I just read Hugh McLeod’s book Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity. This is the book version of his 13,000 word post how to be creative, which has been read by over a million people, and is a must-read if you’re not one of those million. And you can read more about Ignore Everybody here.

I don’t remember how different that post is from the book, but they’re probably very similar. The main difference may be that a way-too-long post works better as a bit-too-short book. Anyway, the book retains his wisdom, his cynicism, and most importantly, his cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards.

And by turning it into a book, Hugh gives us yet one more key to creativity: if you can’t think of what to write a book about, first write a blog post that a million people want to read. You now have a best seller just waiting to be published.

“Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
‘Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain’t been there before.”

- Shel Silverstein, “Put Something In,” A Light in the Attic

Yesterday was Shel Silverstein’s birthday. He died ten years ago, but his words live on.

Think of what you can do today to put something silly in the world. Then tell us what you did.

Someone gave me a bottle of this Japanese soft drink called Ramune. I didn’t know what it tasted like, and looking at the bottle didn’t offer any clues. It had pictures of a pig, a pumpkin, a watermelon, a fan, a flower, a life preserver, and a UFO.

But the weirdest part didn’t come until I tried to open it. I tore off the wrap around the top, removed this green plastic piece, and tried twisting the top. But it just wasn’t twisting off.

I read the label to see if it said anything about opening it, and it did:

WARNING

• DO NOT SWALLOW THE PLUNGER. Throw it away immediately after opening.
• Adults should open the bottle for small children and supervise drinking.
• Do not try to remove the marble from the bottle to avoid injury.
• Do not freeze the bottle or store it in direct sunlight.
• Do not consume if the marble is broken, missing, or descended before opening.

Plunger? Oh, that must be that green plastic piece. Good thing I hadn’t thrown it away. After breaking the connectors that attached the inside to the outside, the green thing became a plunger that you could press your thumb on to apply the force to a smaller area.

Marble? The bottle looked like it had a marble stuck in it, but I thought that was part of the top. But no, there really was a marble stuck in it, and to open the bottle you have to push the marble inside.

So I put the plunger on top, and pushed with my thumb. The marble wasn’t going down, and my thumb was getting bent out of shape. Was I doing it wrong?

I checked online, and found that opening a bottle of Ramune is something of a rite of passage. At least for some people, who use everything from hammers to headbutts to get the darn thing open. Then there are others who say it’s not that big a deal, you just push with your thumb. I fell into the former category.

After wearing my thumb out with no luck, I tried using the heel of my hand. Although I wouldn’t be able to push as deep this way, I could exert much more force, and it would hurt a lot less. But after a few failed attempts, I had dug a deep ring into my hand, and drawn a trickle of blood.

Was this supposed to be another Kobayashi Maru?

I decided to bring out the big guns. My hammer was packed away, but my screwdriver was easy to get to and would work just as well. I put the bottle on the counter (so it would absorb the full impact instead of being pushed away), on top of a cork oven pad (so the counter wouldn’t get scratched).

Then I pounded the bottle several times with the base of the screwdriver, well aware that I was just as likely to break the bottle as I was to push the marble in.

The marble looked like it had moved some, so I went back to pushing my thumb on the plunger, and the marble went it, stopping a couple inches down where the bottle narrows.

The bottle then adds insult to injury because even after opening it, the marble blocks the flow when you try to drink it. But with the right angle, I finally enjoyed the pig/pumpkin/UFO-flavored drink known as Ramune. (It actually tastes something like Sprite).

Just yesterday, I was reading something about attacking problems from a non-obvious direction after reaching a mental dead end. This comes from Whole Brain Thinking: Working from Both Sides of the Brain to Achieve Peak Job Performance:

“Visualize the extreme opposite of the situation. Example: If you are trying to invent a gadget to open bottles, pretend you are trying to bond the bottle cap permanently to make it impenetrable. It will thus be easier to discover the weaknesses inherent in the current bottle caps and a way to get the substances that are inside, out–without resorting to the typical removable cap. You might invent a syringelike contraption that extracts the contents rather than beheading the package.”

I have to wonder if the authors wrote this after an encounter with Ramune. (By the way, this is an example of lateral thinking, just one of many crucial concepts covered in Marelisa Fabrega’s ebook How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists).

Any usability engineer would go into conniptions about the bottle design. Yet the challenge of opening it is what gives Ramune its mystique and its fan base. I want to get another bottle, not so much to drink it, but just so I can try opening it again (hopefully doing a better job next time).

