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Unthink: Rediscover Your Creative Genius - Hardcover

Wahl, Erik

 
9780770434007: Unthink: Rediscover Your Creative Genius
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0770434002 ISBN 13: 9780770434007
Verlag: Currency, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In the tradition of A Whole New Mind and The War of Art, graffiti artist and corporate thought leader, Erik Wahl explores the power of creativity to achieve superior performance.

Somehow we’ve come to believe that creativity is reserved for the chosen few: the poets, the painters, the writers. The truth is creativity is in all of us and re-discovering it is the key to unlocking your fullest potential.

Unthink pushes us beyond our traditional thought patterns. It will inspire everyone to realize that we are capable of so much more than we have pre-conditioned for. Creativity is not in one special place--and it is not in one special person. Creativity is everywhere and in everyone who has the courage to unleash their creative genius.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Erik Wahl is an artist, author, and entrepreneur who has become a catalyst for inspiring professionals to achieve extraordinary levels of performance. Internationally recognized as a thought provoking graffiti artist and one of the most sought-after speakers on the corporate lecture circuit, Wahl’s process of creating “disruptive innovations” in both art and business has led to countless stories of breakthrough success. Wahl’s artwork has raised millions of dollars for charities and can be seen hanging prominently in executive offices around the world. Erik, Tasha, and their three sons live in Southern California.

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1

What Was Right About You

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

--Pablo Picasso

Ask a roomful of five-year-olds how many are artists and every hand will shoot up. Ask a roomful of thirty-five-year-olds the same question and you might get one reluctant hand. Why is that?

The answer to that question begins by understanding who you and I were as children.

For years studies have shown that you were born with an ability to initiate new ideas and solve problems uniquely. "Children have an inbuilt drive for discovery," explains Tim Seldin, president of the International Montessori Council. "This drive for discovery continues to develop as they grow and become more adventurous in the things that they try out, from making mud pies in the garden to starting a worm farm in the living room. Children are born with marvelous imaginations and a keen desire to explore the world."1 In other words, you were born an artist--an individual with a large capacity to learn, adapt, and develop new ideas and solutions at any moment.

As a child, your brain thrived off what neurologists call your "right hemisphere"--the part of your brain that's in charge of intuition and creative, social, and visual skill: the part of your brain that embraces new and unconventional ideas, the part that is fascinated by surprise, the part that doesn't need everything to be neat and tidy and perfectly defined in order to find value. As a result, your mind was an ever-looping reel of whys and, more important, why nots. Curiosity was on overdrive. Imagination was rampant. Inspiration was anywhere and everywhere. The world was your canvas and the rules of creation were few if any.

Young boys turn sticks into swords and fight imaginary battles on a daily basis. They turn gutter streams into mighty rivers on which to sail their paper-made ships. Adventure, imagination, risk--these are hardwired into young boys. The type of toys they have or the locale in which they play doesn't matter either. If a journey beckons, they will find what they need or make it out of anything in reach.

Boys don't need to be taught to be creative. It pours out of them. And they are not the only ones.

Young girls transform themselves into ballerinas with lip gloss and any dress that fans with a twirl. Their dolls and stuffed animals become companions on a quest to find their prince and attend the great ball. Or they too venture off into the great unknown--to make the next great discovery, or to find the buried treasure, or to simply explore the outer reaches of their imaginary world.

For young boys and girls alike, exploration is their daily reality.

Do you remember when your days were governed by your imagination? You could be whoever or whatever you wanted. You could travel around the world--even beyond the world--at the drop of a thought. There were no rules that said you couldn't or shouldn't because it wasn't time productive. Pragmatism, logic, and even safety did not stand in the way. You were free to sculpt your days into works of art--tangible representations of your unique creativity--filled with joy, enthusiasm, and fulfillment.

We functioned this way as kids because our worldview was incomplete. To learn and grow, we needed to be mass collectors of information through our various senses. We were learning a language. We were figuring out how to relate to others. We were discovering the laws of physics and learning how to run and jump, and to use our muscles and limbs more efficiently. In short, we were cross-training for the many scenarios life would eventually toss at us in rapid succession. Our primary environment needed to be a rich, vibrant, and imagination-fostering one.

Many companies around the world have created offices that mirror kindergarten classrooms, hoping to spark that same rich, vibrant environment of childhood. Companies like Google have used unconventional environments to help them create cutting-edge products. The company allows its engineers to spend 20 percent of their work hours exploring anything that triggers their curiosity. The freedom allows employees to work alone and focus on something that tempts their fancy. It also allows employees who wouldn't normally intersect during the workweek to sit down together and let their ideas collide. Some of Google's greatest products grew out of this freedom--Gmail, Google Earth, Google Labs, and its flagship AdSense program.

What many don't know is that while Google hasn't admitted its inspiration for its 20 percent perk, it was probably the mining and manufacturing giant 3M, which began allowing its employees to spend 15 percent of their work time exploring the recesses of their imaginations in 1948. The company wanted to stand out in a postwar America, when rigidity defined the corporate landscape. It did so and continues to do so today. Its legendary Post-it notes were birthed by an employee named Art Fry during his 15 percent exploration time; but that is only one of more than twenty-two thousand patents that have created approximately fifty thousand different products that bring in more than $20 billion annually.2 3M is an innovation volcano.

Could we be oversimplifying the reasons for such companies' constant creativity when we link it to their promotion of employee imagination and exploration? While there are certainly other factors that make the Googles and 3Ms of the world so hypercreative, when asked, the employees themselves, from executive to entry level, point to this free time as the major catalyst in shaping the companies' continued success. When Marissa Mayer was Google's VP of search products and user experience (she's now CEO of Yahoo!), she estimated that approximately half of Google's new products were the result of employees' 20 percent time.3 Kurt Beinlich, a technical director for 3M, explained that his company's 15 percent time has "shaped what and who 3M is."4

There is something freeing, something magical, something exuberant, about an environment where we are not hemmed in by rules and time lines and are instead opened up to imagination, possibility, and learning. This describes the landscape of early childhood.

The idea of returning to childhood for wisdom is nothing new. While the world's greatest teachers and thinkers have for centuries debated every topic and philosophy under the sun, one thing they have agreed on is the need for adults to become like children again in order to not only see our days in their fullest colors but also to pull ourselves out of ruts and push us through life's challenges.

Jesus famously scolded his disciples when they kept the children in a crowd from approaching him. "Let the little children come to me," he insisted, "and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."5 Sigmund Freud lamented, "What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult." Heraclitus wrote, "Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." Friedrich Nietzsche asserted, "In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play." And according to Mahatma Gandhi, "The law of love could be best understood and learned through little children."

Albert Einstein once wondered how it came to be that he was the one to develop the theory of relativity. He explained, "The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal capabilities."6

In Einstein's opinion, his genius was the result of remaining...

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Verlag
Currency
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0770434002
ISBN 13 
9780770434007
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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