The Life of a Creative, Part I

A few years ago a grocery checkout lady saw that I was buying crayons and remarked, "My son is only three but he is so creative. He's already learned to outline the things he'll color before coloring them in." And I thought this was rather sad, for both the child and the mother, because what she described is the antithesis of creativity.

I had a number of talks this weekend with friends about that rarified thing, "the creative process." Much of my energy was spent debunking commonly held misconceptions about that process and how it affects the life of a person who's expected — and paid to be — as creative as possible. Here are a couple points:

• Photo-realism is not the pinnacle of creativity. Sorry, it's not. It's just photo-realism. To have a child who can draw something that looks "just like it does in real life!" indicates some pretty good hand-eye coordination, but that's about it. To have a child who's scrupulously coloring within the lines means you might have a meticulous kid, or someone who'll develop rigid, anal-retentive tendencies later. This is because...

• Creativity is about the world of ideas. We're not talking about just visual or performing arts now, but about a mental muscle that needs to work out each day in order to excel. This means being able to imagine things, to envision, and to field questions that start with phrases like "What if...?" My clients don't need me to come back with the most avant-garde, outlandish ideas, but brainstorming encourages over-reach, so keeping my personal "visual vocabulary" stimulated and replenished means I can come up appropriate ideas faster. This is because...

• Creativity is a problem-solving process, not a lifestyle. If you're thinking of creatives as people in black turtlenecks or boho clothing, living a freewheeling approach to life and deadlines, you're only considering a fraction of the overall. Nobody ever gets paid to miss deadlines or not solve problems. Someone like me may not yearn to read balance sheets for fun, but my so-called "artist's life" is very much determined by project deadlines, client priorities, and budget constraints. In fact, some of my best work came from accommodating all such things — finding "simple but significant" solutions (thanks, Mr. Draper!) without lots of time and budget. This is because...

After 35 years in the streams and tributaries of design, marketing, course development, and fiction writing, I have a fairly good idea of how my personal "creative process" scopes out, and how to manage it, which includes understanding what I need in order to stay creative.

Next post: What do creatives need?

My Dad (Father's Day 2014)

My dad speaks fluent, precise English but never felt totally sure of it, so from the age of 10 I've been editing his business memos ("Lucy, when you have time, will you have a look at this?") This got easier after email! 

He began his career in radio broadcast and got to interview all sorts of people (the most famous were I.M. Pei and Bobby Kennedy); but I was in my teens before I realized he had a lot of fans in Asia-Pac who listened to his programs out of Voice of America and (if they lived in Communist countries) had their fan letters smuggled out to reach him at the VOA. Some said his programs made their lives bearable. Can you imagine?

In the 1980s he and Mom went to China to help VOA establish their Beijing bureau. Mom got a job within the American embassy. One day some Iranian students protested the embassy and when all the employees were gathered at the windows, nervously watching Marines contain the trouble at the gates, one of her colleagues said, "Hey, Jean, isn't that your husband down there?!" Mom looked and — yup, yup — there was Dad, on the other side of the barbed wire, interviewing the students, asking why they were demonstrating.

He later took a producer's job with the State department, leading international documentary film crews across America to cover topics from "public education" and "public health" to "the transcontinental rail" and "TV heroes." Along with helping them interview celebs (Bob Hope, Shirley Temple Black, Stephen Cannell), he also took these crews to public parks and grocery stores and shopping malls, to tell them, "Americans aren't like the people you see on TV shows like 'Dallas' or 'Dynasty.' They worry about the same things as other people on the planet." When he retired at age 69 ("65 means nothing!"), then-vice president Al Gore sent him a letter of thanks, but we had a feeling he wasn't yet done.

And he wasn't. He's spent the past 14 years working freelance for the State department, still leading film crews on "co-op" assignments with our government. Now he's in his early 80s and last week he asked me to edit his "real" letter of resignation. I know my mom's relieved because she's worried for his health each time he traveled with these crews, but I felt a big lump in my throat checking that "swan song" letter. 