If a soft drink can teach patience, persistence, and lateral thinking, then what other learning experiences might be hiding in plain sight, disguised as problems?

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

It’s hard to say exactly what separates us from the animals. For now, I’m going to say creativity. That’s not perfect, but creativity separates us from all but dolphins, chimpanzees, Lassie, and the loosely-based-on-reality velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

In order to write this post, I unfortunately had to take a break from playing Sokoban, one of the many creativity-inducing resources that Marelisa Fabrega points us to in her new ebook. See, the thing about creativity is that it takes you into the flow state. And once you get there, you don’t want to leave.

But it wouldn’t be very nice of me to keep these secrets all to myself, would it? And so I’m taking a break for just long enough to tell you about this ebook called How to Be More Creative: A Handbook for Alchemists.

Anytime I hear someone saying that there’s nothing new out there anymore, or everything that can be done has been done, I want to smack them. Creativity has taken us from apes to where we are now, and it continues to take us forward every day. But people often limit themselves by thinking that creativity is reserved for a select few.

I completely agree with Marelisa that creativity is not something that either you have or you don’t. Everyone has it, but it’s a skill that needs to be developed to its potential. And the more you train your creativity, the more you can do with it, whether it’s in the form of making more money, writing a novel, cooking better meals, entertaining yourself, or doing any of those other things that separate us from the animals.

The only concern I had is that since Marelisa has already written so much about creativity on her blog, I wondered if there would be enough new material in her ebook. And yes, there is. She’s included information from some of her best posts, but she also has lots of new info, stories, tips, examples, and enough fun and informative resources to take your creativity as far as you want to take it.

How to Be More Creative: A Handbook for Alchemists is something you can start putting into practice right away. It’s reminded me that I need to start using my Moleskine notebook the way Leonardo da Vinci would. (Which I’ll get right on, as soon as I’m done with Sokoban!)

Photo by Gaetan Lee

“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9

I see a lot of people complaining that there’s nothing new out there.

True, since the big bang, all we’ve done is rearrange the same subatomic particles that have always existed. A new baby’s DNA is just a mix of its parents’. Any new words we make up just come from the same 26 letters. There are only so many different storylines in all the books and movies in the world. Anything you will ever do in your life has already been done by billions of people before you.

So what?

When you see a naked woman, do you complain that it’s nothing new? For the ladies, when you see diamonds and shoes, do you think, “Oh crap, more diamonds and shoes?”

Why isn’t it sufficient for things to be “new enough?” There’s a big middle ground between “never before seen since the dawn of time” and “rehashed tripe.” What’s wrong with a reminder of something we haven’t thought about in a long time, or seeing something presented in a different way, or just getting more of something we haven’t had enough of yet?

Have we really gotten bored with everything the universe has to offer already?

Does good content matter in the blogosphere? Recently there has been quite a bit of discussion suggesting that perhaps it doesn’t.

James at Men with Pens wrote about Getting Creative With Your Content, or rather, how people are not getting creative with their content:

“I scroll through my feed reader, my attention dulled by the similar headlines. They’re carbon-copy titles that make a desperate attempt to grasp my attention. Some – very few – do. But I’m often quickly disappointed. The headline may be mildly intriguing, but the content of the first paragraph is just the same old stuff. Nothing new, nothing entertaining, nothing interesting.”

Skellie wrote about Why Great Writing Doesn’t Matter Online. Considering how many people admire her writing, it surprised me a bit to see her say this:

“Good writing, clever writing, beautiful writing — all of these things are unnecessary in the creation of great web content…clever turns of phrase, immaculate grammar, flawless spelling and crisp sentences are relatively insignificant.”

(Her point was that “all great web writing must do is communicate great ideas without getting in their way,” but I’d contend that even great ideas don’t necessarily matter, as evidenced by the success of certain blogs).

These posts received a flood of comments from people on both sides of the issue. I felt that a lot of people were doing their best to resist admitting what deep down they know is true: maybe great content really doesn’t matter that much.

It occurred to me that perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way. Instead of lamenting the sad state of the blogosphere, maybe we should just give the people what they want: rehashed content. And I have a tool that will save you a lot of time in creating it: the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher.

Now you can easily rehash content from these blogs:

• 4-Hour Workweek
• IttyBiz
• Hunter Nuttall . com
• Men with Pens
• ProBlogger
• Seth Godin’s Blog
• Skelliewag.org
• Steve Pavlina . com
• Zen Habits

(I chose these blogs because they’re some of the well-known blogs I read. I’m not saying that they consist of rehashed content.)

