Living a Creative Life

Creativity is a tricky word. Consultants peddle it, brands promise it, and we all strive for it, often without really knowing quite what “it” really is. Put simply, there’s a lot of snake oil around creativity. We’re all creative souls already, we just need to figure out how to harness inspiration and unleash the creative spirit within. Here, are best pieces of advice for living a meaningfully creative life.

1. If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body?” It’s like somebody handed that person that placard to wear when they were nine, and they’ve been wearing it around their neck ever since. But rather than challenging them on that, because then they’ll dig in their heels, I ask them to take the word “creative” out of the sentence and replace it with the word “curious,” just to see how ridiculous it sounds. If you can just release yourself from the anxiety and burden that might be associated with the word “creativity,” because you’ve fallen for the myth that it only belongs to the special, the tormented and the professional, and you insert the word “curious,” you’ll see, in fact, that you are an enormously creative person, because all creativity begins with curiosity. And once you tap into your curiosity and allow yourself permission to follow it wherever it takes you, you will find very quickly that you are living a much more creative life than you were last year.

2. You’re not a genius, you have a genius.

The magical thinking that I use to engage with creativity is this idea that inspiration does not come from me, it comes to me. And the reason I choose to believe that is because one, that’s what it feels like, and two, that’s how pretty much every human being before the Age of Enlightenment described inspiration. Even really rational, scientific people will say, “And then this idea came to me.” They’ll use that language, even though if you were to push them on it they would then deny it and would tell you what part of their cerebral cortex it actually came from. In other words, they would disenchant it, and they would make it really boring rather than kind of Hogwarts-y, and I prefer to keep it Hogwarts-y because I feel like the only realm in our lives where it’s safe and actually beneficial to have magical thinking is in the realm of creativity.

3. Make something, do something, do anything.

If you have a creative mind, it’s a little bit like owning a border collie. You have to give it something to do or it will find something to do, and you will not like the thing it finds to do. So if you go to work and you leave your border collie unattended and unexercised in your apartment, you’re going to come home and find out that that border collie gave itself a job, and the job that it gave itself was probably to empty all of the stuffing out of your couch or to take every single piece of toilet paper off the roll, because it needs a job. A creative mind is exactly the same. My experience with having a creative mind is that if I don’t give it a task, a ball to chase, a stick to run after, some ducks to herd, I don’t know, something, it will turn on itself. It’s really important for my mental health that I keep this dog running. So give your dog a job, and don’t worry about whether the outcome is magnificent or eternal, whether it changes people’s lives, whether it changes the world, whether it changes you, whether it’s original, whether it’s groundbreaking, whether it’s marketable. Just give the dog a job, and you’ll have a much happier life, regardless of how it turns out.

Excuses Our Brains Create That Keep Us From Success

Our mind is our greatest asset but sometimes… it seems like it’s our own worst enemy.

 Lastly, I have been glued with what happens to human cognitive and how the brains stop people from achieving their goals and dreams in life. The human brain is so lazy when it’s time to take action that it will outright deceive us in order to postpone it.

Picture this. You’re on your way to your workplace. You’re pumped. You have all your goals and dreams unfolding right before your eyes… and you know that once you get to your computer, you’ll work like crazy. But once you get to work, you end up doing anything else BUT work.

You start reading your emails. Then, a colleague invites you to grab a cup of coffee. 20 minutes later, when you’re ready to do some actual work, you find yourself doing some minor tasks. There’s plenty of time to do the hard stuff later, right?

Here’s what happened. When you were in your comfort zone, your brain KNEW he didn’t have an immediate action to take. But once it did, all enthusiasm was gone and you ended up going back to your daily routine.

Your brain found good EXCUSES to feed you, killing the initial state of flow which you were in and derailing you from your path to success. But once I expose them, you’ll be able to spot them in real time as they occur and replace them with ACTION. Here they are.

Are You Making Excuses or Thinking Clearly

Organizations and entrepreneurs are looking for ways to encourage more innovative thinking. But, according to John Assaraf of The Secret and MyNeuroGym.com, thinking is the problem--the process of thinking actually "by definition cancels out the neural process of creativity," effectively killing innovation. Here he sheds light on the brain processing required for greater innovation as well as the secrets to encouraging and invoking innovation.

"Creativity, imagination and innovation are a part of a neural process that occurs in some of the newest evolutionary structures of the brain," he says. "Creativity is a whole-brain phenomenon that takes a totally different level of complexity."

Begin with the prefrontal cortex, which Assaraf calls the "Einstein Brain: the CEO; Executive Director; the GPS system--the part of the brain where you can think of all the possibilities and then activate the occipital part of the brain to imagine an outcome." This brain process allows us to disconnect the frontal lobe "thinking" portion and tap into our intuition and imagination, which "Einstein believed to be more powerful than knowledge."

