Learning Mandarin is very likely to give you an economic advantage in the years ahead. Recent research has shown that it could help you in other more surprising ways too.
A six-year German-Chinese research project has shown that Chinese brains work faster than western ones. The Chinese students were better at processing information intellectually and quicker at memory tests. But when it came to simple reaction time tests, the Europeans were better. The researchers believe that it is because of how the mind has to process the more complex Mandarin and Cantonese languages than the Roman alphabet. Mandarin has about 50,000 word characters. A knowledge of 3000 would be needed to read a newspaper. A well-educated person may know around 5000. To complicate matters further Chinese languages are phonetic. A vocal change can dramatically change the meaning of words. Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has eight.
It's also thought that there is less difference between the left and right hemispheres of the average Chinese brain compared with the average European brain. This is perhaps due to the very visual pattern recognition nature of the language which requires a more even balance of the traditional left and right brain specialisms. European languages are much more left brain dominant.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Monday, February 18, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Music for Pleasure
A colleague of mine, Alan Stevens, recently wrote in his (excellent) newsletter that he'd been converting his old vinyl LP records to digital files on his PC and commented on his nine year old daughter's astonishment that they had music 'on both sides'. It reminded me of the fact that new technology and new ways of doing things are usually more convenient, but not always better, or more fun. Listening to a vinyl LP (or 45 rpm single for that matter - which can be exhilarating) is a totally different experience to listening to a CD or iPod. I would say that it's a better experience and this is why:
First of all the sleeve is bigger. At 12" the photos are nice and big and the sleeve is satisfying to hold as you listen to the recording. Care is needed taking the record out of the sleeve impressing upon you the value of what you hold in your hands. You need to slowly lower the needle into place, it can't be rushed. The sound of a vinyl record is an analogue of the actual sound that was recorded. That means it's almost exactly the same. This is not true with digital playback which is a sample of the original, it misses data out. True audiophiles can hear the difference and will tell you that CDs sound 'cold' compared to the truer, warmer sound of micro-groove vinyl.
But I haven't mentioned the best bit yet. The record only lasts about twenty minutes or less, even though these are 'long players'. Then you have to get up, walk across the room and pick the needle up and turn the record over. This has a massive impact on how music was presented and listened too. Artists had to arrange the records with a great opening track and closing track on both sides, like two acts of a play. It also means that you don't put a record on and then wander off, you actually have to be there and listen to it. You're involved in it, it's interactive.
When the record industry sold us shiny CDs they were interested in making a lot of money in the short-term, by re-selling us what we already had, more than they were interested in the quality of the music or the concepts of the album and single . But by changing the listening habits and making music more convenient somthings were lost.
For example, it's only now, with the concept of downloads that the idea of buying one song (ie. a single) has come back into play.
We all seem to succumb to the marketing messages and the thrill of the new. New technology is like electricity, fire or money - neither good nor bad. It's what you do with it that counts. Does a high-tech solution always add to the human experience? Or is it better, sometimes, perhaps on a sunny day with a picnic by the river, to open up a hand crafted wooden box to reveal a wind up gramophone which, without contributing any CO2 to global warming, will play a thick shellac disc at 78 rpm and the sounds of musicians and singers who knew nothing of mp3s and downloads, will fill the air. Let's not give up on an experience for the sake of convenience. Keep your records, keep your CDs and keep downloading. There are times and places for them all.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
First of all the sleeve is bigger. At 12" the photos are nice and big and the sleeve is satisfying to hold as you listen to the recording. Care is needed taking the record out of the sleeve impressing upon you the value of what you hold in your hands. You need to slowly lower the needle into place, it can't be rushed. The sound of a vinyl record is an analogue of the actual sound that was recorded. That means it's almost exactly the same. This is not true with digital playback which is a sample of the original, it misses data out. True audiophiles can hear the difference and will tell you that CDs sound 'cold' compared to the truer, warmer sound of micro-groove vinyl.
But I haven't mentioned the best bit yet. The record only lasts about twenty minutes or less, even though these are 'long players'. Then you have to get up, walk across the room and pick the needle up and turn the record over. This has a massive impact on how music was presented and listened too. Artists had to arrange the records with a great opening track and closing track on both sides, like two acts of a play. It also means that you don't put a record on and then wander off, you actually have to be there and listen to it. You're involved in it, it's interactive.
When the record industry sold us shiny CDs they were interested in making a lot of money in the short-term, by re-selling us what we already had, more than they were interested in the quality of the music or the concepts of the album and single . But by changing the listening habits and making music more convenient somthings were lost.
For example, it's only now, with the concept of downloads that the idea of buying one song (ie. a single) has come back into play.
We all seem to succumb to the marketing messages and the thrill of the new. New technology is like electricity, fire or money - neither good nor bad. It's what you do with it that counts. Does a high-tech solution always add to the human experience? Or is it better, sometimes, perhaps on a sunny day with a picnic by the river, to open up a hand crafted wooden box to reveal a wind up gramophone which, without contributing any CO2 to global warming, will play a thick shellac disc at 78 rpm and the sounds of musicians and singers who knew nothing of mp3s and downloads, will fill the air. Let's not give up on an experience for the sake of convenience. Keep your records, keep your CDs and keep downloading. There are times and places for them all.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Thursday, February 07, 2008
So Why Can’t We Be Polymaths?
In this age of specialisms and niching, we’re all told to be good at something (see last issue). But by that many people usually mean for us to be rubbish at everything else. We’re streamed and channelled in our education system to hammer home the messages that we can study science OR the humanities, be an artist OR technician, languages OR mathematics etc.
Like many others who came through the state school system in the UK, I was frustrated that I couldn’t do German because I was doing Physics. The system wasn’t flexible enough for that combination of subjects so they had separated the sciences and languages out. The school was obviously unaware that German was the language of physics (until the aftermath of the second world war), just as French had been the language of Chemistry a century earlier. So I chose the science route and amazed my fellow students and teachers by my magical ability to draw. It was almost as though their brains were shortcircuiting, ‘You can draw and yet you study science? That does not compute!’
This pigeon-holing is dangerous to our creativity. Creativity is a whole-brain activity. A truly creative person is both artist and scientist. The greatest scientific discoveries were made by individuals who thought visually, as an artist thinks and had the imagination necessary to push out the boundaries of what was possible. Harry Kroto who was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996 loved graphic design. That helped him create two dimensional data into a 3D model of carbon-60. (Interestingly enough my degree dissertation was involved in analyzing a tiny, tiny bit of this work). Scientists who understand aesthetics, beauty and form have a creative edge. The greatest artists knew how the physical world worked for them to be able to create form from chaos.
So why can’t we be polymaths (person of wide ranging knowledge or learning)? If we want to be creative individuals with something to offer the world then I’d say that it is imperative that we become whole, both artist and scientist.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Like many others who came through the state school system in the UK, I was frustrated that I couldn’t do German because I was doing Physics. The system wasn’t flexible enough for that combination of subjects so they had separated the sciences and languages out. The school was obviously unaware that German was the language of physics (until the aftermath of the second world war), just as French had been the language of Chemistry a century earlier. So I chose the science route and amazed my fellow students and teachers by my magical ability to draw. It was almost as though their brains were shortcircuiting, ‘You can draw and yet you study science? That does not compute!’
This pigeon-holing is dangerous to our creativity. Creativity is a whole-brain activity. A truly creative person is both artist and scientist. The greatest scientific discoveries were made by individuals who thought visually, as an artist thinks and had the imagination necessary to push out the boundaries of what was possible. Harry Kroto who was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996 loved graphic design. That helped him create two dimensional data into a 3D model of carbon-60. (Interestingly enough my degree dissertation was involved in analyzing a tiny, tiny bit of this work). Scientists who understand aesthetics, beauty and form have a creative edge. The greatest artists knew how the physical world worked for them to be able to create form from chaos.
So why can’t we be polymaths (person of wide ranging knowledge or learning)? If we want to be creative individuals with something to offer the world then I’d say that it is imperative that we become whole, both artist and scientist.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
I'm Having a Laugh
All humans in all recorded cultures have the ability to laugh, to find something ‘funny’ and have what is generally called ‘a sense of humour’, that is the faculty to perceive comedy. It's part of being human.
Some people are nervous about putting humour or comedy in their presentations. There's a joke in the public speaking world that says you should only use humour in your presentations if you want to get paid. This reminds us how important it is in a presentation to appeal to the audiences emotions. Comedic elements are more memorable than dry facts and that use of comedy in education aides retention of information. This could be borne out by the way teenage children are able to recall word for word comedy routines from television comedy sketch shows and sitcoms (like Monty Python, the Fast Show or Blackadder) but are not so able to do so with dry drama and struggle to remember anything from more formal presentations.
But comedy is totally subjective and its success depends on a variety of factors such as the setting, culture, language, delivery and context. This is why in most cases 'jokes' should be avoided as few jokes transcend all barriers to appeal to others without extensive translation or explanation. For comedy to work a shared history is also needed between the comic and the audience.
An excellent way of increasing your creativity and lateral thinking capabilities is to analysise what you find funny (or what you find unfunny where others are laughing!). Take a joke and break it down, see how it works, what does it play on, what information is needed to 'get the joke'?
There are a few key concepts that categorise comedy which include incongruity, repressed desires or fears and an establishment of superiority.
The concept of superiority is perhaps the most primordial form of comedy with humour derived from failures, weaknesses or deformities or either the comedian or another group. This also forms the basis of ‘slapstick’ (physical comedy and clowning) where the audience laugh from relief at someone else’s misfortune or idiocy. Repressed fears and desires have been a common feature of both the sexist joke (such as jokes about ‘the wife’ or ‘mother-in-law’) as well as homophobic and racist jokes which play on peoples fear of the unknown.
It's clear to all but an idiot not to use possibly offensive material in your presentations. The rule is - if it's possible an interpretation could offend - leave it out. The same goes for using profanity. Although a staple diet in most stand-up clubs, big business deals have been lost because most people do not want to hear rude words in a business context. One story goes that when a speaker was turned down for a training session he explained that he would obviously take out the swearwords from his material for that particular client. The client replied that they wanted to book a trainer who didn't have swear words in there in the first place.