On the other hand, his way is how I'd like to live/work — "65 means nothing!" — just keep going until I know it's time to stop. Everything I learned about the value of work came from my dad.

(Photo: When Dad started with the VOA, John F. Kennedy was president of the United States. The Kennedy campaign had worried about their candidate's Catholicism. Back then it would've been unheard of for a black man to become president; in the span of his career, that's come about, and my father's had that headline clipping in his office since 2007).

How complacency becomes a killer

In April 1996, an emotionally troubled young man went on a killing spree at a busy tourist spot known as Port Arthur (Tasmania, Australia). It remains one of the world's bloodiest, resulting in 35 deaths, 28 injured. The gunman did not turn the gun on himself and is currently serving 35 life sentences. Although his motivation remains a guarded secret (thanks to his family and attorneys), he did persist in asking how many he'd succeeded in killing.

Our own NRA extended its reach into Australia's public reaction to this atrocity — by supporting the gun lobby. Like America, Australia does have a "frontier and a gun" component to its culture. But overall the Australian government's reaction was swift and conclusive: According to Policy Mic, "in the wake of the 1996 shootings, support for further gun control measures swelled to 95% of the population. Spearheaded by Australia's conservatives (yes, conservatives), the laws banned rapid-firing long guns and launched an extensive gun buyback program that removed over 650,000 guns from the public. It also tightened laws and regulations surrounding their sale, registration, and storage. The whole package cost about $500 per gun and was compulsory.

"As a result, some estimates say 20% of Australia's total guns were eliminated and ownership by household halved. In the U.S., a similar law would get rid of 40 million firearms. The decreasing homicide rate in Australia declined even faster, and mass shootings stopped entirely. Before the gun laws, Australia had seen 13 mass shootings, 112 resulting deaths, and 52 injured in the previous 18 years. Australia's never seen a similar massacre since. Meanwhile, the firearms suicide rate fell dramatically from about 492 a year to 247.

"Americans don't have a comparable experience because there are 89 guns for every 100 citizens in the country. In the U.S., a 2013 study found that an increase of firearms ownership by 1% translates almost directly to a 1% increase in death by firearm."

I realize Australia's a smaller continent with a different culture. What troubles me — makes me heartsick, in fact — is this: What is our American culture? Don't we deplore terrorism? We submit ourselves to ceremonies of grief over 9/11. So since when did American culture, rich and diverse, say it was okay to stand by helpless and passive as children are gunned down at school? There have been 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook (http://everytown.org/article/schoolshootings).

How sluggishly we have responded to this escalating death toll by gun violence. It was naturally confounding at first, but then twenty first-graders were slaughtered and instead of implementing a practical backgrounds-check amendment that would've solved a fraction of the overall problem, our politicians pocketed money from the NRA and looked the other way. Many more have liberalized gun control restrictions. The senator from my district earned nearly $400,000 for his inaction, and my state governor signed a bill that won him accolades from gun enthusiasts and "2nd Amendment patriots," even as two more shooting incidents occurred in Georgia, within 24 hours of Isla Vista, and a couple days before two cops were shot in cold blood in Vegas.

Between the arrogance of those who would rate and pay our public servants based on fealty to their own interests, and our own public passivity, the problem of gun violence in America will only worsen — it's been getting worst every month. Public outrage is expressed on social media, but not directed at those who've been empowered — by us — to make the laws that would ultimately aid and represent the greater good. 

Complacency kills, because it eradicates the two things that make us human: curiosity and empathy. We need to be aggressively curious about finding solutions, and extending far more empathy for those who've been so cruelly bereaved by gun violence.

It takes less time to contact your elected leaders than it does to watch your favorite sitcom. Most have online forms so you can correspond from their web sites. If you don't know who your elected reps are, put your zip code in at this site: http://whoismyrepresentative.com/. And if you're writing for gun control, all you have to tell them is #notonemore.

