ve already seen it done elsewhere and I’ve seen aspects of it work with my own life, both online and off. What I do need to do is to simply document how this new way of working works and explain how it directly relates to relationship building. This of all three is the most clear to me, as I’m even using these principles within my own work life right now for my day job.

Information is what flows between the structured relationship of identities within these systems. Yet today, these information flows are completely inadequate due to them being all dumped out in a single bucket, rather than channeled into different filtered streams or orbits that can be more easily absorbed based upon the context within which they are viewed. I feel that I need to build something like a content management system that is much more than a content management system, yet at the same time something much more simpler than a content management system, giving it an almost playful yet powerful flexibility to it (i.e. a sandbox). It would be something that would both distribute and aggregate information, not only upon a single site but between sites, so as to relay distributed contextual awareness between all nodes of the system. At this point, I have started working on this conceptually and what I’m finding is that it almost has a fractal nature to it. The trick I’m finding is not to focus too much on the details themselves at this point but to understand them within the greater context and patterns of the system first.

So that’s where I’m standing right now with my vision and its three primary goals which woven together would hopefully provide a new way of self-organizing society, thus allowing us to do things collectively that would seem almost impossible to us now under our existing world view. Again it’s important to realize that no one single goal itself is sufficient to initiate the change but it requires all three working together as a trinity to kick start and be a catalyst for the change to occur. In effect, it is the interaction or relationship between the three goals that ignites things.

David Trubridge gets it. He has an essay on his site that talks about a type of designer called a Cultural Designer.

All of this means that a new type of design must be created. I call this Cultural Design — design as we have never known it, at least for a very long time. The cultural designer will primarily design abstract lifestyles and rituals that allow us to lead a sustainable life. For the few objects that are needed, they will have much less to do with the physical workings of objects, and more to do with their effect — how they nourish us.

In rereading the function and purpose of this type of designer (as I remember reading it a year or two ago), I’m struck by the similarities that I feel I need to express now in my own life and work. Not only is culture a foundational element of this work but there also seems to be a spiritual aspect to it as well when he talks about the need for these objects to “nourish” us. Even his points about “rituals” seems to touch home on Alain de Botton’s Athiesm 2.0 message about the need to create rituals in our own lives that gives us a sense of connectedness with each other and the world and universe around us.

There is no cultural dimension,
nothing that creates a sense of identity —
and above all there is no nourishment.

David Trubridge

Most important of all though he talks about existing design lacking the ability to create a sense of identity which he believes cultural design can help with. This struck home very deeply for me because not only do I feel this within my own life but also I know of other people who feel this same very way. In effect, while technology is helping us to connect with one another, it’s not really helping us to connect with one another, if you get what I mean. We need something that goes deeper than just functionality. It has to have a purpose and cultivate something meaningful within our lives. Right now, a lot of the technology that we utilize seems empty and lifeless to me. It’s not connecting us at a level that we need to be.

That said though, imagine the depth, complexity, and understanding that a Cultural Designer would need in order to pull something like this off. It would definitely require a lot of time and couldn’t be done quickly because you have to observe and test for more than just a functional capability but also a cultural capability. While one could be observed quickly after each iterative test, the second would require at least moderate long term usage to fully see its effects.

Alain De Botton has some interesting ideas that I think touch upon similar thoughts of my own. Below is a video of his TED speech last year in which he talks about Atheism 2.0 and how it should try to utilize the methods of religion to be more effective.

When he speaks about how we should utilize arts to help cultivate our lives, I couldn’t agree more. I keep seeing all of this amazing and incredible talent out there, like on Dribbble, and yet most of it seems wasted on marketing things that don’t have much meaning or structure in our lives. It would be cool to see wealthly patrons, like in the times of the Renaissance, hire artists and designers to create works that cultivate and uplift us, reminding us of our true potential, as individuals and as a group.

Even our deep and spiritual connection to nature seems severed, as many of us live within cities where nature is almost all but hidden from view. Luckily living within Vancouver, the mountains and oceans around me are a constant reminder of nature that it always prominent. That said, I still feel dramatically disconnected compared to my youth when I was growing up on an acreage outside of Edmonton, Alberta. You were immersed within nature and the natural laws and beauty of it. You felt and knew the rhythms and cycles of the earth, seeing their importance all around you, especially during the autumn when the farmers collected their harvest. Again, I feel like I need to create something that reminds me of this natural connectivity within my home or work, so that the cycles and important events of nature aren’t lost from view.