Incongruity of either language or action involves the surprising, illogical or unexpected juxtaposition of ideas or situations which are often referred to as ‘surreal’. The comedian Vic Reeves is possibly the ultimate expression of this type in his UK 1990-91 television programme ‘Vic Reeves Big Night Out’ which was so incongruous that it divided the nation into those who gave him comedy god status and those that thought it was shoddy rubbish. Witnessing ‘Noodles the Comedy Duck’, an obvious glove puppet regurgitating prawns when one of the ten commandments was recited or listening to a man with a stick wearing a paper helmet covered in complaints to his local ombudsmen about coloured lights coming out of his taps requires a certain lateral thinking mindset in the audience. One of Reeves’ catch-phrases was the interesting “very poor” which confessed the obvious shoddy nature of the presentation which added an extra ‘in-joke’ to the faithful which drew them in even more.
Memory plays an important role in comedy. The comedian Harry Hill’s trademark routines involve setting up an enormous number of running gags with seemingly no point to them, only to refer back to them much later in the act. An example is he would mention that he saw three bunches of roses available for sale for a pound. Much later he would say, incongruently, in the middle of another story, “great big bunches they were” and then much later, again out of the blue, “three bunches for a pound? Where’s the profit margin in that?”. The comedy comes from the fact that the audience feel pleased to have been able to be ‘in’ on the joke, having remembered the references from earlier. This works because Hill is imprinting each chunk of gag using deep processing by getting the audience to question its meaning and look for a correlation with something he may have said earlier. He's playing on the shared history concept.
Humour is useful because it allows the audience to relax into behaving as a single unit were laughter can become contagious. In many ways the comic works a form of hypnosis on the audience. Being a group, the audience will take greater risks and may even feel comfortable ‘heckling’ or participating where they would not in a non-comedy or less collective group.
As mentioned earlier, humour enhances creative problem solving. Other claims have also been made of the physiological effects of observing or listening to comedy such as the strengthening of the immune system, increasing pain thresholds and reducing stress. It has even been found to reduce ageing.
All good reasons to look into livening up your presentations with humour or going to see some stand up yourself - for the sake of increasing your income and improving your health!
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Some people are nervous about putting humour or comedy in their presentations. There's a joke in the public speaking world that says you should only use humour in your presentations if you want to get paid. This reminds us how important it is in a presentation to appeal to the audiences emotions. Comedic elements are more memorable than dry facts and that use of comedy in education aides retention of information. This could be borne out by the way teenage children are able to recall word for word comedy routines from television comedy sketch shows and sitcoms (like Monty Python, the Fast Show or Blackadder) but are not so able to do so with dry drama and struggle to remember anything from more formal presentations.
But comedy is totally subjective and its success depends on a variety of factors such as the setting, culture, language, delivery and context. This is why in most cases 'jokes' should be avoided as few jokes transcend all barriers to appeal to others without extensive translation or explanation. For comedy to work a shared history is also needed between the comic and the audience.
An excellent way of increasing your creativity and lateral thinking capabilities is to analysise what you find funny (or what you find unfunny where others are laughing!). Take a joke and break it down, see how it works, what does it play on, what information is needed to 'get the joke'?
There are a few key concepts that categorise comedy which include incongruity, repressed desires or fears and an establishment of superiority.
The concept of superiority is perhaps the most primordial form of comedy with humour derived from failures, weaknesses or deformities or either the comedian or another group. This also forms the basis of ‘slapstick’ (physical comedy and clowning) where the audience laugh from relief at someone else’s misfortune or idiocy. Repressed fears and desires have been a common feature of both the sexist joke (such as jokes about ‘the wife’ or ‘mother-in-law’) as well as homophobic and racist jokes which play on peoples fear of the unknown.
It's clear to all but an idiot not to use possibly offensive material in your presentations. The rule is - if it's possible an interpretation could offend - leave it out. The same goes for using profanity. Although a staple diet in most stand-up clubs, big business deals have been lost because most people do not want to hear rude words in a business context. One story goes that when a speaker was turned down for a training session he explained that he would obviously take out the swearwords from his material for that particular client. The client replied that they wanted to book a trainer who didn't have swear words in there in the first place.
Incongruity of either language or action involves the surprising, illogical or unexpected juxtaposition of ideas or situations which are often referred to as ‘surreal’. The comedian Vic Reeves is possibly the ultimate expression of this type in his UK 1990-91 television programme ‘Vic Reeves Big Night Out’ which was so incongruous that it divided the nation into those who gave him comedy god status and those that thought it was shoddy rubbish. Witnessing ‘Noodles the Comedy Duck’, an obvious glove puppet regurgitating prawns when one of the ten commandments was recited or listening to a man with a stick wearing a paper helmet covered in complaints to his local ombudsmen about coloured lights coming out of his taps requires a certain lateral thinking mindset in the audience. One of Reeves’ catch-phrases was the interesting “very poor” which confessed the obvious shoddy nature of the presentation which added an extra ‘in-joke’ to the faithful which drew them in even more.
Memory plays an important role in comedy. The comedian Harry Hill’s trademark routines involve setting up an enormous number of running gags with seemingly no point to them, only to refer back to them much later in the act. An example is he would mention that he saw three bunches of roses available for sale for a pound. Much later he would say, incongruently, in the middle of another story, “great big bunches they were” and then much later, again out of the blue, “three bunches for a pound? Where’s the profit margin in that?”. The comedy comes from the fact that the audience feel pleased to have been able to be ‘in’ on the joke, having remembered the references from earlier. This works because Hill is imprinting each chunk of gag using deep processing by getting the audience to question its meaning and look for a correlation with something he may have said earlier. He's playing on the shared history concept.
Humour is useful because it allows the audience to relax into behaving as a single unit were laughter can become contagious. In many ways the comic works a form of hypnosis on the audience. Being a group, the audience will take greater risks and may even feel comfortable ‘heckling’ or participating where they would not in a non-comedy or less collective group.
As mentioned earlier, humour enhances creative problem solving. Other claims have also been made of the physiological effects of observing or listening to comedy such as the strengthening of the immune system, increasing pain thresholds and reducing stress. It has even been found to reduce ageing.
All good reasons to look into livening up your presentations with humour or going to see some stand up yourself - for the sake of increasing your income and improving your health!
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Monday, February 04, 2008
Business Unusual
I started my own business on 12th September 2001. That’s right, a day after 11th September 2001. On that fateful day I was flying back from the Caribbean after a two week holiday and had just landed at Heathrow when the first plane struck the North Tower. The next day I went back to work to find the company had gone bust. Completely unrelated to 9/11, but certainly a very strange and un-nerving couple of days.
I was creative director of a mutimedia firm. Don’t let that title throw you, I wasn’t on the board and I had no insight into the accounts or general finances of the company. My job was mainly to manage and do the jobs in the studio. I did know, however, that the boss had recently employed a friend of his on something like £42k as a senior programmer for whom there wasn’t very much work for him to do. I knew that the value of the work coming in couldn’t possibly cover the salaries going out which had been propped up with loans secured against the boss’s house.
The company had been set up ten years earlier to build bespoke PC systems that were used for multimedia presentations. Most of that market had disappeared due to the advancement of PCs and the availability of straightforward software like Powerpoint which virtually did the job for you. Why spend thousands on a bespoke system when you could pay hundreds for an off-the-shelf one that was better?
I saw my role as attempting to guide this outmoded company into the much richer vein of design-led graphics. The company could easily pick up branding, print design and of course web design as well as still doing high-end multimedia such as CD-ROMS which were still in demand. My team created a new identity and marketing campaign along with a brilliant (if I don’t say so myself!) website, that I was sure could have attracted press attention, if not awards, if it had been launched.
But the boss had put the brakes on. He just wasn’t comfortable with ‘creativity’ and ‘design’. He wasn’t comfortable with newer technology, especially the new iBook that our programmer bought. It was able to do exactly the same job that the bosses hot-wired custom built editing suite could do, except that it was faster and didn’t take up half the office. The boss wanted to be fiddling with PCs with their cases off and discussing servers over a pint of ale at lunchtime.
While I was on holiday I had come up with more marketing ideas and the concept of a ‘sub-brand’ that could be used to sell the new design portfolio without appearing to impact on the more staid and traditional image the boss wanted to cling onto. I did a lot of thinking about creativity and how it can be used to solve companies marketing and branding challenges and came up with ideas for names such as ‘Ideas Workshop’ and ‘Ding!’.
So it wasn’t exactly a complete surprise that the company was no longer in business when I got back.
The next day I started my own company and began to put all the ideas I’d come up with into practice. Sometimes you need a kick in the teeth to actually take action and get on with things.
Why did that multimedia company fail? To an outsider it appeared to have everything going for it. Except for clients of course. Inflexibilty, stubborness and fear of change were characteristics of the boss. Not being able to see the bigger picture, to understand where the market was moving was another. The downfall came because of a lack of creativity and a fear of creativity and doing the same things and expecting better results.
Once, perhaps, creativity was a luxury, but not now. Now you have to be creative in business.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
I was creative director of a mutimedia firm. Don’t let that title throw you, I wasn’t on the board and I had no insight into the accounts or general finances of the company. My job was mainly to manage and do the jobs in the studio. I did know, however, that the boss had recently employed a friend of his on something like £42k as a senior programmer for whom there wasn’t very much work for him to do. I knew that the value of the work coming in couldn’t possibly cover the salaries going out which had been propped up with loans secured against the boss’s house.
The company had been set up ten years earlier to build bespoke PC systems that were used for multimedia presentations. Most of that market had disappeared due to the advancement of PCs and the availability of straightforward software like Powerpoint which virtually did the job for you. Why spend thousands on a bespoke system when you could pay hundreds for an off-the-shelf one that was better?
I saw my role as attempting to guide this outmoded company into the much richer vein of design-led graphics. The company could easily pick up branding, print design and of course web design as well as still doing high-end multimedia such as CD-ROMS which were still in demand. My team created a new identity and marketing campaign along with a brilliant (if I don’t say so myself!) website, that I was sure could have attracted press attention, if not awards, if it had been launched.
But the boss had put the brakes on. He just wasn’t comfortable with ‘creativity’ and ‘design’. He wasn’t comfortable with newer technology, especially the new iBook that our programmer bought. It was able to do exactly the same job that the bosses hot-wired custom built editing suite could do, except that it was faster and didn’t take up half the office. The boss wanted to be fiddling with PCs with their cases off and discussing servers over a pint of ale at lunchtime.
While I was on holiday I had come up with more marketing ideas and the concept of a ‘sub-brand’ that could be used to sell the new design portfolio without appearing to impact on the more staid and traditional image the boss wanted to cling onto. I did a lot of thinking about creativity and how it can be used to solve companies marketing and branding challenges and came up with ideas for names such as ‘Ideas Workshop’ and ‘Ding!’.
