Tag: creativity

Creativity, Danger, and Internet Culture

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I keep finding myself surprised by the appearance of things in Shakespeare’s plays that have a ton of relevance to contemporary culture. For example, in All’s Well that Ends Well there is a scene where they prank a soldier. Prank culture has a big place on the Internet, too. Nelk Boys, the Logan Bros, Chad and JT: these are the children of Jackass, the offspring of Punk’d, but they have a four hundred- and twenty-year-old ancestor in Shakespeare’s play.

One of the great things about studying Shakespeare is the mental effort it takes to figure out what is happening as you are led through multiple plots that interweave and are only known through dialogue. We must decipher the stories and their relevance through what characters say to each other. In the case of All’s Well, we hear the soldiers plot out the prank ahead of time. They want to test their friend’s loyalty, so they plan to have him ambushed and held hostage so that he thinks he has been captured by the enemy, but it will be his fellow soldiers in disguise. 

Helena also pulls a kind of trick on Bertram. She switches places with the woman he is trying to have sex with, and she gets him to impregnate her. This is a prank with much more serious consequences, and it is the moral question of the play. Through this dynamic, Shakespeare creates an opportunity to ask a lot of interesting questions. There are debates to be had about the morality of the character’s actions.

One of the problems in our culture today is the changing line between culture and life. Shakespeare wrote plays that were performed in a theater. Nobody gets pregnant or is held hostage. One of the great things about self-made celebrities on the Internet is that they have a ton of creative freedom, because they did it their way. The downside to that freedom is a lack of support or connection to a sustainable business model. Once a movement starts making a lot of money and the players involved depend upon that income it becomes hard to make certain changes. There is a momentum to success that is hard to control.

There is also an escalation of the stakes. People study what performs well on YouTube, for example, and then you get someone like Mr. Beast who constantly feeds the algorithm exactly the kind of stuff it wants. Mr. Beast is performing stunts, not pranks, and this is a more sustainable model. Mr. Beast has an interesting combination of fantasy and reality at work in his videos and he does outlandish and absurdly expensive things, but they also take a lot of discipline and endurance.

Partly, this desire for reality that is shown in pranks and stunts is due to the ungrounded aspect of Internet culture. Because it is a potentially global stage, the internet attracts evermore extreme types of content where the stakes are real. We see people hanging with one hand from the edge of skyscrapers, walking a slack line across an impossibly huge canyon, snowboarding down basically vertical mountains of snow, and so many other death-defying acts.  The fear of death is universally compelling. 

So is sex appeal. If sex sells, it’s because people demand it. The attention economy is flooded with prurient content. The sexual trick in All’s Well works because Bertram is so damned horny. Helena knows it will work, too. She instructs the woman he is trying to screw how to get him to give her his ring, and he does it the dummy. 

Helena manipulates Bertram into marrying her and getting her pregnant through political power and sexual deception. Bertram is a character who represents something you see a lot of today. He is a guy who desires freedom because his life is ironically very unfree. Bertram’s retreat into bro culture shows just how defeated he is. 

It is super interesting to witness and participate in the cultural revolution we are experiencing. I believe that this is an early renaissance of internet culture and some of the characters we are watching are going to innovate and produce work that will be worth of studying far into the future.

My hope is that we will course correct away from higher and higher stakes and veer away from the potential for devastating consequences and instead we will raise the bar by focusing on developing talent and style. Instead of being impressed by someone who is so willing to risk their life, we could be celebrating things that are extremely hard to do, but that are good for life. Mr. Beast learned by studying the YouTube algorithm and now younger YouTubers are learning by watching him, so who oversees this thing? Creative control is the scary thing. Going to the edge of a building is obvious, compelling, and ultimately stupid. Going beyond the known and accepted ideas is scarier and has more potential to break new ground.

We have so many insanely terrifying and challenging problems we could work on tackling. Mr. Beast has a philanthropic component to his content that has the greatest hope to lead this pack of wild creators towards something more sustainable. By using the media to do philanthropic things in the world, he sets a precedent for achieving success by helping other people. The easy and obvious thing is to prove our courage by showing we are not afraid to risk our lives, but the harder and ultimately more rewarding thing is to prove our courage by showing we are not afraid to commit to challenging ourselves creatively instead of with danger.