Assaraf defines intuition as "what you know before you think." So what are the secrets to intuiting versus thinking?

1. Stop thinking and let it go.

When you are in the shower, sometimes you get a "spark of genius when your brain radio is open to accepting external frequencies." Getting into a free-flowing, mind-wandering state allows the mind to go into a semiconscious daydream where you can access a field of information and patterns outside the regular neural network.

Only 40 to 50 brain waves are active at any given time and lists and busy lives keep the mind too crowded. Purposeful activation of the intuitive frequency requires "mindful stillness." Slowing down, sitting quietly, and being present help bring on a relaxed state to give your creativity a chance to rise above the noise.

2. Speed your way to innovation.

Comedians and musicians familiar with the concept of improvisation are capable of being in "a state of flow, turning off an over-thinking brain, and turning on the creative flow." For those who went to art school, gesture drawing is the equivalent, forcing the capture of just the essence of what's important. Any exercise that uses speed works to tap into what you know before you think, getting the "thinker out of the way." If you don't have time to think, you can't overdesign or overthink, and you can ignite the innovation process.

3. Practice the creative flow.

Innovative imagining is natural for kids. It is schooling that forces a young child to turn on the developing left prefrontal cortex and focus, disrupting the imagination process. Although not scientifically proved, it is believed that the majority of our creative neurons shut off by the age of 30, so "we have to work harder to disinhibit thinking brain and turn on the flow of intuition." Through meditative practices and other mind-stilling brain exercises, like MyNeuroGym's Innercise, brain retraining can occur, "forming new connections and growing new brain cells."

Trying to think innovative uses the state of the familiar within the brain and cannot possibly achieve creative, truly innovative solutions. Flow into intuiting your way to innovation instead.

The Brain is An Excuse Making Machine

                                     

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Contrary to popular belief, your brain is not always working for you. You are not one, pure mind. You are a hive of conflicting impulses, and one of the loudest is called fear.

All research into brains has shown that people tend to decide what to do with their emotions first and make up the reasons why afterwards. If you’re afraid of something, your subconscious can always whip up a plausible excuse: it’s too hard; you don’t have the experience; there’s a re-run of Big Brother Africa tonight.

Have you ever argued with someone who would never change their mind, even when all facts were against them? They’re not using logic to find answers, they’re using logic to justify the answer they already have. Our brains do that hundred of times a day.

Understand this: excuses exist to make you feel better. They can fool others. They can dodge blame. They can even become a badge of honour (“if only it wasn’t for my NEPA/wife/addiction to Nollywood Movies on Dstv“). But excuses exist only to numb your pain. They never help you get shit done.

You ask how to know if you’re making excuses or have a real reason not to try being an entrepreneur. Here’s a handy rule of thumb:

So first ask yourself—do you really want this? I mean, I ‘want’ a perfect body, but I’m not willing to put in 6 hours a day for the next year to get there. If you’re not willing to make appropriate sacrifices for something, you don’t want it badly enough. That’s ok. Accept it and find another calling.

If you do want something, your mission is to plough through any excuses. They should be but a frail leaf in the path of a barreling freight train.

Here’s one trick—every time you hear an excuse, reply to it with “yes—and?”

“It is very difficult.” Yes, and?
“I am too young or too old to go for it.” Yes, and?
“I don’t know how.” Yes, and?

The point is: an excuse is not enough. Any fool can invent a thousand excuses for anything. Many do.

NOW LET’S BULLDOZE YOUR EXCUSES

Mind-Blowing Differences between Winners and Losers

In our society being a WINNER is what symbolizes success. Victory is the ultimate factor and we live and die by it. We don’t tolerate failure and it isn’t an option. If somebody fails in our society he or she is demeaned as unsuccessful.

But “don’t panic” I am only mentioning extremes. Most people fall somewhere in the grey area (more closer to the winning side) between Winning and Losing. The general public is generally successful at something’s but then lose at others. They are successful enough to be recognized but then don’t fail enough to be forgotten.


To give you a better idea of this scale, an example of a person who is failing at life could be a homeless person, who while having the resources around stays homeless. And an example of a winner could be somebody like Dangote who reached the apex of his business career and changed the country's perspective of entrepreneurship.


So if you’re fed up with losing or just simply want to win more, you have to put in the work. With a lot of dedication and a little bit of knowledge a person can easily change their life and become a winner. This knowledge is what I hope to share with you today.


After a lot of research, I was able to condense a huge resource down to this list of key differences between winners and losers. The purpose was that you could take this list one point at a time and try to implement short term goals rather than a large unmanageable long-term goal “To Become a Winner”.