So it wasn’t exactly a complete surprise that the company was no longer in business when I got back.
The next day I started my own company and began to put all the ideas I’d come up with into practice. Sometimes you need a kick in the teeth to actually take action and get on with things.
Why did that multimedia company fail? To an outsider it appeared to have everything going for it. Except for clients of course. Inflexibilty, stubborness and fear of change were characteristics of the boss. Not being able to see the bigger picture, to understand where the market was moving was another. The downfall came because of a lack of creativity and a fear of creativity and doing the same things and expecting better results.
Once, perhaps, creativity was a luxury, but not now. Now you have to be creative in business.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Saturday, January 26, 2008
How to Play the Piano
I've had a piano for seven years and a synthesiser for seventeen years and I've just learnt how to play. I'd been trying the play all that time but failed dramatically. Then as soon as I stopped 'trying', within a week I could suddenly play.
It came about because I wanted to retain the 'cool dad' tag for as long as possible with my fourteen month old son. We've been filling his day with music since he was born and when he expressed an interest in the large wooden piece of furniture covered in ebony and ivory keys I wanted to be able to play a tune for him. So I did. Was it as simple as that, you say? Actually yes. And I'm not saying all this to impress you, but to impress upon you a strategy for learning which can be, and should be, applied to everything you want to learn.
Let's have a look at what is going on here.
The first thing was that suddenly the motivation was there to learn. When I was at school my parents and the teacher were concerned that I was late in reading. The reason was that they had given me a load of old boring books to read. I wanted to be able to do it to please them and get away with it and I wasn't motivated in the actual reading of such dull stories. But when I got me hands on the Dalek and Star Wars annuals with their comic strips I suddenly 'got it'. Then I devoured the many Doctor Who novelisations of the television series, a couple I owned and the rest from the library. Remember these were the days before video recordings. A Doctor Who story was on television once and then never repeated so books were the only way of reliving the adventures.
Comic strips, pulp science fiction, novels of tv series and fantasy 'choose your own adventure' books were all decried by teachers and parents in the 70s and 80s. What they failed to recognise, as the author Philip Pulman has often pointed out, is that it's the reading that is important for children. It doesn't really matter what they read as long as they do read. (For Pullman it was the Superman comics). Children soon consume a range of books and then look to the next thing to satisfy their reading desires. It's often those who started on the lesser appreciated literary forms that move quicker onto more advanced works.
What was going on with my early reading was that I was getting a result straight away. I was learning as I went along, but I was getting the result which was the understanding of the particular adventure story.
I'd used the same approach to learning the guitar. I was self-taught. I learnt that I only needed the chords A and D to play 'Mull of Kintyre'. Add in an E and I could play Buddy Holly's entire back catalogue. My goal was to sing and play and within a week I could do that. After a month I was writing my own songs.
So it was this technique that I applied to the piano. The goal was to be able to play and sing some popular songs. I didn't need to start at the very beginning and learn the history and meaning of dots and squiggly lines on wires. All I had to do was to make a convincing sound.
All learning begins with self learning. A good teacher shows the way and needs to surround the student with the right motivation for them. The student then pulls themselves up, by themselves. The thrill of achievement then fuels the next stage; the desire to get better. This is where the teacher is needed as mentor, to guide the student through to mastery by showing technique and information.
So many teachers get this process back to front. They bombard the student with technique and information which goes over the heads of so many students who then feel disenfranchised and lose interest. There is a certain percentage of people who can learn this way but many will get quickly bored if the information is not relevant to their current goal. It's all about finding the right teaching strategy to match the student's learning strategy.
Now that I can convincingly play 'Hey Jude' and 'Let it Be' I can begin to expand my repertoire as well as going back to look at the technique and information for reading printed music. I now have the motivation to be able to get there.
You'll have your own learning strategies. They may be different to mine but they'll be the same in the one vital way: you will always need less will power to learn something you want to learn and that you will enjoy learning. If you have to use will power then you are more than likely to just give up and do something more rewarding at the first sign of hard work. Build the reward into the learning. This will work whether you want to learn Mandarin, Chemistry, salsa dancing or piano. Ask yourself 'why?'. If that 'why' is compelling enough you'll be doing it in no time.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
It came about because I wanted to retain the 'cool dad' tag for as long as possible with my fourteen month old son. We've been filling his day with music since he was born and when he expressed an interest in the large wooden piece of furniture covered in ebony and ivory keys I wanted to be able to play a tune for him. So I did. Was it as simple as that, you say? Actually yes. And I'm not saying all this to impress you, but to impress upon you a strategy for learning which can be, and should be, applied to everything you want to learn.
Let's have a look at what is going on here.
The first thing was that suddenly the motivation was there to learn. When I was at school my parents and the teacher were concerned that I was late in reading. The reason was that they had given me a load of old boring books to read. I wanted to be able to do it to please them and get away with it and I wasn't motivated in the actual reading of such dull stories. But when I got me hands on the Dalek and Star Wars annuals with their comic strips I suddenly 'got it'. Then I devoured the many Doctor Who novelisations of the television series, a couple I owned and the rest from the library. Remember these were the days before video recordings. A Doctor Who story was on television once and then never repeated so books were the only way of reliving the adventures.
Comic strips, pulp science fiction, novels of tv series and fantasy 'choose your own adventure' books were all decried by teachers and parents in the 70s and 80s. What they failed to recognise, as the author Philip Pulman has often pointed out, is that it's the reading that is important for children. It doesn't really matter what they read as long as they do read. (For Pullman it was the Superman comics). Children soon consume a range of books and then look to the next thing to satisfy their reading desires. It's often those who started on the lesser appreciated literary forms that move quicker onto more advanced works.
What was going on with my early reading was that I was getting a result straight away. I was learning as I went along, but I was getting the result which was the understanding of the particular adventure story.
I'd used the same approach to learning the guitar. I was self-taught. I learnt that I only needed the chords A and D to play 'Mull of Kintyre'. Add in an E and I could play Buddy Holly's entire back catalogue. My goal was to sing and play and within a week I could do that. After a month I was writing my own songs.
So it was this technique that I applied to the piano. The goal was to be able to play and sing some popular songs. I didn't need to start at the very beginning and learn the history and meaning of dots and squiggly lines on wires. All I had to do was to make a convincing sound.
All learning begins with self learning. A good teacher shows the way and needs to surround the student with the right motivation for them. The student then pulls themselves up, by themselves. The thrill of achievement then fuels the next stage; the desire to get better. This is where the teacher is needed as mentor, to guide the student through to mastery by showing technique and information.
So many teachers get this process back to front. They bombard the student with technique and information which goes over the heads of so many students who then feel disenfranchised and lose interest. There is a certain percentage of people who can learn this way but many will get quickly bored if the information is not relevant to their current goal. It's all about finding the right teaching strategy to match the student's learning strategy.
Now that I can convincingly play 'Hey Jude' and 'Let it Be' I can begin to expand my repertoire as well as going back to look at the technique and information for reading printed music. I now have the motivation to be able to get there.
You'll have your own learning strategies. They may be different to mine but they'll be the same in the one vital way: you will always need less will power to learn something you want to learn and that you will enjoy learning. If you have to use will power then you are more than likely to just give up and do something more rewarding at the first sign of hard work. Build the reward into the learning. This will work whether you want to learn Mandarin, Chemistry, salsa dancing or piano. Ask yourself 'why?'. If that 'why' is compelling enough you'll be doing it in no time.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Take it as red
Have a look outside for a red car. Have a closer look at the body of it. Is it really red? The more you look the more you’ll see that it’s many different colours, few if any of them are actually red. You’ll see that areas are different shades of pink, grey, white, black. Perhaps other colours that are reflected slightly giving us murky greens and browns. “But I know it’s red” you may say. Well it isn’t red. There is unlike to be a situation where the car is entirely red.
We make assumptions, ‘knowing’ that the car will have been painted with one colour of ‘red’ paint. But to say the car is ‘red’ is a simplification, a minimisation or the truth. It is a reductionistic viewpoint. “But it’s still red!” you cry. Well, no, it isn’t. Colour is determined by the frequency of light which hits our retina. When white light bounces of the car, the microscopic texture within the paint diffracts the light and absorbs certain wavelength of the colour spectrum, reflecting only certain other colours. So if the ‘red’ car reflects ‘grey’, than that part of the car is grey from the observers viewpoint. As the viewer moves, the colour of the car changes. Only the ‘ideal’ car, the reductionistic abstract is ‘red’. Likewise, a tin of red paint with the lid on is not actually red. Only when the lid is removed and light shone in does it become red.
All of this has consequences relevant here as this level of reductionism goes on all the time, stunting our true perception of the world around us, blinding us to what is really going on out there.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
We make assumptions, ‘knowing’ that the car will have been painted with one colour of ‘red’ paint. But to say the car is ‘red’ is a simplification, a minimisation or the truth. It is a reductionistic viewpoint. “But it’s still red!” you cry. Well, no, it isn’t. Colour is determined by the frequency of light which hits our retina. When white light bounces of the car, the microscopic texture within the paint diffracts the light and absorbs certain wavelength of the colour spectrum, reflecting only certain other colours. So if the ‘red’ car reflects ‘grey’, than that part of the car is grey from the observers viewpoint. As the viewer moves, the colour of the car changes. Only the ‘ideal’ car, the reductionistic abstract is ‘red’. Likewise, a tin of red paint with the lid on is not actually red. Only when the lid is removed and light shone in does it become red.
All of this has consequences relevant here as this level of reductionism goes on all the time, stunting our true perception of the world around us, blinding us to what is really going on out there.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Think Ahead for Glory
At this time of year sensible people do some form of goal setting exercise. You can’t hit a target you can’t see, so set the target. An easy and fun way to do this something I do every year. Give it a go yourself.
Get a piece of lined paper and write ‘Glory list 20** (this past year)’ at the top. Then write a column of numbers 1 to 30 down the left hand side. For each number write something that you achieved this year that was glorious. Include personal and business, large and small things. You must do all 30.
Then get another identical piece of paper. This time write ‘Glory list 20** (next year)’ at the top and the numbers down the side. Referring to what you wrote on the other sheet, write a new version of it next year that’s bigger and better. So if one of your glories from this last year was “I had a weeks holiday in France”, put for next year: “I had two weeks holiday in France and a week in America” or whatever would upstage last year for you. Write each and every line as if it has already happened.