Real Men Cry: Jocko Willink, Brené Brown and Emotional Vulnerability

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Mastering your emotions is old school. Jocko Willink won’t teach you how to do it, but he will tell you how important it is. He seems to have inherited a respect for emotional control and so he has no recommendation beyond what Nike prescribes. Willink is, however, very open about his emotions and it is not rare to hear him breaking into tears as he is reading something or recounting a story that involves great loss. He is a person who has found the ability to feel deeply and to remain operational. I think that Jocko is a national treasure for the way he devotes himself to teaching leadership skills. His love of literature and his experience in war make him one of the most dynamic speakers and thinkers we have today. I learn things from listening to and reading Willink. He is a very smart guy with a lot of experience to draw from in his discussion of management ideas and all things war. I have learned a lot from listening to Willink, but nothing about how to deal with your emotions, only that you have to somehow some way.

One of the only public intellectuals I can think of who is maybe more badass than Jocko Willink is Brené Brown and it is because of her commitment to understanding emotions. She is an intellectual firebrand, an advocate for feeling deeply, an enemy of shame and a friend to all who struggle with feeling vulnerable gracefully. I found Brené Brown when I needed her most: as a new father struggling to adapt to the new emotional experience of being vulnerable. The experience of having someone you love unconditionally who depends on you for their survival and well-being opened me up to feelings of vulnerability I had never even imagined. 

There is a logic to Brown’s work. You can read it or listen to it in a sequence that will make a lot of sense, but you might need to hear her words more urgently than you need to understand her theory. This is a time for embodying the spirit of her book Rising Strong. We are at a crossroads. We can choose cynicism or caring deeply. Both Jocko Willink and Brené Brown advocate for caring deeply, they just have different techniques for how to do so effectively. Willink prescribes early rising, physical therapy, and doing the work to stay on the path to protect your people and to win the day. “Discipline equals freedom.” There are thousands of techniques he gets into, but the core mission behind all of his ideas is to be there for your people, to do the work. Make good decisions that put you in the position to have leverage. Jocko is a Navy Seal, and he is teaching us about relationship skills. That is the core of his leadership philosophy.

Brown teaches us how to own our emotions. Her main thesis is that shame is a horrible management strategy that has been used over time excessively and has created a culture of shame that stunts our emotional growth and limits our experiences. Through confronting the feelings of shame and giving voice to the experience, she points to a path of greater self-awareness and self-actualization. When people talk about doing the work, they are pointing to the same process. Doing the work, emotionally, is rewriting your own motivations to shift from a shame-based set of ideas to a more human and accepting model of behavior.

I can remember going through my Brené Brown education vividly. I listened to Rising Strong one spring season not too long ago while I would go on these long hikes in Nisene Marks forest. Being in a wild setting is therapeutic to me and so is exercise and I was using the two together to help me to process my feelings. I would eat some edibles, put on my headphones and head out into the woods.

If you listen to Brené Brown, you will most likely have some breakthroughs. What she is teaching us is so simple, but so incredibly important and valid. Our culture has a lot of problems with how we teach people how to be valuable members of society. Brown is especially powerful for people who have been raised to be strong and to avoid showing weakness. Being vulnerable is unavoidable, but lots of us try our hardest to out-maneuver whatever threatens to make us feel exposed. But we are all members of the human family and we will all experience devastating losses. Running from the feelings of vulnerability, hiding behind the armor of shame only makes the whole experience that much more chaotic and potentially dangerous.

It is only when we own our feelings by giving them a place, by voicing them, that we regain the leverage we need to work with and through our emotions. As a proud Texan, Brown offers a wonderfully rich contrast of things. It would be very difficult to mistake her discussion of vulnerability for a watering down of masculinity or toughness. She is not attempting to demonize masculinity or to attack men. Brown is a friend to men. She can teach us how to be more human. Women too, of course. But men need friends in this process of learning how to be more human. If we want men to change, then we should celebrate the people leading the charge.

Through listening to Brown and walking through the woods feeling the grace of cannabis moving through me I have several memories of the most painful epiphanies, of just sobbing and crying with nobody around to see or hear and all of the bottled-up pain inside of me would just come out in these awful roars of grief for what I couldn’t change, for what I couldn’t forget. The loss of friends, the loss of love, the fear of failure, all of it, everything I was ashamed of came rushing up out of me like a stampede of buffalo shattering the underbrush of my heart as I stumbled with tear filled eyes deeper into the dark and wild. 

