Feeling small makes me creative

This blog is a riff on the theme of a recent blog by Seth Godin. You can find his post using the link at the end of this post. 

It was a very short comment but, as I read it, I had an instant flashback to a trip I made some years ago to Yosemite National Park in California.

Driving into the valley I saw a sheer rock face rising up almost 900 metres from the bed of a river.

It was a breath-taking sight, which exerted a kind of gravitational pull on me. I just started driving towards it until I was able to park close by and walk to the foot of it.

I have always found mountains inspiring but this one was in a league of its own. 

El Capitan dispenses with the niceties of foothills, slopes, hidden peaks etc. and just stands there; brutal, monolithic and perpendicular.

Looking up this monumental cliff with my head tilted as far back as it would go, I had a sense of being incredibly small, in a way that you can only know when you are standing next to something massive. And you know what – it felt really good.

For me, it was a deeply spiritual experience.

As in any genuine spiritual experience, I was forced off the throne at the centre of my world and made to view myself, and my world, from a completely different perspective.

And then the ideas began to flow. It was almost as though the shift in perspective had unstopped a channel in my brain and a profusion of ideas came cascading into my consciousness.

Original Photo: Mike Murphy

I think there is some kind of a principle in creation that the smaller I feel outside my head, the bigger the ideas that flow inside it.

I wonder if it is this sense of smallness that quietens down my ego and, in doing so, makes all the assumptions and paradigms that are associated with it a bit less dominant. And maybe, this allows the quiet thoughts and partial ideas that are floating around my right brain to surface and be recognised.

For this to work though, I think it is very important that the thing making me feel small does not have an ego of its own.

If it was a person, I know my fighting instincts would kick in and it would quickly descend into a contest of wills. But how can you argue with almost a Kilometre of rock!

It is not trying to make me feel small. It just does, because it is undeniably bigger, more impressive, more splendid than me. To paraphrase Mario Puzo's famous line: "It's nothing personal, just bigness."

To me, that is the golden key to inspired creativity – I need to feel small but not diminished.

Seth's post is here:  http://htl.li/jreD2 

Looking differently at familiar things

© 2012 Mark Buchanan

One of the paradoxes of human behaviour is that, the more familiar we become with things (or people) the less we notice them. We stop exploring and our understanding of them starts to fossilise. 

Deep down, we long for novelty and surprises but, at the same time, we crave the confidence and safety that come with familiarity.

Perhaps there is a way to provoke surprise and delight from the familiar, by finding a new way of looking at it.

We can do this literally, as I have done with the photo at the top of this page. 

It is a view of the centre of my hometown (Chester, in the UK), which has been photographed literally hundreds of thousands of times before.

Tourists love it but, to those of us who live here, it has long since faded into the background. We just don't notice it any more.

I found it fascinating, however, how much interest and conversation it provoked when I photoshopped this picture into a planet panorama.

The "strangeness" of the image made us all examine it in a new way and, as a result, new details caught our attention.

Of course, you don't have to go as extreme as a planet panorama if you don't want to. 

You could swap the picture you carry of your loved one(s) for a picture of just their eyes, or their hands and see how that makes you feel about them.

If you have a favourite photo as your computer (or mobile phone) wallpaper, try rotating it through 90 degrees and see if something new strikes you about it.

There are, also, some less literal ways we could apply this approach.

The next time you are having a product innovation meeting, why not start by asking your team members to list 5 things they hate about your product or service.

Or, list 3 things your competitors do better than you.

On a personal note, what is the one thing you would absolutely not want to have written on your tombstone?

That's an easy one for me - "He was predictable."

High Dynamic Range Thinking

This is a view of handbridge in the beautiful, Roman city of Chester in the North-West of England, where I live.

I was staring out of my window yesterday afternoon and I saw the low, winter sunshine start to break through the storm clouds so, I grabbed my camera, dashed out of my office to this spot and started shooting.

I used a special technique  to produce a rich and vivid picture and, as I was clicking away, it occurred to me that the same principle can be applied to our thinking, to generate richer ideas, which will generate more beautiful results.

The technique is called "High Dynamic Range" whereby I set my camera to take 3 shots in quick succession - one under-exposed one "correctly" exposed,  and one over-exposed, which are then combined to produce the finished photograph.

You can see the 3 pictures below:

The middle shot is the one the camera thinks is "correct" and it is certainly a really nice picture. However it lacks the richness and texture of the picture at the top of this blog.

Unlike the human eye - the greatest optical masterpiece on the planet - the camera's sensor cannot expose the rich depths of the shadows AND the sparkling details in the highlights at the same time. 

So, it averages them out - losing detail from both ends of the dynamic range - and the result is, well, average!

If I am honest, a lot of my thinking can be pretty average, especially when I am under pressure. I just don't take the time to explore the full dynamic range of my ideas. 

I get results and they're are often good ones - but they're not great.

And then there is the brain bias issue to deal with.

The right-brainers amongst us will have a natural tendency to over-expose. It's all about bringing out the unseen details in the shadows - at the expense of the more obvious highlights.

The left-brained community will tend to under-expose, carefully preserving all the obvious highlights but losing the shadowy details in the process.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography achieves its rich, textured results by combining the under and over exposed shots with the correctly exposed one. It takes the highlights from the under exposed shot and the shadows from the over exposed shot and blends them into the correctly exposed shot, so increasing the dynamic range.

High Dynamic Range thinking works in a similar way. 

We take our initial thoughts and then deliberately push our thinking. First to the left to capture EVERYTHING we know on this subject, and then to the right to release our creativity and imagination to explore hidden possibilities and trigger new ideas.

Just as in photography, the results will be more beautiful, more textured, richer and more satisfying