On a third piece of paper write “Glory List 20** (next year) extra” and write anything else that you missed out on here. This is what you will have achieved come this time next year. Just by doing that you’ve made it so much more likely to come true.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Get a piece of lined paper and write ‘Glory list 20** (this past year)’ at the top. Then write a column of numbers 1 to 30 down the left hand side. For each number write something that you achieved this year that was glorious. Include personal and business, large and small things. You must do all 30.
Then get another identical piece of paper. This time write ‘Glory list 20** (next year)’ at the top and the numbers down the side. Referring to what you wrote on the other sheet, write a new version of it next year that’s bigger and better. So if one of your glories from this last year was “I had a weeks holiday in France”, put for next year: “I had two weeks holiday in France and a week in America” or whatever would upstage last year for you. Write each and every line as if it has already happened.
On a third piece of paper write “Glory List 20** (next year) extra” and write anything else that you missed out on here. This is what you will have achieved come this time next year. Just by doing that you’ve made it so much more likely to come true.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Don't be a generalist - be a specialist
You can't please everybody all the time. If you try you actually end up pleasing nobody all the time. This is what television broadcasting companies and record companies have only just started to realise. ITV for example has tried for years to please the 'masses', the 'popular vote', the 'average viewer' only to find that now no such viewer exists. As a commercial television broadcaster their revenue comes from advertisements during the programmes. So they have to put on programmes that the demographic for the adverts would want to see. Recent viewing figures have shown that less and less people want to watch what ITV has to offer that many advertisers no longer want to invest in spending their money on commercial television. Last year Cadbury have ended their ten year sponsorship of Coronation Street.
The days of everyone in the nation doing the same thing are long gone. The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show was watched by 30 million people. That amounted to every home that had a television and 60% of the population. Now the most watched television reaches 15 million (Eastenders and Doctor Who) which is only 16% of the country.
The Sun claims to be the UK's most popular newspaper with an average of 7.8 million readers every day (twice as many and The Times). The Sun claim to be 'the voice of the nation' but the reality is that only 13% of the population actually read it, so it's not that popular after all.
When the BBC started releasing archive television programmes on video in the 1980s they made an assumption that the audience for the videos was a general one who would be interested in the old programmes from a general interest point of view. So they made compilations of long running shows such as Doctor Who and Monty Python, creating a 'best of' video series. What took them a long time to realise was that the potential Doctor Who audience wanted the entire episodes uncut, not edited. The Doctor Who audience was a specialist audience who would pay handsomely to have their favourite programme in its entirety. They even wanted the BBC indents, trailers, out-takes and behind the scenes interviews released. The BBC realised that they were now catering for a specialist market that was so much bigger than the general interest market they'd originally planned for. In the 80s and 90s Doctor Who made more money through merchandise for the BBC than all of the rest of its output put together and that was while the programme was off air for 16 years.
In marketing terms this is known as 'the long tail'. A bookshop in town with limited shelf space needs to stock the books that are going to sell so it stocks all the 'best-sellers'. Simply put it's a business model that relies on selling a few titles to lots of people. On the other hand, an internet specialist shop sells lots of obscure titles to a few people. Because of the internet, the people who love the more obscure titles can be reached, even though they are spread all over the world. In effect the specialist market for something obscure is now huge. This is how new bands are able to market their music more effectively than ever before. There may not be many glam goth teddy boy punk heads in your town but when you capture the one from every town you have a sizeable market.
This is how many business have made a lot of money out of internet marketing in recent years - by realising that the marketplace is fragmented. Everyone is interested in something and there's no common ground to reach them all on. There are no generalist customers out there. They all have specialist needs. We can meet those needs with our business by becoming specialists ourselves. The new rule is that it's possible to please somebody all of the time.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
The days of everyone in the nation doing the same thing are long gone. The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show was watched by 30 million people. That amounted to every home that had a television and 60% of the population. Now the most watched television reaches 15 million (Eastenders and Doctor Who) which is only 16% of the country.
The Sun claims to be the UK's most popular newspaper with an average of 7.8 million readers every day (twice as many and The Times). The Sun claim to be 'the voice of the nation' but the reality is that only 13% of the population actually read it, so it's not that popular after all.
When the BBC started releasing archive television programmes on video in the 1980s they made an assumption that the audience for the videos was a general one who would be interested in the old programmes from a general interest point of view. So they made compilations of long running shows such as Doctor Who and Monty Python, creating a 'best of' video series. What took them a long time to realise was that the potential Doctor Who audience wanted the entire episodes uncut, not edited. The Doctor Who audience was a specialist audience who would pay handsomely to have their favourite programme in its entirety. They even wanted the BBC indents, trailers, out-takes and behind the scenes interviews released. The BBC realised that they were now catering for a specialist market that was so much bigger than the general interest market they'd originally planned for. In the 80s and 90s Doctor Who made more money through merchandise for the BBC than all of the rest of its output put together and that was while the programme was off air for 16 years.
In marketing terms this is known as 'the long tail'. A bookshop in town with limited shelf space needs to stock the books that are going to sell so it stocks all the 'best-sellers'. Simply put it's a business model that relies on selling a few titles to lots of people. On the other hand, an internet specialist shop sells lots of obscure titles to a few people. Because of the internet, the people who love the more obscure titles can be reached, even though they are spread all over the world. In effect the specialist market for something obscure is now huge. This is how new bands are able to market their music more effectively than ever before. There may not be many glam goth teddy boy punk heads in your town but when you capture the one from every town you have a sizeable market.
This is how many business have made a lot of money out of internet marketing in recent years - by realising that the marketplace is fragmented. Everyone is interested in something and there's no common ground to reach them all on. There are no generalist customers out there. They all have specialist needs. We can meet those needs with our business by becoming specialists ourselves. The new rule is that it's possible to please somebody all of the time.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Friday, January 11, 2008
Avoid Cliches like the Plague
A cliché is a phrase or opinion that is overused or displays a lack of original thought. When an audience hears (or reads) a cliché they unconsciously assume that the rest of what has been said and what else is about to be said will also display a lack of original thought and the message, if there is one, will be ignored. George Orwell said "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
Using a cliché isn't clever and it isn't amusing. People often use them as they think that it makes their prose more professional or business-like. It doesn't. If you want your presentations to be heard or your articles to be read try using your own words to describe the thing you're talking about. Your message will then seem alive and real instead of false and dead. So instead of 'at the end of the day', say something that fits the context of what you're saying. 'Finally' may be enough. Instead of 'at this moment in time' try 'currently' or 'today'. Endeavour to bin such phrases as 'with all due respect' and 'I hear what you're saying' as well as that anathema '24/7'. Using default chunks of cliché is the opposite of poetry.
Some other dastardly favourites are 'on a weekly basis' instead of 'every week' or 'going forward' instead of simply a pause. A bad writer or speaker is always telling us everything is 'literally' or 'basically' something or that they are 'being honest' or even worse 'being perfectly honest' - so was everything you said earlier a lie?
My pet hate has to be the need so many people have to avoid personal pronouns (I, me and you) as if they feel they might offend. So they'll say, 'can I get this for yourself?', 'Speaking personally myself...' or 'Myself and John'. It's simply John and I.
Basically I bet now you're beginning to feel like you're caught between a rock and a hard place. It's time to literally wake up and smell the coffee. Using language creatively is not rocket science. Rocket science is the scientific study of propulsion using explosive chemicals. That is what rocket science is and we all know that. It is not anything else you may like to compare it to. So let's just say 'it's not complicated' instead.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Using a cliché isn't clever and it isn't amusing. People often use them as they think that it makes their prose more professional or business-like. It doesn't. If you want your presentations to be heard or your articles to be read try using your own words to describe the thing you're talking about. Your message will then seem alive and real instead of false and dead. So instead of 'at the end of the day', say something that fits the context of what you're saying. 'Finally' may be enough. Instead of 'at this moment in time' try 'currently' or 'today'. Endeavour to bin such phrases as 'with all due respect' and 'I hear what you're saying' as well as that anathema '24/7'. Using default chunks of cliché is the opposite of poetry.
Some other dastardly favourites are 'on a weekly basis' instead of 'every week' or 'going forward' instead of simply a pause. A bad writer or speaker is always telling us everything is 'literally' or 'basically' something or that they are 'being honest' or even worse 'being perfectly honest' - so was everything you said earlier a lie?
My pet hate has to be the need so many people have to avoid personal pronouns (I, me and you) as if they feel they might offend. So they'll say, 'can I get this for yourself?', 'Speaking personally myself...' or 'Myself and John'. It's simply John and I.
Basically I bet now you're beginning to feel like you're caught between a rock and a hard place. It's time to literally wake up and smell the coffee. Using language creatively is not rocket science. Rocket science is the scientific study of propulsion using explosive chemicals. That is what rocket science is and we all know that. It is not anything else you may like to compare it to. So let's just say 'it's not complicated' instead.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Monday, January 07, 2008
When Jargon Replaces Thinking
Many businesses find it impossible to run a meeting without lacing it with cliched jargon. Ridiculous phrases, odd metaphors and allegories seem to be increasingly used without a great deal of thought into what's really being said or any consideration for those present who may not have heard this nonsense before.
Investors in People ran a survey last year which found that a third of 3000 workers polled felt excluded when gobbledygook jargon speak was used. Two thirds felt it gave the impression that bosses were being untrustworthy or hiding something. All those polled felt that it was a sign of bad management and showed the bosses didn't really know what they were talking about.
There are also cases of male bosses using male dominated sports metaphors without realising that their audience is mostly women. Some of these are used without knowledge of their origin, eg. 'stepping up to the plate' means nothing unless you know baseball. (The UK version would be stepping up to the crease, from cricket).
Here are some of the most used and what you could say instead:
Blue-sky thinking: Think of some idealistic or visionary ideas - don't worry about their practical application
Get our ducks in a row: Have things efficiently ordered
Brain dump: Tell everything you know about a particular topic
Think outside the box: Don't limit your thinking to within your job description
Joined-up thinking: Take into account how things affect each other
Drilling down: Get more detail about a particular issue
Push the envelope: Improve performance by going beyond commonly accepted boundaries
The helicopter view: An overview
Low-hanging fruit: The easiest targets
Guestimate: A guess
Going forward: from now on
Singing from the same hymn sheet: talking about the same subject
I know where you're coming from: you are wrong
I'm all for metaphors and there's nothing really wrong with any of the above unless they are used when people don't understand them or used out of context. The most successful managers are those that recognise that communicating in a way that everyone can understand is the key to having an engaged, motivated and enthusiastic team. If you find yourself trapped in jargon land, print out the list and play Buzzword Bingo.