Do not quit your day job and follow your dreams anyway

"Find a job that you love and never have to work a day in your life".  Confucius, It sounds great in principle. It rarely works in practice.

The problem is Confucius’ idea of one perfect job that will solve everything. This doesn’t exist. Any human being is multi-dimensional. It’s their unique combination of different passions that make them who they are, not one overriding interest. We’re not all obsessive artists tunnel-focused on one thing in life. We’re complex, nuanced people with different priorities, needs and aspects of ourselves to explore.

Even if it was once something you loved, your day job can become frustrating if it obscures everything else about you. What’s more, getting paid to do something you love inevitably changes your relationship to it. What you do will always be governed by what there’s a market for – what people pay you to do. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re relying on one job to deliver all of the fulfilment that you need in life then it might become one. It’s unfair on you – and it’s unfair on the business you work for.

This is why I groan inside whenever I read a blog, listen to a speaker or hear a conversation that boils down to why somebody should quit their day job and follow their dreams. That’s because the best way to explore what you can be as a person isn’t to go all-in, ditching one job for another in a desperate search for one that makes your dreams come true. It’s to explore the different aspects of yourself through the art of the side-hustle. Find a day job that you love, then find other things to work on that you love as well. It will make you much happier – and it’s likely to increase the value that you can bring to the business that pays your salary.

How the mid-life crisis hit fast-forward
As a marketer, you’re no doubt familiar with Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of needs. This is the idea that human beings have a hierarchy of needs that they are driven to fulfill, starting with those that are essential to staying alive, then moving up to more complex emotional and psychological matters.

For Confucius, happiness was about being able to eat, sleep, put a roof over your head and support a family as effortlessly as possible. However, that’s not the situation that most professionals find themselves in today. Once we’ve got greater security, we want a sense of love and belonging, then a sense of respect and self-esteem. Finally, we need self-actualisation: the sense that we’re actually being the people we have the potential to be; that we’re fulfilling the meaning in our lives.

And the evidence is rising that this is where professional life is falling short. 

We are living at a time when research shows more and more professionals experiencing ‘quarter-life crises’ about the lack of meaning in their working lives, while they are still in their mid-20s. People are starting to panic about feeling unfulfilled in their work when they’ve barely started working!

Success Doesn’t Happen Overnight

Success doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the product of years, and sometimes a lifetime, of habits that accumulate and drive a person toward his or her goals. Though “successful” can have multiple definitions, we can agree upon a generally accepted one—a person is successful when he or she leads others to success, meets his or her personal and professional goals, creates something useful and innovative, and makes a lot of money while making a lot of people happy at the same time. Most of us would be happy with any one of those elements of success.

To get to that level, you have to learn from the habits of the people who came before you. Take, for instance, there are common habits, which have come to define some of the most successful people in the world.

Invest in Yourselves

You can invest in a car, invest in a stock, or even invest in tonight’s entertainment. There’s only one investment that really matters, however, and it’s the one that’s going to stick with you for the rest of your life: It’s you. Investing in yourself is crucial if you want to be successful, and that means prioritizing your own development over the development of things outside yourself. For example, education is rarely a poor investment, either in time or in money.

Reading the news regularly and attending free online classes is often more than enough to develop your mind and perspective. No matter what you do or how you do it, it’s in your best interest to regularly and consistently enable yourself to grow, whether that means learning new information, acquiring new skills, or reshaping yourself as a person.

Do not be Held Back by Failure

The road to success is rarely straight. In fact, most successful people have only found success after enduring, and overcoming, the foul taste of failure in their own lives. Take, for example, Bill Gates, whose first business, Traf-o-Data was a complete and utter failure. Rather than give up and take a normal job somewhere else, Gates went on to create Microsoft, and we all know how that story ended. Failures come in all shapes and sizes, from embarrassing social mistakes to critical business collapses. Successful people make it a habit to prevent these failures from getting to them. Instead, they’re focused on continuing to move forward.

Think Long-Term

Successful people tend to make long-term decisions, rather than decisions that make sense in the moment; this is called delayed gratification, and it was the subject of my article titled “This Personality Trait Leads to Wealth And Happiness; Do You Have It?” They would rather have $100 a month from now than $50 right now, and they have no problem making a temporary sacrifice if it means improving something in the long-term. Take, for example, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who frequently insists that patience is the key to everything. He doesn’t make impromptu decisions, nor does he jump ship the instant something looks like it might be going wrong. Instead, he takes his time making great decisions, and isn’t afraid to stick with them for the long haul. He’s a man who weathers the storm, every time.

