Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life - Hardcover

Katan, Tania

 
9780525573401: Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525573402 ISBN 13: 9780525573401
Verlag: Currency, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

“Playful, smart, easy to implement, and, dare I say, punk rock, this book will wake you up to your personal power and remind you just how enjoyable your life, and work, can be.”—Jen Sincero, #1 New York Times bestselling author of You Are a Badass

WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD
 
“You don’t have to turn into a corporate drone to kick ass in the working world,” says inspirational speaker Tania Katan. After more than ten years of smuggling creativity into the business sector, Katan is here to tell you that any task or pursuit can be a creative one. You just need to be willing to defy conformity and be ready to conjure imagination anywhere, at any time. That’s where Creative Trespassing comes in.
 
Creative Trespasser /cre-at-ive tres-pass-er/ noun
1: Someone who sneaks creativity and imagination into the most mundane tasks or buttoned-up workplaces.
2: Someone who finds extraordinary ideas in ordinary places.
3: Someone who uses creativity as fuel for a freer, more joyful life.
 
Peppered with stories of her own shenanigans—from organizing a wrestling match in the middle of an art museum to staging a corporate culture intervention via post-its—and lessons from the rule-breaking exploits of artists, change-makers, and totally legit business leaders alike, Creative Trespassing is a rollicking, uninhibited guide to using creativity as fuel for a freer and more joyful life.
 
Whether you’re seeking new ways to innovate, trying to spice up routine entry-level work, or looking to bring more of your rich creative life into your day job, Katan shows you how to transform monotony into novelty and be more energized in your work and in the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tania Katan is an inspirational speaker, speaking coach, and creative consultant who believes in storytelling at all costs! She has been a featured speaker at CiscoLive!, S.H.E. Summit, Landmark Ventures Social Innovation Summit, CreativeMornings, Comedy Central Stage, TEDx, and more. And her productive disruptions have been covered by the New York Times, USA Today, HuffPost, Glamour, Time, ReadWrite, Adweek, BuzzFeed, Mashable, USA Today, CNN, and more. Katan’s B.A. in theater has turned out to be more lucrative than any disparaging academic adviser could have imagined!

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Chapter 1

Fear Is So Last Year

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.

—John Cage, Avant-Garde Composer

At nineteen years old I heard my calling, a clear message delivered from above. The voice was not God’s or my guardian angel’s. Rather, it belonged to the tall, stern undergraduate adviser informing me that, “The only playwriting class we have available is for graduate students. You’re an undergraduate. You could submit a piece of writing and try to get in, but your chances are slim.”

Sure, many people in my position may have taken this as bad news, but I’ve always been a fan of slim chances. In fact, if chances are too chubby, I tend to give up before I even start. It’s a trait I inherited from my father, the OG underdog, who used to buy lottery tickets only when the jackpot was good and fat and worth (in his mind) the time and energy it took for him to sip scotch at a neighborhood bar while slowly scratching off the silver coating covering the numbers with the edge of a thin dime. He usually won a buck or two —one time he even won a few hundred—but for my dad, it wasn’t about winning the big jackpot, it was about the anticipation, about getting pleasantly day drunk while pondering the possibility of winning against all odds. In fact, the more the odds were stacked against him, the more fun for him it was.

So, chip off the old block that I was, I ignored my adviser’s advice and decided to play the odds with a satirical poem I’d written about pretentious folks who performed poetry in coffeehouses entitled “I Wear Black! And You Don’t.”

The first line: “YOU, like the bug / at the bottom / of my Big Gulp . . .”

The last line: “I slit my wrists horizontally as opposed to vertically and laugh. Ha. Ha. Ha. I wear black! And you don’t.”