The Plain English Campaign have created a 'Gobbledygook Generator'. Click here to try it - You really can't fail with systemised organisational alignment.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Investors in People ran a survey last year which found that a third of 3000 workers polled felt excluded when gobbledygook jargon speak was used. Two thirds felt it gave the impression that bosses were being untrustworthy or hiding something. All those polled felt that it was a sign of bad management and showed the bosses didn't really know what they were talking about.
There are also cases of male bosses using male dominated sports metaphors without realising that their audience is mostly women. Some of these are used without knowledge of their origin, eg. 'stepping up to the plate' means nothing unless you know baseball. (The UK version would be stepping up to the crease, from cricket).
Here are some of the most used and what you could say instead:
Blue-sky thinking: Think of some idealistic or visionary ideas - don't worry about their practical application
Get our ducks in a row: Have things efficiently ordered
Brain dump: Tell everything you know about a particular topic
Think outside the box: Don't limit your thinking to within your job description
Joined-up thinking: Take into account how things affect each other
Drilling down: Get more detail about a particular issue
Push the envelope: Improve performance by going beyond commonly accepted boundaries
The helicopter view: An overview
Low-hanging fruit: The easiest targets
Guestimate: A guess
Going forward: from now on
Singing from the same hymn sheet: talking about the same subject
I know where you're coming from: you are wrong
I'm all for metaphors and there's nothing really wrong with any of the above unless they are used when people don't understand them or used out of context. The most successful managers are those that recognise that communicating in a way that everyone can understand is the key to having an engaged, motivated and enthusiastic team. If you find yourself trapped in jargon land, print out the list and play Buzzword Bingo.
The Plain English Campaign have created a 'Gobbledygook Generator'. Click here to try it - You really can't fail with systemised organisational alignment.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Saturday, December 22, 2007
The Colour of Christmas
One of the most important techniques for being creative is the art of noticing. In fact this is perhaps the most important technique in sentience and consciousness: 'I think, therefore I am' is really prefixed by 'I noticed that I was thinking'.
It's nearly Christmas and I've noticed something. So many decorations are using a new colour, completely unknown to Christmas until very recently; blue. As we change from high voltage bulbs to low power LEDs, someone must have noticed that high energy (and until very recently, expensive) blue LEDs are the brightest.
Can we have (as Shakin' Stevens sang) a blue Christmas? What colour is Christmas? Most of us secretly want a white Christmas. The last one of those I saw was in 1980. Subsequent ones seem to have been more grey, if judged by looking out of the window. The archetypal colours of the Victorian Christmas were green and red. The green is brought into the house with the evergreen of the tree and holly, reminding us that life continues during the harsh winter. The red of the holly berries, robin red breast and mulled wine connects both pagan and Christian thoughts of blood and sacrifice. The outfit of the 'jolly old elf' has been fixed as red, with white trimmings.
One of the gifts of the Magi at the nativity was gold, in reality just a fairly uncommon heavy metal. It's next to platinum on the periodic table which is rarer and yet gold is the emotionally evocative substance. Gold is the standard the world agreed to base its finances on. There is something about the colour of gold. Christmas is also a festival of light, representing hope that the sun will return. We bring lights inside our houses, the gold of candlelight and the reflected sparkle from tinsel. In recent years foils and tinsels seem to have fallen out of favour, replaced by an enthusiasm for electric flashing lights.
Christmas uses all these colours to evoke within us some form of emotional response, of excitement, of hope, of wonder, of the possibility of magic. I'm dreaming of a multicoloured Christmas.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
It's nearly Christmas and I've noticed something. So many decorations are using a new colour, completely unknown to Christmas until very recently; blue. As we change from high voltage bulbs to low power LEDs, someone must have noticed that high energy (and until very recently, expensive) blue LEDs are the brightest.
Can we have (as Shakin' Stevens sang) a blue Christmas? What colour is Christmas? Most of us secretly want a white Christmas. The last one of those I saw was in 1980. Subsequent ones seem to have been more grey, if judged by looking out of the window. The archetypal colours of the Victorian Christmas were green and red. The green is brought into the house with the evergreen of the tree and holly, reminding us that life continues during the harsh winter. The red of the holly berries, robin red breast and mulled wine connects both pagan and Christian thoughts of blood and sacrifice. The outfit of the 'jolly old elf' has been fixed as red, with white trimmings.
One of the gifts of the Magi at the nativity was gold, in reality just a fairly uncommon heavy metal. It's next to platinum on the periodic table which is rarer and yet gold is the emotionally evocative substance. Gold is the standard the world agreed to base its finances on. There is something about the colour of gold. Christmas is also a festival of light, representing hope that the sun will return. We bring lights inside our houses, the gold of candlelight and the reflected sparkle from tinsel. In recent years foils and tinsels seem to have fallen out of favour, replaced by an enthusiasm for electric flashing lights.
Christmas uses all these colours to evoke within us some form of emotional response, of excitement, of hope, of wonder, of the possibility of magic. I'm dreaming of a multicoloured Christmas.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Friday, December 21, 2007
The Magic of Christmas
“What are you doing for Christmas?” – a question we could be asked at anytime from September onwards. No other public holiday commands such importance in Britain than Christmas that it is planned and prepared for almost six months earlier.
Christmas’ critics make the mistake of worrying that either the religious aspect doesn’t apply to them, or that the commercialisation has diluted the spiritual significance. A woman in America, after seeing that her local Church was advertising a Christmas service was reported to have said “Even the Church is cashing in on it.” It seems that paradoxes such as these that give Christmas its fascinating nature. Even in the cynical wonder-less world of twenty-first century there is still magic to be had – if you know where to look.
Christmas has a power, stronger than Cromwell who had it banned, only for it to survive underground and resurface when the coast was clear. It is from those sixteen years when public celebration was outlawed that the concept of spending Christmas with the family became a new tradition, which continues today.
The myths and traditions surrounding Christmas have their origins going back thousands of years, way back before the birth of Christ. The first 25th of December as a celebration of Christ’s birth was celebrated in Rome in AD 336. (Further east the date had previously been set as the 6th January, giving rise to the twelve days of Christmas, from the official date to the older date). It became an official celebration in Britain in AD 567 when the Council of Tours declared the twelve days as festaltide. Ethelred ordained it to be a time of peace when all strife must cease in 991.
Christmas is as multi-cultural as you can get. Just think of the ‘traditional’ Christmas day: the turkey; an Aztec bird, a German tree, a pudding made from Asian spices, a carol about the Bohemian King Wenceslas to the tune of a Swedish spring song, pagan magic, mistletoe and holly, wood spirits dressed up as angels and a Russian saint. ‘Christmas’ has had many names and many traditions over the millennia and has proved notably stubborn to give any of them up.
The religion of the Kalands gave us our calendar which sets January 1st as the first day of the new year. Prior to this, in the Celtic year, November 1st was New Year’s Day and it was on the night before, All Hallows Eve, that people believed the souls of the dead would return for just one night. It is from the Celts that we have the concept of ‘eve’ as they considered the evening before an important day to be as revered as the day itself.
There seems to have always been a festival on or around the 25th December. In the age of magic it was the winter solstice and later with other pagan influences including Roman ones, the festival of the unconquered sun and the worship of Saturn, which was also on the 25th.
During the agricultural age the twelve days of Christmas were granted as a holiday, but in the industrial age of recent centuries, the holiday shrunk, and continues to shrink to the bare minimum. The erosion of Sunday as a day of rest in recent years and twenty-four hour shopping has reduced the communal rest to levels unheard of since the Victorian workhouses.
But the modern world has had an effect to balance out those changes too. With television and mass communication, Christmas is a shared experience more than ever. The ingredients of Christmas are not spoiled if you look selectively. It has lost the odd custom here and there, but after the setbacks of the Cromwell years, Christmas underwent a massive resurgence in the nineteenth century escalating to the phenomenal proportions of today.
Everyone is familiar with the image of the Victorian Christmas, mainly from Charles Dickens’ novels like ‘A Christmas Carol’, but why did the Victorian fascination with Christmas begin? Perhaps it was because of the nature of society that had become the take shape during that time. For the wealthy, times were good and people had time on their hands to be miserable while for the poor, times were bad. Both sections of society then began the concept of looking back to a Golden Age when life was easier and simpler than the harsh world of their present. In effect then, the Victorians invented ‘retro’, the idea of borrowing ideas and style from the past whilst wishing today was as rosy as the ‘Good Old Days’. It was this imagined Golden Age that they tried to revive in Christmas celebrations, a time so rooted in tradition that it has become tradition for tradition’s sake.
Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that we are at the end of time; Christmas is still evolving, still expanding. Some traditions fade away while some grow ever stronger. Take for example the jolly figure of Santa Claus, or to give him his British name, Father Christmas. There is an important difference between the two. Santa Claus is how he is known in America where he wears a bobble hat. In Britain, more so now in the North, he is still Father Christmas and wears a hood where his existence goes back long before Saint Nicolas, even back into pagan times as the god Saturn, the Scandinavian god of Yule and the Green Man. Until Victorian times his clothes were green and he wore a holly wreath if he wasn’t wearing his hood and cloak.
A popular Urban myth is that he was an invention of the Coca Cola company. This is not quite the case. What is true is that they used a more clean cut and standardised image of Santa Claus for their successful 1931 advertisements which was later adopted by other artists to form the definitive American Santa Claus, which America then began to ship back across the Atlantic back to Europe along with their version of Halloween which had all but died out in its native Europe.
New traditions of recent years have established themselves; the Christmas number one record, the Queen’s Speech, even the old tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas night has survived in the Christmas feature film on television. Nowadays we are just as likely to hear Bing Crosby or Slade’s Christmas songs as any ‘traditional’ carol. ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ is still in there but layer upon layer of the modern Christmas has been added.
Christmas is criticised for sentimentality and yet it is that sentiment that becomes good-will and charity at a time when those in need have greater need than any other time of the year. This Christmas sentiment is most notable in the phenomenal story of Christmas 1914 when the slaughter stopped in the trenches and enemies exchanged cigarettes and food and played a game of football. Christmas sentiment was the trigger, initially on the German side, to question the war. The truce lasted several days and in some areas up to a week. Only when the generals ordered fraternising with the enemy to be punishable with death did trust turn to suspicion and the guns started booming again. Alfred Anderson, who served with the 5th Battalion the Black Watch and the last surviving member of the Christmas Truce died in November this year aged 109.