Just fire up the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher and pick a blog. Adjust some parameters to fit your writing style, click “Rehash it,” and it spits out a brand new post for you, using word choice similar to the selected blog. It even gives you an image to use.

Some of you English majors may quibble with the grammar of what it spits out, but it really doesn’t matter. As you may know, people don’t read every word, they just scan. As long as your post contains a few buzzwords, it’s golden.

If you write (or read) content online or anywhere else good writing doesn’t matter, I’ve just saved you thousands of hours and given you a practically infinite number of free posts. I may have even improved the quality of your content.

Me Hunter. You read.

Photo by lanuiop

Earlier I wrote about the importance of finding your calling, and pointed you to some ways of finding your calling through introspection. I also said I’d write about an alternative way to find your calling without introspection. Here it is.

There’s lots of advice out there saying to “do what you love,” or “follow your heart,” or “do what you’re meant for.” The idea is that by paying close attention to who you are, you’ll be able to figure out what place your unique gifts have in the universe. And there’s certainly some truth to that. It’s essential to spend lots of time thinking about what you’re supposed to do to be fulfilled. The decision usually isn’t as easy as just picking from society’s menu of recommended career choices. If it were, then why do so many people hate their jobs?

Henry Ford once said, “The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what it is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.” Notice that he said “secret,” not “easy color-by-numbers blueprint.” Your destiny is often far from obvious! And sometimes by being too close to the problem and too entrenched in routine, we can miss things that others might see.

Yes, sometimes others know things about us that we don’t know about ourselves. Or maybe we’ve just forgotten things we used to know because we’ve gotten used to wearing a different mask. Our success is ultimately judged by others anyway, in that you can’t make a living from something unless people find enough value in your work to pay for it.

For these reasons, it makes a lot of sense to pay close attention to what other people tell you you’re good at. Not necessarily what they tell you when you ask them, because they’ll probably just make up some vague or generic answer on the spot to get you to go away. But you should pay close attention to what they tell you on their own, without being prompted.

Let’s look at an example. I was led to creating this personal development blog in large part because of three things that other people voluntarily told me I was good at: writing, creativity, and honesty.

Writing. A few years ago, my mom ran into my high school journalism teacher at the doctor’s office. They didn’t know each other, but my teacher figured it out when they called my mom’s name. It was about ten years after I had graduated, and my teacher had no idea what I was up to. She said “Just tell me that Hunter’s writing!” When my mom said I was a software developer, my teacher let out a disappointed “Oh.” That should have told me something, but unfortunately I didn’t listen right away because I was too focused on doing what paid the bills. It took me a while before I got into writing, but I got there.

Creativity. I was actually told that I was creative by a personality test more so than by any actual person, but it still counts. I once took a test (I think it was called the OAD Survey) that measures how your personality matches up with the ideal personality for your job (sounds useful, doesn’t it?). The most obvious discrepancy for me was in the area of creativity. I got a 10, and my job was ideally suited for a 2. No wonder I couldn’t stand it! Now I can use creativity both in finding solutions to tough problems, and in writing about them.

Honesty. Lots of people have commented on how honest I am, but I still don’t fully understand this. Is being honest actually uncommon? I thought most people were honest, but I guess they must not be, or people wouldn’t bother telling me that I am. Personal development is definitely a field where honesty will differentiate you. Obviously, there are lots of people out there hyping up scams or overpriced programs, books, CDs, etc. that purport to make you millions overnight, easily accomplish any goal, etc. Even a lot of the legitimate stuff is hard to recognize because it’s drowned in hype. I have some things to sell here, but even when I do have a vested interest in something, I think you’ll find me refreshingly transparent.

It’s always good to get second opinions. I’ve had people tell me I was a bad writer, that I had no imagination, and that I was lying through my teeth. So who did I decide to believe? I just went with the people who seemed credible and caring instead of the people who were making ignorant snap judgments.

I didn’t immediately connect these three qualities to blogging, but I might have done so a lot sooner had I consciously thought about it. And at this point I can’t say for sure whether my blog will become successful or lead to anything, but I found that it was immediately a lot of fun, and I know it’s something I have to do.

Don’t feel that you have to do all the work in finding your calling. Other people will do a lot to point you in the right direction, if you just listen.