As it turned out, I had much better luck than my father, because, somehow, not only did I not get put on suicide watch, I won the jackpot: a spot in the graduate playwriting class! On the first day of the semester I was so excited I practically skipped into the classroom. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. No more slumming it with the undergrad crowd for me, I thought as I found a seat next to a woman who was hunched over her notebook, scribbling furiously. I’m in the big leagues now! There were only seven of us in the class, and the graduate students were all decked out in the fashion of the time—grunge, some combination of black T-shirts with flannel accents, worn-out jeans, dirty sneakers, and a studied air of gloominess. Whereas my outfit—large silver hoop earrings and pale pink button-down oxford (although in my defense, it was untucked from my light blue jeans)—was giving off more “professional lesbian golfer” vibe than “future Tony Award–­winning playwright.” They all seemed to have the same notebooks, you know, those nineties-looking ones with the black and white blotches on the cover. My notebook, on the other hand, was more of an assertive orange (some might have said fluorescent, but same difference). Don’t worry about it, I assured myself. You belong here. These are your peeps.

The first several minutes of class passed in eerie silence, as though the other writers were communicating telepathically in some secret language I didn’t speak. Finally, the professor, who had been busy emptying the mysterious contents of his worn brown leather satchel onto his desk, sat down, faced us and delivered his marching orders: “There are three people stuck in a moving vehicle. Go!” All six sophisticated, flannel-clad grad students quickly cracked open their identical notebooks, put pen to paper, and started moving their hands as if the divine spirit of next-level-shit playwriting had suddenly entered their bodies. The spirit seemed to have skipped over me, however, and instead sent his friend, the divine spirit of holy-crap-what-is-happening. I was frozen. Couldn’t move a muscle. I let out a vague squeak, like the Tin Man begging for a tune-up and leaned in to ask the professor in a stage whisper, “Are we writing a play? Is that what we’re doing here?”

He nodded in the affirmative, which most people would have taken as a cue to start writing, but I could only sit there, utterly paralyzed. I was stuck. I’d been in class for all of five minutes, and I had writer’s block already?? Fear filled my entire being as my brain began generating involuntary “What if”s. What if I can’t think of anything to write? What if my writing sucks? What if the grad students make fun of me? What if they find out I’m a playwriting imposter? What if I spontaneously combust?

For lack of any better options, I put pen to blank page and started writing the stage directions that all plays begin with, lights up to reveal . . . ​And then the weirdest thing happened. I kept writing. In fact, my hand didn’t stop moving until the professor yelled, “Time’s up. Hand in your plays.” That’s when I realized that I had written, nonstop, for fifty-five minutes! It felt like being high, only with more focus and less munchies. And the craziest part: the play was actually good. I know this because the professor called me into his office the next day and said, “Tania, this play is actually good.” Followed by the words I had previously heard only in my wildest dreams: “You should submit it to playwriting contests.”

I tell this story not to brag about my innate playwriting talent (okay, maybe just a little), but rather because how I began that day, sitting in that classroom blinded by the glare of the white, empty pages of my weird orange notebook staring back at me, is how everyone—every performer, painter, software developer, manager, educator, cashier, dog walker, flight attendant—starts the day: facing an empty stage, a blank page, a bare canvas, a napping computer screen, an unfamiliar route, the entire sky. Whether we work in a soul-sucking corporate job or at the coolest “creative job” ever (or someplace in between), we all start each day from scratch. But here’s the amazing thing about the proverbial blank page: we get to choose how to fill it. We get to decide whether what we put on that page will be conventional, expected, and safe, or whether it will be daring, audacious, and wildly creative.

We can choose whether to stare blankly at the white emptiness, praying for the divine spirit of creativity to swoop in and start making out with us, or whether to trust that there is an entire world waiting to be explored in that space, put pen to paper and start. To make a mark, a simple act that might inspire us to make another mark, and then another, and pretty soon the sum total will add up. Ultimately, when faced with that proverbial blank page, we can either begin to write or allow inertia to keep us stuck in the thick smog of fear and self-doubt. It’s our choice to make anew every day.

We get to decide whether what we put on that page will be conventional, expected, and safe, or whether it will be daring, audacious, and wildly creative.

Don’t worry, fear of the blank page strikes the most creative among us! Like the artist Maurizio Cattelan who, in the eighties, was on the verge of his first-ever solo exhibition, one that would launch his art career and . . . ​he couldn’t think of anything to make. He was too consumed by freaking out; totally paralyzed by the fear, anxiety, and insecurity over creating and displaying his art. And his gallery,...

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Verlag
Currency
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525573402
ISBN 13 
9780525573401
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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