Yes it is tacky and sometimes tasteless, but decking our homes in plastic trees, flashing coloured lights and silver tinsel is possibly the only way we know to rekindle the magic and mark the occasion as special, for a reason that is lost to most of us.
Christmas is the perfect marriage of our needs and desires, both ancient and modern. It is the ultimate festival, providing the greatest sense of occasion of all. It is an agreed, shared, communal lift. It is today as it was in ancient times: the festival of birth, of hope, of light, in the black barren darkness of winter. In our electric lit, atmospherically controlled world we have no obvious physical needs, but are there other needs? Does the festive season lighten the darkness in our hearts? Perhaps it does remind us of a Golden Age, the mythical Victorian Christmas or perhaps our own childhoods, if they were more tranquil than our current lives.
It is a celebration of the family and of friendship. A time of greed and yet of charity. A time, as in 1914, of questioning the world. It is a deadline, a marker, representing the achievements of the past year and all the hopes and dreams of the years to come, like standing on the edge of eternity.
Overall it is special, relieving us from the ordinariness of the rest of the year, so that for a very short time the leaden weight that oppresses us is somehow lifted to reveal our natural state of joy.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Christmas’ critics make the mistake of worrying that either the religious aspect doesn’t apply to them, or that the commercialisation has diluted the spiritual significance. A woman in America, after seeing that her local Church was advertising a Christmas service was reported to have said “Even the Church is cashing in on it.” It seems that paradoxes such as these that give Christmas its fascinating nature. Even in the cynical wonder-less world of twenty-first century there is still magic to be had – if you know where to look.
Christmas has a power, stronger than Cromwell who had it banned, only for it to survive underground and resurface when the coast was clear. It is from those sixteen years when public celebration was outlawed that the concept of spending Christmas with the family became a new tradition, which continues today.
The myths and traditions surrounding Christmas have their origins going back thousands of years, way back before the birth of Christ. The first 25th of December as a celebration of Christ’s birth was celebrated in Rome in AD 336. (Further east the date had previously been set as the 6th January, giving rise to the twelve days of Christmas, from the official date to the older date). It became an official celebration in Britain in AD 567 when the Council of Tours declared the twelve days as festaltide. Ethelred ordained it to be a time of peace when all strife must cease in 991.
Christmas is as multi-cultural as you can get. Just think of the ‘traditional’ Christmas day: the turkey; an Aztec bird, a German tree, a pudding made from Asian spices, a carol about the Bohemian King Wenceslas to the tune of a Swedish spring song, pagan magic, mistletoe and holly, wood spirits dressed up as angels and a Russian saint. ‘Christmas’ has had many names and many traditions over the millennia and has proved notably stubborn to give any of them up.
The religion of the Kalands gave us our calendar which sets January 1st as the first day of the new year. Prior to this, in the Celtic year, November 1st was New Year’s Day and it was on the night before, All Hallows Eve, that people believed the souls of the dead would return for just one night. It is from the Celts that we have the concept of ‘eve’ as they considered the evening before an important day to be as revered as the day itself.
There seems to have always been a festival on or around the 25th December. In the age of magic it was the winter solstice and later with other pagan influences including Roman ones, the festival of the unconquered sun and the worship of Saturn, which was also on the 25th.
During the agricultural age the twelve days of Christmas were granted as a holiday, but in the industrial age of recent centuries, the holiday shrunk, and continues to shrink to the bare minimum. The erosion of Sunday as a day of rest in recent years and twenty-four hour shopping has reduced the communal rest to levels unheard of since the Victorian workhouses.
But the modern world has had an effect to balance out those changes too. With television and mass communication, Christmas is a shared experience more than ever. The ingredients of Christmas are not spoiled if you look selectively. It has lost the odd custom here and there, but after the setbacks of the Cromwell years, Christmas underwent a massive resurgence in the nineteenth century escalating to the phenomenal proportions of today.
Everyone is familiar with the image of the Victorian Christmas, mainly from Charles Dickens’ novels like ‘A Christmas Carol’, but why did the Victorian fascination with Christmas begin? Perhaps it was because of the nature of society that had become the take shape during that time. For the wealthy, times were good and people had time on their hands to be miserable while for the poor, times were bad. Both sections of society then began the concept of looking back to a Golden Age when life was easier and simpler than the harsh world of their present. In effect then, the Victorians invented ‘retro’, the idea of borrowing ideas and style from the past whilst wishing today was as rosy as the ‘Good Old Days’. It was this imagined Golden Age that they tried to revive in Christmas celebrations, a time so rooted in tradition that it has become tradition for tradition’s sake.
Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that we are at the end of time; Christmas is still evolving, still expanding. Some traditions fade away while some grow ever stronger. Take for example the jolly figure of Santa Claus, or to give him his British name, Father Christmas. There is an important difference between the two. Santa Claus is how he is known in America where he wears a bobble hat. In Britain, more so now in the North, he is still Father Christmas and wears a hood where his existence goes back long before Saint Nicolas, even back into pagan times as the god Saturn, the Scandinavian god of Yule and the Green Man. Until Victorian times his clothes were green and he wore a holly wreath if he wasn’t wearing his hood and cloak.
A popular Urban myth is that he was an invention of the Coca Cola company. This is not quite the case. What is true is that they used a more clean cut and standardised image of Santa Claus for their successful 1931 advertisements which was later adopted by other artists to form the definitive American Santa Claus, which America then began to ship back across the Atlantic back to Europe along with their version of Halloween which had all but died out in its native Europe.
New traditions of recent years have established themselves; the Christmas number one record, the Queen’s Speech, even the old tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas night has survived in the Christmas feature film on television. Nowadays we are just as likely to hear Bing Crosby or Slade’s Christmas songs as any ‘traditional’ carol. ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ is still in there but layer upon layer of the modern Christmas has been added.
Christmas is criticised for sentimentality and yet it is that sentiment that becomes good-will and charity at a time when those in need have greater need than any other time of the year. This Christmas sentiment is most notable in the phenomenal story of Christmas 1914 when the slaughter stopped in the trenches and enemies exchanged cigarettes and food and played a game of football. Christmas sentiment was the trigger, initially on the German side, to question the war. The truce lasted several days and in some areas up to a week. Only when the generals ordered fraternising with the enemy to be punishable with death did trust turn to suspicion and the guns started booming again. Alfred Anderson, who served with the 5th Battalion the Black Watch and the last surviving member of the Christmas Truce died in November this year aged 109.
Yes it is tacky and sometimes tasteless, but decking our homes in plastic trees, flashing coloured lights and silver tinsel is possibly the only way we know to rekindle the magic and mark the occasion as special, for a reason that is lost to most of us.
Christmas is the perfect marriage of our needs and desires, both ancient and modern. It is the ultimate festival, providing the greatest sense of occasion of all. It is an agreed, shared, communal lift. It is today as it was in ancient times: the festival of birth, of hope, of light, in the black barren darkness of winter. In our electric lit, atmospherically controlled world we have no obvious physical needs, but are there other needs? Does the festive season lighten the darkness in our hearts? Perhaps it does remind us of a Golden Age, the mythical Victorian Christmas or perhaps our own childhoods, if they were more tranquil than our current lives.
It is a celebration of the family and of friendship. A time of greed and yet of charity. A time, as in 1914, of questioning the world. It is a deadline, a marker, representing the achievements of the past year and all the hopes and dreams of the years to come, like standing on the edge of eternity.
Overall it is special, relieving us from the ordinariness of the rest of the year, so that for a very short time the leaden weight that oppresses us is somehow lifted to reveal our natural state of joy.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Are Art and Money the Same Thing?
I used to think that we could abolish money in the future as part of some Star Trek style Utopia. Now I’m not so sure. I think if we didn’t have money, we’d invent it as it’s so useful in comparing and transferring value to one another. As far as we can tell, we’re the only animal to have a system of currency. We’re also the only animal to have art. The two, money and art, may have not evolved together but may be more closely related than we think.
If you have created a piece of art, you have created something of value greater than the raw materials the art is constructed from. So the painting you have created is worth something and has a value in the same way that a note of currency has value and is worth something. Both can be exchanged for something else of equivalent value.
This is interesting as during the Renaissance, when magnificent works of art were created and revered then and now as masterpieces, those works were created because of an entrepreneurial spirit and the beginning of the system of capital which drove cultural and intellectual changes. A painter or sculpturer’s reputation was based on his ability to arouse commercial interest in his work, through direct payment, commission or sponsorship and not through any abstract criteria of artistic merit. The same principles apply today, but are not understood or taught correctly to many of todays potentially great artists. That is why so many artists, be they painters, actors, dancers or musicians remain poor.
Think about it. If a piece of ‘art’ has no value, it is not deemed proper art. The problem is that so many of today’s artists find money ‘offensive’. That is why they are poor. They wait around to be ‘spotted’ or ‘discovered’. But in an age of abundance that is filled with real works there is very little chance of that happening. Van Gough was ‘discovered’ 11 years after he died penniless.
A great artist realises that he or she has the potential to literally print money by creating value almost out of thin air from their talents and raw materials. The same criteria must apply that applies to all business: potential customers must be convinced that your creations have value. Money and art are part of the same thing.
Have a look at this poem called 'But is it Art?
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
If you have created a piece of art, you have created something of value greater than the raw materials the art is constructed from. So the painting you have created is worth something and has a value in the same way that a note of currency has value and is worth something. Both can be exchanged for something else of equivalent value.
This is interesting as during the Renaissance, when magnificent works of art were created and revered then and now as masterpieces, those works were created because of an entrepreneurial spirit and the beginning of the system of capital which drove cultural and intellectual changes. A painter or sculpturer’s reputation was based on his ability to arouse commercial interest in his work, through direct payment, commission or sponsorship and not through any abstract criteria of artistic merit. The same principles apply today, but are not understood or taught correctly to many of todays potentially great artists. That is why so many artists, be they painters, actors, dancers or musicians remain poor.
Think about it. If a piece of ‘art’ has no value, it is not deemed proper art. The problem is that so many of today’s artists find money ‘offensive’. That is why they are poor. They wait around to be ‘spotted’ or ‘discovered’. But in an age of abundance that is filled with real works there is very little chance of that happening. Van Gough was ‘discovered’ 11 years after he died penniless.
A great artist realises that he or she has the potential to literally print money by creating value almost out of thin air from their talents and raw materials. The same criteria must apply that applies to all business: potential customers must be convinced that your creations have value. Money and art are part of the same thing.
Have a look at this poem called 'But is it Art?
