Living Archives - Page 11 of 51

Building Blocks of Creativity: Curiosity

June 8, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

If we really want to understand and shape behavior, maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. —David Brooks

Having an open mind and being open to experience go hand-in-hand. And if you’re open-minded, you’re curious. You don’t believe that what you know about something—anything—is all there is to know. You want to explore and you want to learn more. You’re not afraid to put yourself in unfamiliar situations or to expose yourself to people and ideas that challenge you or your beliefs.

Curiosity, by its nature, implies uncertainty and ambiguity. Your brain doesn’t like uncertainty, which is why the experience can be uncomfortable. But if you choose comfort and the illusion of certainty (because certainty is an illusion) over curiosity, you’re turning your back on the very characteristics that make humans human.

Besides, curiosity can also be rewarding. Mario Livio, astrophysicist and author of Why? What Makes Us Curious? says:

[The] lust for knowledge is associated with a pleasurable state, and in our brain activates regions that anticipate rewards.

It makes sense that curiosity activates reward pathways in our brain. Curiosity and openness to experience give us the ability to be inventive and creative, to solve complex (sometimes life-or-death) problems, to imagine things that don’t yet exist, and to accomplish great undertakings in the face of enormous odds.

Curiosity is the essence of human existence. ‘Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’… I don’t know. I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there around the corner. But I want to find out. —Eugene Cernan

Curious, open-minded people see the world differently from other people, both literally—in terms of basic visual perception—and figuratively. They tend to screen out less visual information, so they sometimes see things others block out. And they “see” more possibilities as a result of being divergent (rather than convergent) thinkers.

Are You Intentional?

In order to be creative, we need to be able to change something in the world. But we also need to be able and willing to be changed by the world.

Of course, to a great extent we do create our own reality, so our interactive relationship with the world could be said to be creative. But the reality that we create for ourselves happens outside our awareness and outside our control. It’s pretty amazing, but we can’t take credit for it. It doesn’t require anything from us, and we can live our entire lives taking it for granted, having no curiosity about it and paying no attention to it whatsoever.

If you have no curiosity about yourself and your relationship with the world, you may want things to be different, but you’re unlikely to engage in the cognitive investigation and exploration that can lead to creativity and change. So you’re unlikely to do anything to change the status quo.

If you’re curious, however, the questions are more interesting—and more alive—than the answers. As a result, you never stop exploring. You take very little for granted. And you’re intentional about changing your brain, yourself, and your world.

Time to Let Go of the
Myth of the True Self

May 18, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The True Self is a fantasy version of you. It’s who you were meant to be—who you should be or who you could be if you hadn’t lost your way or if life hadn’t messed you up. Your True Self contains all the best qualities and potential available to you. If you could reconnect with it, you would be able to make a different choice. You would always do the right thing.

But the True Self doesn’t exist. There’s no alternate version of you to compare yourself to.

When the present doesn’t measure up to what you imagine it could be, you might have the feeling that something is missing or wrong. You might conclude that what’s wrong—or broken—is you.

If you see the problem as something being wrong with you, you will likely try to solve it by finding a way to fix what’s broken or not working. You might attempt to construct a bread-crumb trail backward to figure out why you do the things you do instead of the things you’d prefer (or think you should prefer) doing.

You might try getting in touch with your True Self or discovering your life purpose or passion. But you are many selves, rather than a single self, so what does authentic even mean in that context? And if you don’t have a True Self, there’s no point in searching for the life-purpose cheese because whose life purpose would it be?

Belief in a True Self Isn’t Harmless.

If your status quo includes such a belief, consider the implications:

You need to fix yourself before you can determine who you want to be or what you want to do. So some aspects of your life are either on hold or have been abandoned altogether as you attempt these fixes—sometimes energetically, sometimes halfheartedly—usually repeatedly.
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Your ideas about how you should be are based on looking backward rather than forward.
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Your ideas about your True Self come from your Broken Self. (Where else could they come from?) Your concept of your True Self is most likely based on what you don’t like about your current self.
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It is hard to trust your Broken Self to restore you to your True Self and to believe you have sufficient personal agency to do it.
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Trying to fix yourself is hard work, and it’s neither inspiring nor motivating: the best you can do is get back to where you should have been all along. That is unlikely to be compelling enough to generate a sense of urgency.
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If you erased the experiences and beliefs that have made you who you are, you would no longer be you. Who would you be then? And what would you want? As Julian Baggini says:

I am my baggage. I am the layers that have grown on the onion, not the tiny core at the middle. We are precisely all the things we’ve accrued, the memories, the experience, the learning. If you strip away what you call the baggage, you’re stripping away precisely the things that make us…that fill us out.

