Today, July 11th , we continue the discussion for the Beyond Busy Global Monthly Book Club’s fourth book.
Anyone who has read our current discussion book can participate by commenting. You can also join our public BBGMBC Facebook group, if you would like to join us in reading one excellent quality book per month and then discussing it here.
And without further ado, let’s keep the discussion of Imagine: How Creativity Works by Johah Lehrer going.
I was really intrigued by the ideas about how creativity works alone vs. how creativity works together.
Heidi Smith Luedtke shared one of her favorite quotes in the comments section of yesterday’s blog post:
“When ideas are shared, the possibilities do not add up. They multiply.”
She said, I like this because it encourages me to discuss ideas before they may feel fully formed. Discussion helps to unconceal deeper truths and allows us to see connections we would not find on our own. My natural tendency is to keep things to myself before I feel sure of them, but that is not likely to lead to the most creative — or correct — solutions).
I also found the discussions of the ways some companies promote creativity to be fascinating.
In my own work, I often find myself encouraging writers to both master creative alone time and then get out and share what they offer with the world. It’s a bit different than the formal approaches that the companies used as examples promoted, because most of the people I work with are:
a. moms
b. work from home
c. have kids
d. need time to create
e. then need to be able to concentrate in the time they carve out
f. need to find the capacity to complete work that is started
g. about ten more steps that I won’t even go into here
f. and then, as if this wasn’t all hard enough, they need to find ways to get their works out into the world and share them, both in person and virtually
So, I guess in some ways, I felt that there were huge important parts of a discussion on creativity that were not even touched upon by this book. But on the other hand, I found the parts that were touched upon to be very interesting, and often found myself nodding along and finding echoes from my own work in this book (emphasis on chutzpah, teaching folks to do (not just theorize or discuss doing), and I completely resonate with the idea of creativity being cultural.
So, let’s save the issue of whether or not there is sexism in the book for another day (even though it’s definitely on my mind), and just look at this idea of balancing your creative wealth when you are alone with the creative wealth of others…what do you want to say about this?
I don’t have a preconceived answer. However I found the juxtaposition of the two ideas to be a great conversation starter. And I felt that there was so much more to say about topic of creativity alone vs. creativity together.