Some people will try to shame you for who you are. In a world where almost anything we do seems to be criticized by someone who feels superior, it is so important and refreshing to have people like Brené Brown and Jocko Willink who can remind us how to be more human, who can help us to find the courage to continue fighting despite inevitable loss. The human condition is absurdly beautiful and impossibly fragile. We are all walking our own paths through these woods and thankfully there are friends who can help to remind us that it is ok to feel pain, it is ok to feel vulnerable and that the only way to get stronger is by doing both. 

Creativity or Discipline?: Art Matters

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What is the relationship between discipline and creativity? On the surface, these things seem to be opposites. Discipline implies consistency and regularity. Creativity suggests variety and spontaneity. What is the image of discipline in the US? What is our idea of creativity? What is the reality?

Creativity comes from a variety of places, including trauma. Art is sometimes a response to an emotional need, to a state of shock. The thing is, not everyone who experiences trauma creates art, and not all experiences are equally traumatizing. 

Will power, or the continuity of choice, is one of the factors that transforms traumatic feelings into creativity.  What is the difference between someone who is damaged by a traumatic experience versus someone who is able to transfigure their pain into poetry? It is their willingness to practice. Of course, not all art comes from traumatic feelings.

Another aspect of creativity is choice. Creativity isn’t found in one thing or another. Creativity is the ability to choose.  Art can be any combination of aesthetic qualities. There are no rules as to what can qualify as art. Making a creative decision, a decision to go in a creative direction and to practice a formal constraint, is definitely one of the ways to look for creativity. 

What decisions have been made? What choices can we make now? What is the basis of a creative choice? What makes up an art direction?

Creativity is the conception of form.

Discipline is sticking with a program of work designed to create growth. To be disciplined is to possess self-control, to know one’s limits, to act within a safe and measured sphere of possibility. It is also to act consistently. When disciplined practice creates strength, there is more control in the execution of decisions. The strength gained from practice brings the line drawn by the hand closer to the mind’s idea.

Creativity derives from passion. Deeply caring about anything leads to opinion and the repetition of opinion creates style. A passion for form leads to the discipline of style. 

The subject of a work also has a lot to do with the interaction between creativity and discipline. The loss of a love can lead to a loss of passion, and instead of being productive creativity becomes cathartic. Instead of being driven by a desire to make great work, the artist who is heart-broken uses creative expression to cope with the feelings. 

Imagine Jeff Koons versus Mark Rothko. Koons is an artist who conceives of ideas and blueprints for the making of a spectacular visual object. His work is not expressive but conceptual. He is not using art to express something personal as much as he is performing for art. He is making aesthetic and conceptual, formal, choices to create something for the world.

Expressionist artists, like Rothko or Pollock, use creativity to vent their anguish, to express their tragic sense of time. Both routes end up creating something new, something valuable. The expressionists, however, ended up killing themselves and Jeff Koons is one of the wealthiest artists of all time. 

The value in art is derived from the desire of collectors and institutions to preserve the work of artists for future generations. Once an artist reaches art historical status, their work is almost immediately valuable.

People get too serious about art when money is involved, and it is always involved. It takes discipline to keep a sense of humor. You have to stick to your decisions. 

The tragic artist seems more authentic to us in some ways. There is very little sense of discipline in the tragic artist because they are fueled by trauma, not will power. The tragic artist is living on borrowed time. Creativity is a drug for the tragic artist, and it is just a matter of time before it becomes impossible to re-up.

The pop artist doesn’t use their public work to express their private feelings, but instead takes the task of making an art object as a kind of engineering challenge. 

Discipline and creativity are never neutral forces and so it requires an understanding of an individual and their context to really get down to the nitty gritty. What is the purpose of discipline and creativity in your work? Do you tend to feel more creative when you are emotional or does emotion come out of doing the work?

The purpose of the discipline is to earn trust. Through the repeated performance of a task, we inherit an artist’s belief in their project. 

Why do we need creativity? Where do we need it? 

You would think that making pretty things to look at wouldn’t be super high on our list of priorities in a world that has so many serious problems. 

Creativity always starts with a question about form. How would it look if we did this…? What would a viewer feel if we did that…? How do we make this art object feel a certain way? How can we inspire certain feelings in an audience? The questions create the context for formal experimentation and an artist will use their discipline, their media, to create some answers.