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Friday, December 07, 2007
Multitasking is for Morons
People go on about multitasking. Usually they trot out the same old chestnut that women are better at multitasking. Usually that’s stated as an attack on men to ‘prove’ that women are better than men at something.
Why people are so insecure that they want to waste time pointing out differences between the sexes to gain some sort of tribal upper-hand escapes me. What people also seem to overlook is that all these things are ‘on average’. It doesn’t mean that because you’re a woman you are going to be better at such and such or worse at such and such. And it doesn’t mean that skills such as multitasking and reading maps can’t be learnt. There are plenty of women who can read maps better than the average man and plenty of men who are better at multitasking than the average woman.
But multitasking is not a ‘great triumph’, it’s a curse and a scourge to your creativity. Being able to do lots of things at the same time sounds like a great idea in our time constrained world. But when we look at what tasks multitaskers actually do concurrently they are all mundane left-brain tasks. The danger is that such an emphasis has been put on multitasking that it’s created yet another benchmark of left-brain prowess that people feel they need to live up to. People are given yet another reason not to concentrate on doing one thing well. People again fail to live in the moment and to take the time to enjoy life, instead packing in as many robotic tasks as possible.
Creative tasks demand full absorption. They require freedom from a mind that is worried about ‘getting things done quickly and efficiently’. A painter, sculptor, writer or composer needs to take as long as it takes to create their work. They are not clock watching, cutting corners or doing anything else while they are committed to the creative act. You're not going to generate that killer idea for your business while you run about doing a load of other stuff. Meanwhile your competitor may well have just come up with something wonderful.
My wish for you is to gain access at a conscious level to your inventive, intuitive and imaginative powers that normally go untapped, or only fleetingly accessed in our left brain dominated, verbal, technological culture and education system.
Save multitasking for mindless jobs and spend as much of your life as possible being mindful instead.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Why people are so insecure that they want to waste time pointing out differences between the sexes to gain some sort of tribal upper-hand escapes me. What people also seem to overlook is that all these things are ‘on average’. It doesn’t mean that because you’re a woman you are going to be better at such and such or worse at such and such. And it doesn’t mean that skills such as multitasking and reading maps can’t be learnt. There are plenty of women who can read maps better than the average man and plenty of men who are better at multitasking than the average woman.
But multitasking is not a ‘great triumph’, it’s a curse and a scourge to your creativity. Being able to do lots of things at the same time sounds like a great idea in our time constrained world. But when we look at what tasks multitaskers actually do concurrently they are all mundane left-brain tasks. The danger is that such an emphasis has been put on multitasking that it’s created yet another benchmark of left-brain prowess that people feel they need to live up to. People are given yet another reason not to concentrate on doing one thing well. People again fail to live in the moment and to take the time to enjoy life, instead packing in as many robotic tasks as possible.
Creative tasks demand full absorption. They require freedom from a mind that is worried about ‘getting things done quickly and efficiently’. A painter, sculptor, writer or composer needs to take as long as it takes to create their work. They are not clock watching, cutting corners or doing anything else while they are committed to the creative act. You're not going to generate that killer idea for your business while you run about doing a load of other stuff. Meanwhile your competitor may well have just come up with something wonderful.
My wish for you is to gain access at a conscious level to your inventive, intuitive and imaginative powers that normally go untapped, or only fleetingly accessed in our left brain dominated, verbal, technological culture and education system.
Save multitasking for mindless jobs and spend as much of your life as possible being mindful instead.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Stop the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign
I don’t like the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign and I think it should be stopped with immediate effect. But before you click away in disgust, please read on for my reasoning here.
I’ve studied loads and loads of some of the best goal setting techniques. I’ve studied the techniques of some of the most successful business leaders and spiritual leaders. I understand the ‘law of attraction’, visualization and prayer. In all that stuff, when you want to achieve something, or change something or gain something, the thing you must do, at all times, without exception is to focus on the thing you want, not the thing you don’t want.
‘Make Poverty History’? What are we focusing on there then? On Poverty and on History! Ok, some clever so-and-so came up with this catchy title, I can hear them now (“It’s a play on words! It means ‘let’s end poverty by making it historical’ and ‘let’s make history within the concept of poverty’....”)
Sometimes you can be ‘too clever’ for your own good. We should not be telling everyone to wear the words ‘Poverty’ and ‘History’ on little plastic armbands to remind them of poverty and history all day long. We should be telling everyone what we really want.
In the 1970s in the UK there was a campaign that started with the aim to make sport available for everyone. What do you think they called the campaign? “Make Couch Potatoes History?” no, of course not, it was “Sport for All”.
So ask yourself, what do we really want? Have a think about it. Shouldn’t we really want to make everyone wealthy? Happy? Healthy? Shouldn’t we be focusing on happiness, abundance and the future? Shouldn’t we be focusing on not lifting people out of poverty but pulling them up into wealth and abundance? Shouldn’t our campaign be something like “Make Everyone Wealthy Now”? I know it doesn’t sound clever or flash. The truth seldom does.
The words we use are important. The words we repeat in our heads are important. The words we focus on is what we get. Make sure you focus on the things you want.
And don’t even think about getting me started on “The War on Terror”...
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
I’ve studied loads and loads of some of the best goal setting techniques. I’ve studied the techniques of some of the most successful business leaders and spiritual leaders. I understand the ‘law of attraction’, visualization and prayer. In all that stuff, when you want to achieve something, or change something or gain something, the thing you must do, at all times, without exception is to focus on the thing you want, not the thing you don’t want.
‘Make Poverty History’? What are we focusing on there then? On Poverty and on History! Ok, some clever so-and-so came up with this catchy title, I can hear them now (“It’s a play on words! It means ‘let’s end poverty by making it historical’ and ‘let’s make history within the concept of poverty’....”)
Sometimes you can be ‘too clever’ for your own good. We should not be telling everyone to wear the words ‘Poverty’ and ‘History’ on little plastic armbands to remind them of poverty and history all day long. We should be telling everyone what we really want.
In the 1970s in the UK there was a campaign that started with the aim to make sport available for everyone. What do you think they called the campaign? “Make Couch Potatoes History?” no, of course not, it was “Sport for All”.
So ask yourself, what do we really want? Have a think about it. Shouldn’t we really want to make everyone wealthy? Happy? Healthy? Shouldn’t we be focusing on happiness, abundance and the future? Shouldn’t we be focusing on not lifting people out of poverty but pulling them up into wealth and abundance? Shouldn’t our campaign be something like “Make Everyone Wealthy Now”? I know it doesn’t sound clever or flash. The truth seldom does.
The words we use are important. The words we repeat in our heads are important. The words we focus on is what we get. Make sure you focus on the things you want.
And don’t even think about getting me started on “The War on Terror”...
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Saturday, July 21, 2007
The Problem with Challenges
The great stimulant to creativity is pressing problems. The problem is that in today's business world people are living in denial. (Sadly most people think that denial is a river in Egypt, as Zig Ziglar said). They are in denial that problems exists. 'Problem', is a dirty word. So you can't say to your boss, 'I have a problem', you have to say, 'I have a challenge'. The problem is, though, that you don't have a challenge, you have a problem.
Climbing Mount Everest is a challenge; you don't have to do it. You can rise to the challenge or let it go. So if you had a challenge you don't actually need to tell your boss, you could just let it go. But if your challenge is really a problem then you can't let it go. A problem is different. A problem needs a solution and like a mathematical problem, there is always a solution.
Softening words in this way doesn't help. People may think it's positive thinking but it's not. It's denial. Positive thinking is about seeing the world as it really is and acting accordingly. Real positive thinking does not deny that there are weeds in your garden. If the weeds are a challenge then you could simply decide that you don't really want to face them. If the weeds are a problem then you have to decide what the solution is.
Positive thinking lets you survey the reality of the weeds and plan the best way of pulling them up without dwelling on the fact.
'Problem' is not a dirty word. It is a proud and honourable word. Face your problems with pride, confidently, expectantly, with the attitude that there exists a logical, practical solution just waiting to be found. The most creative people have a relaxed attitude of confident expectancy that causes their minds to function in original and imaginative ways. Face up to the problem and focus on finding the solution.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Climbing Mount Everest is a challenge; you don't have to do it. You can rise to the challenge or let it go. So if you had a challenge you don't actually need to tell your boss, you could just let it go. But if your challenge is really a problem then you can't let it go. A problem is different. A problem needs a solution and like a mathematical problem, there is always a solution.
Softening words in this way doesn't help. People may think it's positive thinking but it's not. It's denial. Positive thinking is about seeing the world as it really is and acting accordingly. Real positive thinking does not deny that there are weeds in your garden. If the weeds are a challenge then you could simply decide that you don't really want to face them. If the weeds are a problem then you have to decide what the solution is.
Positive thinking lets you survey the reality of the weeds and plan the best way of pulling them up without dwelling on the fact.
'Problem' is not a dirty word. It is a proud and honourable word. Face your problems with pride, confidently, expectantly, with the attitude that there exists a logical, practical solution just waiting to be found. The most creative people have a relaxed attitude of confident expectancy that causes their minds to function in original and imaginative ways. Face up to the problem and focus on finding the solution.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Think the Right Way
Some people think they’re a left brainer, “I’m a left brainer,” they say, “I deal with computers, I deal with numbers. I get things organised, I turn up on time. I’m always smart. I’ve always got a pen. I’m a left brainer. I’m not an art-farty right brainer, wasting everybody’s time.”
Some people think that creativity is purely a right brain activity. Some think they’re right brain people and say “Well I’m an artist, I don’t have to turn up on time, I’m not interested, I like being in a mess, I do what I like because I’m an artist and I don’t have to wear a suit. Just don’t ask me to add anything up.”
Well they’re both wrong because we use both hemispheres of our brain all the time. If you really did use just your left brain you would be autistic. If you use just your right brain you would be in a mental hospital. What is really going on is that one hemisphere directs thinking for a particular task (not for a particular individual). The left brain dominates logical thinking, the concept of time, names for things and processes in a linear way. The right brain dominates language and meaning, opertaing in a holistic way. But the two always work together – and must do for you to function.
It’s important that we understand the specialisms of the hemispheres so that we know when it’s appropriate to use left-brain or right-brain directed thinking for a particular task. Let’s have a more detailed look:
Left Brain = Linear, Logical and Sequential
Right Brain = Holistic, Intuitive and Random
The left-brain does things in straight lines (linear) with no deviation. It processes in a logical fashion. It does one thing after another (sequential), one thing at a time. This is exactly how a computer works. The left brain is perfect for knowledge based tasks and since we’ve just come through the Industrial and Information ages, left-brain thinking has, quite rightly, dominated business in the west for a century and a half.
