We don’t know where our ideas come from.
Can’t get a job finished? Or even started? Finding you thinking or writing blocked? Overwhelmed by the little things that get in the way of what you really want to do?
A solution is to create some boundaries of time and space to be creative and to get the big jobs done.
John Cleese, the British actor, often talks about creativity. Here is an excerpt from a presentation he gave in Belgium some years ago on creativity and where our ideas come from. If you only ever watch one video on management, then this should be it.
Here is an extract of some of the key message (and, please note, this is no substitute for taking the time to play the full video.)
“People often say, Where do you get your ideas from? And I say I get them from a Mr. Ken Levingshore who lives in Swinden, he sends them to me every Monday morning on a postcard. I once asked Ken where he gets his ideas from, and he gets them from a lady called Mildred Spong who lives on the Isle of Wight. He once asked Mildred where she gets her ideas from and she refused to say. So the point is, we don’t know. This is terribly important. We don’t know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is we do not get them from our laptops.”
…we do not get them from our laptops! Cleese goes on…
“In fact, we get our ideas from what I’m going to call for the moment, our unconscious, the part of our mind that goes on working, for example, when we’re asleep.”
“What I’m saying is, if you get into the right mood, then your mode of thinking will become much more creative. If you’re racing around all day, ticking things off on lists, checking your watch, making phone calls, and generally keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.”
“So now I want to run over how in this very frenzied world we all live in, how you may create a mood that will enable you to be more creative. Basically the way I put it is you need to create a tortoise enclosure. So that your little tortoise mind, a little nervous creature, can look around, and say, Yes, it’s safe to come out.”
To do this, you have to create a kind of oasis in your life. In the middle of the stressed, Oh, I’ve forgotten to do this, I’ve got to do that, I have to be there by eleven… in the middle of all that, you have to create an oasis. A tortoise enclosure where your tortoise mind can come out to play.
There’s two things you have to do. You have to create boundaries of space, and you have to create boundaries of time. It’s as simple as that.
Boundaries of space so you can avoid interruptions which is disastrous to the creative process… then you have to give yourself a starting time and a finish time. Because when you do that, you have created an oasis which is separate from ordinary life, and then and only then can you play.
Establish BOUNDARIES
of TIME
and of SPACE
An essential management tool.