Belief in a True Self reflects a static, deterministic, mechanical perspective that is at odds with the dynamic nature of our existence. It keeps us going round and round on the hamster wheel instead of creating change or moving forward.

You Are Here.

You happen to be functioning exactly the way all human beings function: you can—and do—generate multiple possible alternatives to what’s so. Not only can you imagine many scenarios that are quite different from the present, you readily and frequently compare the actual to the imaginary—and often find the actual to be wanting. That’s only a problem if you interpret it that way.

Yes, imagination is a double-edged sword. Our ability to imagine things that don’t yet exist sets us apart and has led to our continued survival thus far. It’s an essential element of creativity and invention and without it we would be unable to formulate plans or goals or even think about the future.

Imagination is also the primary source of dissatisfaction. Without it, you would be much more content—but you also wouldn’t be you.

If you’re not satisfied with the present, but there’s nothing wrong with you, you will need to redefine the problem before you can attempt to solve it. Consider that you are just who you are: the current version of you, neither broken nor exactly as you would like to be. Instead of fixing yourself, which is not only uninspiring but also impossible, how about imagining what you want to create and moving forward into that?

Based on an article published in lucidwaking on 1/21/19.

YOU: A Work of Art in Progress

May 8, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

As long as you’re alive, your life is a work in progress (unfinished). But is it just work or is it a work of art? And what difference does it make?

The idea of living one’s life as a work in progress is not original. But several decades ago, when I was struck afresh by the rich possibilities of artistic metaphor, I not only looked at my own life in this context, I also queried some friends.

No one had trouble responding, and I was surprised by every one of their answers. A former insurance industry executive said his life would be a multi-media performance piece. A writer described her life as a sculpture, while a musician referred to his as a “junk” sculpture. A computer programmer declared his life was a symphony. Here are a handful of detailed descriptions:

Kathy:

I see myself as a mobile spinning out of control.
I’m not quite put together in a way that moves with the ebb and flow of gentle breezes yet.
I’m unbalanced and jerked around right now.
One or two pieces of something substantial need to be added so I can untangle myself when the forces of nature, or human hand, cause me to spin temporarily out of control.
(This temporary spinning does not inflict permanent damage. It just causes me not to be my usual self.)

Kelly:

The work of art in progress: me covered in layer upon layer of steel, concrete, wood, glass, gunpowder, feathers, year after year and lots of work…maybe some layers come off to expose this work of art…me.
Kinda like a big clump of marble, taking off what is not me and getting to the real David…um, no…Kelly.
Warning: completed works of art are not on our plane anymore.

Lee:

A sand castle, co-structured by a small child.
We came from the sea, I will go back to the sea…
Imperfect, made from tiny pieces and subject to the whims of nature…
Able to be tall and strong, ridged yet soft…
Able to be shaped by the people and the world around me…
Formed by wet sand dripping from a child’s hand or sculptured by forms and expert hands.

Linda:

I think of MY LIFE as an oil painting. Starting with a clean canvas I splash some paint on, just to see what it will look like.
After experimenting, I decide that it would be better to Have a Plan.
I draw out in pen what I want to paint. I add some color.
If I catch the paint before it dries I can change it or scrape it off entirely.
The memory of what has gone before is still there, but it is not entrenched in who I am.
When I wait too long and the paint dries, it becomes a part of the canvas.
I draw a new plan.
As I build up the layers of paint, adding depth, my canvas thickens with layers of paint.
I realize that I do not have to have a plan for everything.
I realize that my painting looks better when I have gone outside the lines of the plan.
My canvas now has years and years of paint added, paint that has dried, colors that have changed or been scraped off.
I’m really starting to like what I have painted.

