The Book of Doing and Being: Rediscovering Creativity in Life, Love, and Work - Softcover

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Barnet Bain is an award-winning Hollywood producer and director, radio broadcaster, and creativity expert. Select film credits include Oscar Award–winner What Dreams May Come (producer); Emmy Award–nominee for Best Picture, Homeless to Harvard (executive producer); The Celestine Prophecy (writer, producer); The Jesus Film (writer); and The Lost and Found Family (director). Barnet is a member of the Transformational Leadership Council and a founding member of the affiliated Association of Transformational Leaders. He is also a contributing blogger for Huffington Post. Barnet consults and trains business leaders and private clients who are committed to high performance. Through his workshops, telecourses, and training seminars, Barnet guides people of all ages and walks of life to expand their vision of what is possible, step into their purpose, and contribute their gifts and talents with passion.

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The Book of Doing and Being

INTRODUCTION

When I was growing up in Canada, my dad was a butcher and my mom was a housewife. Around the dinner table, the conversation would often include talk about customers at my dad’s shop, neighbors, friends, and others in our community. On occasion, the conversation would turn to Grégoire, a wedding photographer and quite a good painter with a small studio in town. The scent of photo-developing chemicals and espresso followed Grégoire wherever he went. With his scarves, long hair, and French accent, he had a romantic mystique about him. My parents always referred to him as a “freelancer”—a word that packed a lot of meaning. Most important, it meant that he had no reliable income, therefore, no safety. It was both terrifying and exciting to hear about Grégoire and how he couldn’t rely on the world for money, validation, or a certain future.

Nothing about the way I was raised had any rapport with the freewheeling idea of being a freelancer, and yet I have become one. I have created a blueprint that is sufficiently differentiated from the framework of my beginnings—I created it, in part, by stepping beyond the bounds of structured imagining, which is something I’ll teach you how to do in this book. And while I know there are no guarantees—no promise of assured good outcomes in my career, finances, health, love, or anything else—there is also no turning back. Even if I wanted to turn back, the line to the anchor has been cut. I’m too far from the shore, and there is no safe harbor to return to. I have to create safety, trusting that safety found within myself will show up in my experience of the world. Most of the time, I am on tranquil seas, and yet sometimes it gets stormy, tempestuous. I hit moments of stress and fear that call me to return to the trance, but I can’t do it. I can only live on magic, fueled by my passion and commitment to the creative life.

When you seek out and explore creativity, as you will do by working with the exercises and practices in this book, it leads to an individualization from your original blueprint, which can be both exhilarating and unnerving at the same time. Instead of reacting to or rebelling against a framework that has been preset by others, you get to harvest what works of it and set about consciously creating the life you desire.

No matter what your vocation, you come to realize that life is a freelance affair and you no longer take anything for granted, whether it’s a paycheck, a marriage vow, or your health and well-being. You discover that none of these is outside of you. You can’t put them in a vault to accumulate interest and guarantee a particular future. Everything that matters to you comes from an inner reservoir that is always available in the present moment.

When you know that your whole life is a creative act, you begin to take responsibility for every piece of it. And claiming 100 percent responsibility makes everything crystal clear. You can see that each one of us is a freelancer, regardless of job title. You know that each of us is the writer and director of our own unforgettable life story.

That knowing is a fundamental shift in perception—a transformation. It happens when you are intimate enough with your past to be able to create an original framework that is yours alone, one that is as distinctive to you as your fingerprints. Living from the inside out, every facet of your life is freelance, designed by your own hand. You are a free agent. You are free.

THE PRESENT IS NOT THE RESULT OF THE PAST

Every act is a creative act. A relationship, a business, a screenplay, a dance, an art form, a reality—everything we know and everything we love is a constellation of creative acts.

Ensconced in our favorite corner of a restaurant where we frequently meet, my friend Barbara and I were fully engaged in a conversation about the creative life. We asked each other, What is a creative life? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How is it expressed? We were overflowing with ideas, many of which had made their way onto the large piece of white paper that covered the tablecloth, creating a mind-map of our thoughts. I’m grateful we did that because I have since referred to my piece of the map many times, drawing great inspiration from it and even adding new threads as they come to me.

At the center of our conversation was the idea that we are always evolving, individually and collectively. And if we are willing to be surprised by the next thing—the next creative impulse, the next idea that excites us, the next experience that moves us—then we are living a creative life. This dynamic is true for everyone, whether a stay-at-home parent, a CEO, a musician, a retail salesperson, an actor, a social media manager, or a monk. It cannot be otherwise.

The present does not have to be a continuation of the past.

Creatively redefining and reimagining our lives is an ongoing and perhaps inevitable conversation for Barbara and me to have. Barbara is Barbara Marx Hubbard, the celebrated futurist and eloquent communicator of evolutionary potential. I am a screenwriter and film producer. So she and I are both storytellers who share a passion for chronicling and understanding the unfolding human drama in which each of us has a vital role to play.

Over the past thirty-five years, my career has followed a particular trajectory that made itself clear early on. Reflected in the movies What Dreams May Come, Homeless to Harvard, The Celestine Prophecy, and others, that focus has to do with the mechanics of creativity itself, especially its connection to consciousness. Creativity is a relationship you nurture—must nurture, or life ceases to delight and surprise. If you offer yourself to creativity, it will seize you; shower you with wonders. For several years, I have spoken of this on film sets, in workshops, and at events around the country. But as we sat together that afternoon, Barbara said, “People have wonderful things to share, but most of us don’t realize that we are actors on the stage of history—and every actor needs a coach at some point.”

Right there, as she spoke those words, I knew the time was right for this book. Although my passion for creating films continues unabated, I realized in that moment that my larger role is that of attuning others to their part of the play, their part of the story that life is telling on a grand scale.

But in this great play, none of us has a script. We make up our parts as we go. So, in order to know what we want to create and why, we need a deeper understanding of ourselves.

CREATIVITY AS A STATE OF MIND

When we say, “I want to create something,” what we are really saying is, “I want to change things. I want to make something more beautiful . . . or more safe or more efficient or more sustainable.” All creativity starts with that desire to have impact, and the ownership of that desire is everything. In that sense, conscious creativity, perhaps more than anything else, requires an admission of a particular state of mind.

There is a little movie-set parable that says it all.

The tour guide stops his trolley on the Universal Studios back lot. Three craftsmen are hammering and sawing and painting away. The guide says, “Hey, what are you all doing?” The first one says, “What do you think? I’m painting a wall.” The second one says, “I’m doing okay; I’m making a living.” Then, covered from...