The Two Essential Secrets of Excellence:

You Have Time

&

You Have the Power of the Creative.

Leaving aside the fact that “Excellence” is a MORE or less meaningless term at best signifying: “some state better than right now” we can proceed with the workaround.  All problems fall into one of two categories: 1) I know what to do, but don’t have time to do it, and/or 2) I don’t know what to do.  It’s “and/or” because these two excuses are invariably combined to form a meta-reason for postponing change. But here’s how to Make Things Happen: Begin with the Power Mantra:

What Prevents Me?

(repeat as necessary)

Make this a real question; if you think “too busy” then spend the next hours watching what you do, is it really the case are you really constantly busily productive?  Could you find 20 minutes to think, plan, write, and another 10 to act?

Now that you’ve eliminated, as you most surly should have, “no time”, your mind will be full of confusion and guilt, overwhelmed with should, convinced by can’t, paralyzed by the perceptions of possibilities, failure, humiliation, destruction, devastation, even death, while if you do nothing, an easy choice, all that could possibly happen is what happened yesterday and the day before.  But by now it will seem that you’re taking this all a bit too seriously, yesterday wasn’t all that great, today’s no better, maybe a bit worse, and really the worst thing that’s likely to happen is not much, which is why you think you’re “Not Creative.” Because if you were Creative you’d obviously Know how to become Excellent. You would Know What To Do!

But What Do You Mean By CREATIVE?

Let’s explore.  It is generally known that Poets are by nature and definition CREATIVE, so let us consider two relatively contemporary examples, Alfred Joyce Kilmer and Thomas Stearns Eliot.  Both American with British overtones, and both have “created” works or at least phrases that haunt our culture.

Joyce Kilmer: Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land

One or the other is no doubt poetry at its finest. You may prefer Joyce Kilmer who was a good and brave soldier who was shot in the head dead by enemy sniper but who lives forever either as a hero or an example of truly bad poetry, if you think hero you’ll probable like the poem. But if you are of a more modernist mind you will prefer Mr. Elliot who like a good intellectual smoked himself to death, which along with his poem you may find a bit off putting, even a little pretentious. Either way it’s a very good argument for a subjective definition of being creative.  And thus frees me to offer:

The SECRET to being CREATIVE!

DO SOMETHING!

It really doesn’t matter what; the first thing that pops into your head.  If you have more than a single thought and you can’t decide, flip-a-coin.  Seriously, chance will eliminate the possibility of prejudice or expert bias.  What matters is trying things and keeping an open mind; what’s critical is paying attention to the results.  This is the secret to being what is called creative, The Willingness to Try Things and the Courage to Decide What Works.  All that is required of you, and it is small yet different from external things, is a certain mindfulness. Just a little practice and you’ll be ready for the next step:

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

I think when most of us started to listen to Bob Dylan we assumed that we were part of some community that shared a certain hipness denied to the rest of society. Maybe so, but it kind of missed the point. The point, if I may be permitted, was that we didn’t know, but we knew that we didn’t know, and were trying to deal with the implication of our ignorance.

One of the unforeseen effect’s of the current information overload is that we’ve lost comfort with not knowing. We tend to be, along with our previous president, “deciders”; after a couple of seconds of examination, we either understand something or we assume that it doesn’t have enough significance to warrant the time and energy to try to figure it out. YouTube is a great example; we’re not really ready to deal with the mystery. Probably the best demonstration of our ignorance can be experienced by trying to get a handle on the Ipower social network. It’s hard to know where to start; the AtheneWins channel began October 11, 2007, it’s currently the 13th most subscribed YouTube channel, and the 23rd most viewed. This is particularly impressive when you consider that most of the competition is record companies and media production giants. Still, the real curiosity is the content; start here: Best Paladin of The World pwning nubs on My Heart Will Go On from Celine Dion (ATHENE #1).  From there it gets really strange, bringing new definition to phrases like tasteless and sexist. How to get a horny bitch (ATHENE #12). In an apparent effort to leave no group un-offended they rapidly move on to Tom Cruise, Scientology, and most of Asia: Hot Girl & Crazy Gamer on Tom Cruise from scientology (ATHENE #19). Before proceeding any further we need to take a brief detour with Marina Orlova 28-year-old philologist who is HotForWords so that we have a good understanding of “irony”. It turns out that the folks at AtheneWins, which has now branched out into the Ipower channel, Tania Uncensored, etc. are actually a group of Belgium political/net activists. This raises questions like , “Do they know what they’re doing; are they serious, and if so when so; are they a positive force for social change, or simply another example of the degeneration of youth and society; why are several thousand people watching them on a daily basis (on any given day one or more of the Ipower productions finds itself in the top 20 most viewed videos on YouTube), and my personal fave, ‘What is identity?’” Perhaps more to the point, it raises the question- do we/can we have any idea what’s happening on YouTube? Wittgenstein ended the Tractatus with position seven: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Good advice; if we could follow it, we just might learn something.

What shall I wear?

My Sexy Countdown Blog

photo credit: Nesster

Oh well, my real point is that we can’t turn off the electricity, so I may as well post this.  This Tweet just in form Michael Wesch: “Chacha … new ways to cheat on exams / new reasons to write different kinds of exams:  http://chacha.com/“.  You got a cellphone or a laptop, you got a question? Thanks to ChaCha you got an answer.

Perhaps part of the difficulty is that what I’m struggling toward isn’t really implementation, but rather evolution. Someone recently pointed out that you don’t change societies by changing laws. Instead the most effective way to produce social change was to introduce a new technology into the culture. Of course it’s hard to predict exactly what kind of change you’re going to effect. What’s critical is recognizing the effect early and leveraging it to a business advantage. This isn’t trivial because all nature, including our own, is inherently conservative and the tendency is to preserve the status quo. There are, however, likely to be things that implement themselves. All of which is related, in my mind at least, to a post on The Technium on how Google does science.

apophenia: open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

Here’s and interesting YouTube video that suggests some ways we might leverage that for more formal educational purposes.

• Technology isn’t about good or bad tools anymore than it’s about good or bad teaching.
• Technology is for the foreseeable future inevitable.
• Technology is an ‘enabler’.
• Technology provides amazing opportunities and encourages laziness.

We need to find ways to use technology to encourage people to use technology effectively.

Take that as a kind of koan, roll it around in your head for a few weeks, see where it leads us.

Something that hasn’t changed for us is that people die. And it’s not really news that more than occasionally they do so with bravery, dignity, and even humor. Over the past few days excerpts from Randy Pausch’s last lecture at Carnegie-Mellon have been circulating on the Web, and television; there have been numerous blog posts and articles in the press. As you may know Pausch will shortly die of pancreatic cancer and if you want the sound-bite it’s: “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.” The real value of the Web is that it gives us access to the entire lecture. Here’s the link. It’s in Windows Media format so you may need to download it to get it to play. It’s long, close to an hour but more than worth the time particularly for learners and for teachers.