Even in my own work relating to passion and purpose, I feel there is something deeper that I’m trying to help express universally for all. The best way of describing it would be the science of spirituality. In effect, I’m trying to make the nature of spirituality, this feeling of connectedness, something that is accessible and understandable to everyone in a simple yet profound way. Obviously as yet, it is still a mystery to me but I feel like the key has to do with our structured interaction with one another. In effect, once I understand this pattern or structure between each of us, I feel like I can create an interface that will help people both see and understand each other better within the context of the world we live within.

I think there might be something that may not be so evident to people who read my journal. When I say “you” within my posts, I’m primarily referring to myself. In effect, as a journal, I’m talking to myself. I’m basically trying to reinforce what I know through repetition (writing it out to myself), so that I’ll remember it later when I reflect upon my journal.

The problem with this tone of writing though is that when I talk to others about their struggles, it comes off as very preachy or commanding. “You need to do this” or “You need to do that.” This is a huge flaw in my communications that I’m fully aware of, yet I’m still trying to figure out how best to circumvent or correct. For example, within the writings of others, I notice they utilize words like “one” or “oneself”. “One needs to remember to play daily.” This removes the direction of the message and doesn’t put any command on the individual listening to it.

Other than that, my final option would be to completely change my writing so it is clearly evident that I’m writing to myself. So instead of saying to myself “You need to do this”, I instead would say “I need to do this.” This actually isn’t as bad as it seems because I know that in helping myself, I’m helping others. Thus by utilizing “I”, I’m making it evidently clear to even myself, that I am the one who needs to work on living what I already know. In effect, just knowing isn’t enough. To fully complete the circle (i.e. live to play, play to learn, learn to work, work to live), I need to be able to fully work on living what I have learnt through play. Only then will I be able to truly lead by my actions, rather than by my words.

There are two valuable attributes that I’ve found to be extremely helpful in my search for my passion and purpose. These two attributes are perspective and awareness.

Perspective, I believe, is the easier of the two to learn. It can be learnt by playing within your life on a daily basis. Put another way, strive to do something different daily. In doing so, you’re putting yourself within different situations which can give you new and unique perspectives to your life.

Some examples of daily play to get new perspectives would be as follows. Reading material outside of your normal field of interest. Walking different paths or visiting different places within your local neighborhood to see or encounter things that you might not normally. Whatever your creative method (i.e. writing, drawing, composing, etc), try to create something different daily, no matter how rough or crude it might seem.

Awareness, on the other hand, I’ve found to be much more difficult to learn, primarily because it almost implies a degree of wisdom to recognize what you are seeing. For example, just because you can see something, it doesn’t imply you understand what you’re seeing. And if you can’t understand what you’re seeing then it may as well be invisible to you because the understanding brings the awareness.

The thing to realize though is that there are different forms of understanding. Logical understanding means you are fully cognizant of what you are seeing to the point that you can easily express it verbally to others. Intuitive understanding is much more difficult however. You may feel you know something is important, yet you can’t logically explain why at that point in time. Nevertheless, one must realize that this intuitive awareness is just as important, even if you can’t explain the importance of what you’re seeing.

Awareness I’ve found isn’t so much learnt, as it is fostered or cultivated. To be aware, you must give yourself the time and space to allow it to manifest itself through reflection. If, however, you don’t give yourself time to reflect, to recognize what you’re looking at, even at an intuitive level, then there is less chance for awareness to occur.

Therefore to foster awareness, I’ve found it beneficial to have large periods of reflection. For example, if you have a journal, it’s important to not only give yourself time to write within it but also time to reflect upon it. Look back within it and see if you can see a pattern, connectivity, relationship, or interaction between the different individual events within your life, no matter how superficial they might seem at first. Above all else though, give yourself the time and space away from both input and output to digest what you are absorbing.

In effect, every so often ensure that you unplug from the external signals and noise around you, so that you can fully concentrate on the signals emanating from within you.