Nicole:

Well, it would be a whirlwind in places spinning lots of reds, fiery and out of control, deep yellows, oranges, spinning AUTUMN colors. And then over where the BLUE starts to outnumber the red you will find other places: neatly categorized and presumably alphabetical little BLACK stacks. Each one placed with precision, stacked up to the ceilings in wavering stature, suggesting that they might fall at any moment in time.

Steve:

My life has always been a film, with music rambling in my head, the stimuli being “things passing by/me going forward”—motionless.

The Play’s the Thing…

Once upon a time, I saw my life as a play. There’s an inherent discipline in living life as a play in progress that’s different from the discipline involved in living life as a sculpture or a symphony or a painting. Staging, timing, and pacing are crucial. Significantly, in a play the props and scenery are vital—but only to the scenes they belong in. It makes no sense for an actor to become attached to any particular props.

I was aware of things as background props and of people, including myself, as characters from an early age. I wrote plays, read plays, hung out with the local drama group, and thought up names and descriptions of characters, as well as elaborate decorating schemes, to entertain myself.

At some point I noticed what I was doing and decided it was an odd way to think about myself and the world. Whereas other people seemed to make choices almost instinctively, I could consider a range of alternatives: a final choice would depend on the requirements of the scene or the plot line. Choosing otherwise seemed arbitrary. In spite of considering my view of life somewhat idiosyncratic, I continued to operate within that framework. When a major plot twist offered the opportunity for me to reinvent myself, I had no difficulty doing so. It was just a play, after all.

Although I probably appreciate the value in that point of view now more than I did then, I wouldn’t use the same metaphor to describe my current life. It often feels more like a surrealistic jigsaw puzzle: challenging, colorful, so much to look at, still not put together (still creating), and not at all what you’d expect.

There’s value in experimenting with styles and forms, imagining and reimagining our lives through different lenses and perspectives.

So, if your life were a work of art in progress, what metaphor would you choose to describe it? What shape would it take? What colors and/or sounds would it have? What process or media would be involved in its creation? What emotions would it evoke?

Would it be a painting, a sculpture, a black and white photo montage? A novel, a short story, a play, a poem, an essay? Would it be a song-cycle, a symphony, an opera, a collage, a Rodgers and Hart musical, a movie? Or…something else altogether.

A metaphor is always a framework for thinking, using knowledge of this to think about that. —Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life

A focus on creating yourself is the opposite of a focus on fixing yourself: the motion and the action are forward rather than backward. Thinking about your life as a work of art in progress can shift your view of what you’re doing in life—and of what you’re capable of doing. Creating art is compelling and juicy and expansive. It is an ongoing process of bringing something—in this case you—into being.

It is that dimension [our imagination of ourselves] whereby we are not merely living our lives—passively, as it were—but are actively giving them shape: ceaselessly interpreting and inventing ourselves afresh. It is that dimension whereby we do not receive a life as much as compose a life—as we might compose a story. As we appreciate the extent of this dimension, it becomes impossible to see how any aspect of our lives can escape our self-creative touch. —William Lowell Randall, The Stories We Are

Scout vs. Soldier
(more on mindsets)

April 18, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Do you want to be right or do you want to get it right?

You might manage to do both at the same time, but the question isn’t about your result. It’s about your underlying intention or aim.

It’s an important question because the answer determines how you process information. And how you process information can have a considerable influence on how well you succeed at accomplishing what you set out to do.

Soldier or Scout?

Julia Galef, president of the Center for Applied Rationality in Berkeley, has come up with a great metaphor to describe these two different mindsets: the soldier and the scout.

She says that when you operate from the soldier mindset, your actions stem from reflexes rooted in a need to protect yourself and your side and to defeat the enemy, whoever or whatever it may be.

On the other hand, when you operate from the scout mindset, your actions are based not on attacking or defending but on understanding the terrain and potential obstacles. You want to know what’s really there as accurately as possible.

Confirmation or Feedback?

In the grand scheme of things, both mindsets are valuable. Obviously there are times when you need to defend and protect—and maintain the status quo. But if you’re trying to change your status quo, you need to know how to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information. You also need to pay attention to what happens when you take steps to achieve your goals. You can interpret what happens as either confirmation or feedback.

If you’re aiming to confirm and defend your pre-existing beliefs (soldier mindset), you won’t be inclined to examine what happens with any degree of objectivity. Instead you’ll be quick to jump to a conclusion and then build a case to support it by what’s referred to as motivated reasoning.

But if you view what happens as feedback (scout mindset), you tend to be curious about it. You want to understand it because the better you understand it the better you’ll be at making accurate course corrections. People with a scout mindset, Galef says, “are more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations.”

The soldier mindset is easier to access because System 1 is often more concerned with being right than it is with getting it right. Soldier mindset is automatic. You don’t have to do anything to slip into it. It’s easier to jump to conclusions than it is to be deliberate and thoughtful and willing to acknowledge doubt and uncertainty.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. —Voltaire

You can end up paying a very high price when you aim to be right instead of to get it right. It’s easier to dig your heels in than it is to admit you’ve made a mistake or have changed your mind. But if you can’t change your mind, you won’t be able to change your status quo.

Bias and the soldier mindset come naturally to us. But in order to master the art and science of change, we need to develop critical thinking skills and operate from the scout mindset more than we do from the soldier mindset.

How Your Mindset Sets You Up

April 8, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A mindset is the set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes with which you approach situations or people—or through which you view them. It determines how you interpret situations and respond to them. Mindsets have something in common with habits since they tend to be habitual, which means largely unconscious. They are a type of mental shortcut; they operate based on assumptions, and they generate expectations.

You can have mindsets about yourself, other people or groups of people, places, situations, events, political organizations, types of music—actually just about anything. A mindset can have surprisingly deep and far-reaching effects.

Mindsets Are Self-Reinforcing

You’ve probably heard someone described as having a victim mentality, which is the same as having a victim mindset. If you have a victim mindset you would tend to:

feel that others are to blame for your misfortunes
believe you are powerless to alter your circumstances
have a primarily external locus of control
be disinclined to take personal responsibility
distrust other people
fail to take positive action on your own behalf

The first three attitudes and beliefs lead to the subsequent three behaviors—which, in turn, confirm the attitudes and beliefs. Like any mindset, a victim mindset causes you to view situations, events, and interpersonal relationships through a distorted filter. It leads you to believe your perception isreality. That’s one of the ways your mindset sets you up.

A Few Other Mindsets (Labels)

I’ve written about the productivity vs. creativity mindsets. Here are some others to consider.

Survivalist
Globalist
Entrepreneurial
Lifelong Learner
Achiever
Maker
Activist
Liberal
Conservative
Libertarian
Progressive
Outsider

Recognizing and Changing a Mindset

When examining a mindset, it’s important to know what it is, when it’s in effect, and how it affects your perception, interpretation, and response. But trying to understand where it came from or how it developed is a side trip that won’t get you closer to altering it. (It doesn’t matter how you came to possess the diffusion filter for your camera lens. Once you install it, it affects what you see when you look through the lens.) Instead, focus on determining your mindset’s attributes: what beliefs, attitudes, personality traits, etc. are part of it?

One of the best ways to catch your mindset in the act is to notice when your expectations of a person or a situation are not met. Instead of pausing to consider the source of your expectations, your brain is more likely to jump into action to find a suitable explanation that will allow you to comfortably fit the experience into your ongoing inner narrative. Unfortunately, even when reality conflicts with your mindset, your brain’s tendency is to interpret what happens in a way that reinforces your mindset.

After you develop an understanding of a mindset you want to change:

Clarify why you want to change it.
Determine your desired outcome.
Identify one situation to change.

Remember that it’s easier to focus on and change a behavior (what you do) than it is to focus on and change a thought, a thought pattern, or a belief. Create an intention to change your behavior in one situation and apply repetition and perseverance until the new behavior or response becomes the status quo.

It isn’t easy to recognize or change a mindset, but if you focus on the mechanics (what, when, and how), you can do it. And it’s worth the effort to open your mind, shift your perspective, and learn how to adjust your personal camera lens filters so you aren’t stuck with whatever lenses you happen to have developed over the course of your life.