Polishing the Apple

Thank you so much to the Koch brothers for donating $25 million to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF). It'll provide scholarships for "3,000 exemplary students," with spare change left over to help fund operations for all historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and the UNCF. Coming from guys worth $100 billion, this is indeed noisy generosity, given the Kochs typically shroud most of their financial maneuvers in mystery.

As gilded PR stunts go, there's some presumption that $25 million will look fantastic to the average schmoe — us — until you put it in context. This nation has over 100 HBCUs with a total enrollment of approximately 324,000 students: the National Association for College and University Business Officers reports that the combined value of the top 10 HBCU endowments equals $1.5 billion, while the top 10 endowments of predominantly white colleges equals $154.7 billion (Stanford alone: $18.7 billion). The heart of the problem isn't just cash; the Department of Education has to revise the Parent Plus loans that basically tightened lending criteria and shut out middle-class black parents.

I would tell those 3,000 exemplary HBCU students to respect the scholarship, study hard, write the Kochs a heartfelt thank-you note every month of your life, graduate, and then — as professionals or private citizens — bust your chops to recover the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since last August the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity has spent $44 million on Congressional races. In other words, regain the vote and fight voter suppression as much as you can, because your Koch-backed degree won't mean much if this democracy becomes an oligarchy where you come from a demographic that's being gerrymandered out of the vote. Call me an old softie but that's how I feel about it. #‎baloney

Give a Buck

The Moral Comfort Zone of Doing Absolutely Nothing

The last thing I want to do is politicize my blog about soft skills in the workplace, but our workplaces do not exist in a vacuum. I wrote this upon hearing about the latest shooting rampage at Seattle Pacific University. I welcome your comments but just ask that you keep it civil; bad enough that bereaved parent Richard Martinez has been accused of being a "media whore."

In this life, the response that annoys me the most sounds like, "It can't be done," or "It's never been done this way before." 

These rationalizations spawn complacencies that sound like practicality but are in fact moral laziness. It's a way of saying, "Why bother, it's too much work, so why even begin effort?" This latest shooting in Seattle reminds me of all such notions. "We're never going to gather up all the guns, so why bother.... Gun ownership is an American right, so don't even dare try.... Hey, let's not overlook the sanctity of the 2nd Amendment!... (and that morally exhausted old nellie) Guns don't kill people, people kill people." 

So, okay, let's just leave the situation as is. Let's not attempt any interim solutions to establish background-check protocols, to help the mentally ill, or to mitigate the stupefyingly easy access to automatic weapons already blessed by powerful special interest groups. Let's tsk-tsk-tsk but do nothing while our public servants are graded and bought up by those same groups. We'll just pretend that brazen self-service won't happen when they try to leverage political power on the next set of issues we feel strongly about .... We'll just keep fighting between ourselves, jutting out our chins as we parade our semi-automatics in public restaurants and retail stores, and calling each other out for stupidity when we line up on both sides of this argument. But here's the point you and I keep missing:

Both sides of the argument should be affronted that the gun violence discourse is no longer democratically owned. 

Whichever you believe, take a stand. Write or call your elected officials. Donate money to the group advocating the side of the argument you believe in. Maybe the politicians will listen to moderate centrist views versus the barking of the extremists. Encourage civil discourse on Facebook so everyone walks away learning something new versus feeling justified in polarization. 

We've got to start somewhere. The current situation is untenable and it's only getting worse. Fixing the gun violence problem is supposed to be hard work. The same
thinking that got us to this point of escalating death tolls is not the same thinking we'll need to get us out of this (literally) bloody mess. We are not going to please everyone, which is a tough way to begin collaborations, but I'd rather collaborate with you in the most contentious way than watch passively as special interest groups define the argument. Or stand with you, graveside, watching another parent bury a slain child.


If we continue to do nothing, to remain passive, then each of us — pro- and anti-gun control alike — should be prepared to look in the eye of every parent who's lost a child to gun violence, and say, "Here is what I believe. Now what are you going to do about it?" Try that and then talk to me about courage under fire. #notonemore