The right-brain looks at the big picture (holistic). This is why a large proportion of successful entrepreurs are creative right-brain directed thinkers. You need to be able to think holistically and see the big picture to have a business plan. The right-brain makes unusual links between disparate ideas (intuition). It carries out processes in a non-sequential order. There may be a pattern, but it won’t be A to B to C. In fact the right brain is a pattern generating and pattern recognising machine.
The left-brain is interested in utility, the right-brain in significance. So the left-brain is ‘function’, the right brain is ‘form’. In business this has a wider implication. When anyone is taught how to sell they are told something very important: sell the benefits, not the features. Few people are interested in how ABS brakes work on a car or even what ABS stands for. They don’t care if they have got ABS brakes or not. But when you tell them that ABS brakes stop your brakes from locking and going into a skid, that ABS brakes will save their life in an emergency stop, that’s a benefit. You sell the benefit and leave the technical description of the features to the appendix at the back of the brochure. A benefit is really ‘so what does that mean?’.
This shows that it’s the right brain that we appeal to when selling, in most people. People want meaning and significance in their lives, in the products they buy and in the services they use. Does your offering appeal to this need or are you trapped in left-brain directed thinking all the time and wonder why your service doesn't connect with people or that you can't think of new ideas?
Many business tasks need to be directed by right-brain thinking in the new Conceptual Age: marketing, sales, brainstorming, product development, human resources, lean productivity and customer service to name but a few.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Some people think that creativity is purely a right brain activity. Some think they’re right brain people and say “Well I’m an artist, I don’t have to turn up on time, I’m not interested, I like being in a mess, I do what I like because I’m an artist and I don’t have to wear a suit. Just don’t ask me to add anything up.”
Well they’re both wrong because we use both hemispheres of our brain all the time. If you really did use just your left brain you would be autistic. If you use just your right brain you would be in a mental hospital. What is really going on is that one hemisphere directs thinking for a particular task (not for a particular individual). The left brain dominates logical thinking, the concept of time, names for things and processes in a linear way. The right brain dominates language and meaning, opertaing in a holistic way. But the two always work together – and must do for you to function.
It’s important that we understand the specialisms of the hemispheres so that we know when it’s appropriate to use left-brain or right-brain directed thinking for a particular task. Let’s have a more detailed look:
Left Brain = Linear, Logical and Sequential
Right Brain = Holistic, Intuitive and Random
The left-brain does things in straight lines (linear) with no deviation. It processes in a logical fashion. It does one thing after another (sequential), one thing at a time. This is exactly how a computer works. The left brain is perfect for knowledge based tasks and since we’ve just come through the Industrial and Information ages, left-brain thinking has, quite rightly, dominated business in the west for a century and a half.
The right-brain looks at the big picture (holistic). This is why a large proportion of successful entrepreurs are creative right-brain directed thinkers. You need to be able to think holistically and see the big picture to have a business plan. The right-brain makes unusual links between disparate ideas (intuition). It carries out processes in a non-sequential order. There may be a pattern, but it won’t be A to B to C. In fact the right brain is a pattern generating and pattern recognising machine.
The left-brain is interested in utility, the right-brain in significance. So the left-brain is ‘function’, the right brain is ‘form’. In business this has a wider implication. When anyone is taught how to sell they are told something very important: sell the benefits, not the features. Few people are interested in how ABS brakes work on a car or even what ABS stands for. They don’t care if they have got ABS brakes or not. But when you tell them that ABS brakes stop your brakes from locking and going into a skid, that ABS brakes will save their life in an emergency stop, that’s a benefit. You sell the benefit and leave the technical description of the features to the appendix at the back of the brochure. A benefit is really ‘so what does that mean?’.
This shows that it’s the right brain that we appeal to when selling, in most people. People want meaning and significance in their lives, in the products they buy and in the services they use. Does your offering appeal to this need or are you trapped in left-brain directed thinking all the time and wonder why your service doesn't connect with people or that you can't think of new ideas?
Many business tasks need to be directed by right-brain thinking in the new Conceptual Age: marketing, sales, brainstorming, product development, human resources, lean productivity and customer service to name but a few.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Oh No, Not the Paper-Clip
How many non-uses of a paper-clip can you think of? Most people find this quite hard which shows they are not fluid at activating the right side of their brain. This is a lateral thinking task because you have to get off the track of thinking of actual uses of a paper-clip. This tests how random you can be.
The task is actually quite easy since there are actually very, very few uses of a paper-clip; to clip paper together and to eject stuck CDs from computers. Almost anything else will do, except people find it so, so difficult! You can’t fly to the moon on a paper-clip. You can’t marry a paper-clip. You can’t use a paper-clip to teach snails quantum physics. One of the reasons people freeze up and can’t think of anything, especially in groups, is that someone has said something clever, witty or particlularly good so now they have to compete with that. No. When generating ideas you do not compete with anyone. The point is not to outdo one another or try to be funny or clever. The point is to come up with ideas.
You cannot use a paper-clip to solve world povety.... hang on, perhaps you can. If we do this.... and this... and suddenly a brave new idea has been found that changes the world. And all because ‘judgement’ such as ‘that won’t work, that’s stupid’ has been turned off. Try it yourself.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
The task is actually quite easy since there are actually very, very few uses of a paper-clip; to clip paper together and to eject stuck CDs from computers. Almost anything else will do, except people find it so, so difficult! You can’t fly to the moon on a paper-clip. You can’t marry a paper-clip. You can’t use a paper-clip to teach snails quantum physics. One of the reasons people freeze up and can’t think of anything, especially in groups, is that someone has said something clever, witty or particlularly good so now they have to compete with that. No. When generating ideas you do not compete with anyone. The point is not to outdo one another or try to be funny or clever. The point is to come up with ideas.
You cannot use a paper-clip to solve world povety.... hang on, perhaps you can. If we do this.... and this... and suddenly a brave new idea has been found that changes the world. And all because ‘judgement’ such as ‘that won’t work, that’s stupid’ has been turned off. Try it yourself.
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Creating Brain Waves
When the brain is most creative it is able to form new associations between disparate ideas. When you alter your attitude, what you do with your body and what you choose to focus on, you’re actually altering the frequency of your brain waves. There are several characteristic electroencephalogram waveforms, or electromagnetic oscillations, associated with various sleep and wakefulness states:
A gamma wave is a pattern of brain waves associated with perception and consciousness. Gamma waves are produced when masses of neurons emit electrical signals at the rate of between 26 and 70 times a second (‘times a second’ is frequency, measured in hertz or Hz). Research has shown gamma waves are continuously present during the process of awakening and during active rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Beta waves occur above 12 Hz. Beta states are the states associated with normal waking consciousness, mostly active, busy or anxious thinking and active concentration.
Alpha waves are in the range of 8-12 Hz and signify periods of relaxation, with eyes closed but still awake.
Theta waves operate between 4 and 8 Hz and are found during some sleep states, in states of quiet focus like meditation and memory tasks. They reflect the on-line state of the brain in readiness to process information.
A delta wave is a large, slow (2 Hz or less) brain wave and is usually associated with deep sleep.
So to summarise:
Gamma = perception, conciousness and dream sleep
Beta = concentration, wakefulness
Alpha = relaxation
Theta = meditation and creative thinking
Delta = deep sleep
EEG Biofeedback Training is a learning strategy that enables people to alter their brain waves by getting a feedback of their present state. Some psychologists have set up biofeedback specifically to enable patients to enter the much rarer theta brain wave state to utilise creative thinking. They do it by monitoring the brain using electrodes. The patient sits relaxed and wears headphones. If the machine registers alpha waves it plays the relaxing sound of a babbling brook. If it registers theta waves the sound changes to crashing waves which enhances the meditative state. The system forces the patient to relax further and enter theta wave thought.
What is happening in theta wave state is that the brain has slowed down. This slower thinking allows connections to be made between more distant connections in the brain that normal gamma and beta wave thought hasn’t got time to access. This really means that it allows the time for distant, perhaps long out of use memory to be brought to conscious attention allowing older unconnected images to be recontexualised with newer thoughts. This is the creative process.
How can you access your theta wave brain state? Is there something you can do or someplace you can go? In your creative state you will find the solutions to your problems, you'll be able to think of new ideas and better was of doing things. Can you find time during a busy day to meditate? Can you really afford not to?
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
A gamma wave is a pattern of brain waves associated with perception and consciousness. Gamma waves are produced when masses of neurons emit electrical signals at the rate of between 26 and 70 times a second (‘times a second’ is frequency, measured in hertz or Hz). Research has shown gamma waves are continuously present during the process of awakening and during active rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Beta waves occur above 12 Hz. Beta states are the states associated with normal waking consciousness, mostly active, busy or anxious thinking and active concentration.
Alpha waves are in the range of 8-12 Hz and signify periods of relaxation, with eyes closed but still awake.
Theta waves operate between 4 and 8 Hz and are found during some sleep states, in states of quiet focus like meditation and memory tasks. They reflect the on-line state of the brain in readiness to process information.
A delta wave is a large, slow (2 Hz or less) brain wave and is usually associated with deep sleep.
So to summarise:
Gamma = perception, conciousness and dream sleep
Beta = concentration, wakefulness
Alpha = relaxation
Theta = meditation and creative thinking
Delta = deep sleep
EEG Biofeedback Training is a learning strategy that enables people to alter their brain waves by getting a feedback of their present state. Some psychologists have set up biofeedback specifically to enable patients to enter the much rarer theta brain wave state to utilise creative thinking. They do it by monitoring the brain using electrodes. The patient sits relaxed and wears headphones. If the machine registers alpha waves it plays the relaxing sound of a babbling brook. If it registers theta waves the sound changes to crashing waves which enhances the meditative state. The system forces the patient to relax further and enter theta wave thought.
What is happening in theta wave state is that the brain has slowed down. This slower thinking allows connections to be made between more distant connections in the brain that normal gamma and beta wave thought hasn’t got time to access. This really means that it allows the time for distant, perhaps long out of use memory to be brought to conscious attention allowing older unconnected images to be recontexualised with newer thoughts. This is the creative process.
How can you access your theta wave brain state? Is there something you can do or someplace you can go? In your creative state you will find the solutions to your problems, you'll be able to think of new ideas and better was of doing things. Can you find time during a busy day to meditate? Can you really afford not to?
Click here to read more about creativity.
www.aydinstone.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