Don’t be Afraid to Move Forward

Sometimes, the only difference between successful people and ordinary people is that successful people made a decision to move forward. Ordinary people are frequently crippled by fear, uncertainty, and hesitation, but successful people are able to move past that and move forward despite those feelings. Richard Branson, famed serial entrepreneur, always started things before he felt truly ready, and his gumption to make progress drove him to greater success.

Stay Focused

The focus is critical for success, but creating and maintaining focus is a hard habit to start. Distractions are everywhere in our lives, from the small scale (with emails, phones, and the lure of the internet) to the large scale (with competing offers, other projects, and “easier” routes). Staying true to your most important goals is important if you want to eventually achieve those goals. Each moment you spend doing something unrelated to those goals can be considered a moment wasted.

Stay Positive

It’s hard to be positive in the face of an overwhelming project, or after a crushing blow to your long-term plans, but successful people are able to do it. Rather than focusing on the negative, they focus on the positive. They turn challenges into opportunities. They express gratitude for what they do have instead of longing or grief for what they don’t. They use self-talk positively instead of negatively, and they look to the future instead of the past.

Understand the Meaning of Work-Life Balance

Hard work is imperative. Without a strong work ethic and a commitment to executing that work properly, it’s almost impossible to ever become successful. However, working hard doesn’t mean abandoning the important parts of your personal life. Rest, relaxation, and time spent with your family and friends are all critically important for your mental wellbeing. Taking time off of work every once in a while and preserving a healthy work-life balance is important, and is preserved even by the hardest-working, most successful people on the planet.

Thinking Outside the Box

Thinking outside the box is more than just a business cliché. It means approaching problems in new, innovative ways; conceptualizing problems differently; and understanding your position in relation to any particular situation in a way you’d never thought of before. Ironically, it's a cliché that means to think of clichéd situations in ways that aren’t clichéd.

We’re told to “think outside the box” all the time, but how exactly do we do that? How do we develop the ability to confront problems in ways other than the ways we normally confront problems? How do we cultivate the ability to look at things differently from the way we typically look at things?

Thinking outside the box starts well before we’re “boxed in” – that is, well before we confront a unique situation and start forcing it into a familiar “box” that we already know how to deal with. Or at least think we know how to deal with.

Here are ways to beef up your out-of-the-box thinking skills. Make an effort to push your thinking up to and beyond its limit every now and again – the talents you develop may come in handy the next time you face a situation that “everybody knows” how to solve.

Career Ladder Mindset VS Breakthrough Career Mindset

                     

The first time I came across Adam Poswolsky’s book project was through his Indiegogo campaign where he explained what the book is about and more importantly why he was writing it. I was immediately hooked from the moment I watched the trailer video because I felt he was talking to me personally addressing questions like:

Have you ever felt stuck knowing you need to make a change in your life but you are too afraid to take the leap?

How do you know it’s time to quit from a mediocre job that no longer inspires you?

You are in your 30’s not knowing who you are and what you want from life?

Can you really spend your days doing something that inspires you allowing you to make an impact uniquely to your gifts?

After watching the video, I ordered for the book from Amazon.

How exciting!!!

Adam shares the lessons he has learned throughout his journey of intentional learning and experimentation with the purpose of inspiring and empowering young people to realize that career experimentation is not a waste of time when it’s done with the purpose of getting closer to your true self.

The book made me realize it’s ok to experiment with different things when you know you need to make a change in your life but feel stuck! Experimentation takes us one step closer to aligning our true self with our gifts.

At one point in my life, I felt stuck in a job I didn’t like and wasn’t true to my gifts and true self but I settled for mediocrity because I didn’t know any better. I was just checking off days waiting for something to happen only to realize that I had the power to change my reality at any point in my life.

Career ladder mindset VS breakthrough career mindset

Become a Hardworking Employee without Sacrificing Your Personal Life

Let’s be real for a second. These days, many of us live in a world of excess, where more is definitely better. We heap our plates full with seconds when we’re already full, overstuff a drawer with t-shirts we’ll never wear again, and ensure that we own at least 20 mugs. (I know, I know—each of those mugs serves a very specific purpose.)

Often, we apply this “more is more” principle to our professional lives, too. Clocking in at the crack of dawn and logging off only when our eyelids can’t stay open anymore are often heralded as hallmarks of star employees.

But, I have news for you: This type of lifestyle is not necessary for success, growth, or job satisfaction. In fact, I’d argue that it can actually hurt you(but that’s a story for a different day).

The main message here is: You can be the apple of your manager’s eye even if you don’t make working overtime a habit. Provided of course that when you’re in the office, you’re kicking ass, completing everything assigned, and turning it on time.

Ready to start leaving before dinner time? I recommend making these three things habits: