creative maverick

I hope you have a good break coming up over the next few days. If you’re currently assessing what to do with your work next year, here’s a little something to ponder while you’re off…

Try this trick of asking yourself a question and then forgetting about it while you’re off work. Your subconscious will continue to work on it while you’re distracted having fun and celebrating. You might be surprised what pops into your head over the next few days.

Here’s the question:

What part of your work have you most enjoyed in 2009?

What project was most exciting? What activity have you discovered you really enjoying doing? What client did you most enjoy working with? Was there something that is not a central part of your work but which you loved doing (chatting with colleagues, brainstorming, playing a part in design or branding, making people laugh, playing around on twitter)?

Keep a piece of paper in your pocket and whenever something occurs to you, write it down.

That’s it.

Then in the New Year just ask yourself this second simple question, “How can I do more of this work in 2010?”

If this is not currently a central part of your work, ask yourself “What are all the ways I could get paid for doing this thing I enjoy?” You might not have an immediate answer. Just allow the question to percolate and note down any ideas that pop up.

Going on a long trip?

Are you going on a long drive or train journey for Christmas? If you’d like to know some of the tricks to discovering the work you love and getting paid for it, download my free audio class on the subject as an MP3 and take it with you. Put it on your iPod or burn it to CD. Or just listen to it in the kitchen while you’re cooking!

Here’s the link to the free audio download “How to do what you love and make it pay”

Whatever you’re doing I hope you take some time to relax and have some fun.

Merry Christmas,
Happy Holidays,
and have a great 2010

Here’s something Barbara Sher put on her blog a while ago which explains the dilemma of the creative person who hates to do any one thing for very long. If you’re a Scanner, or a Creator (in Wealth Dynamics terms) you’ll understand this very well.

She talks about scientist Clifford Stoll’s TED Talk:

He’s had some exciting adventures; he’s famous for finding KGB spies and stopping them from hacking classified information, but in his talk he explains that these days, things that used to interest him have become boring.

And she quotes Clifford’s wonderful statement from early in his talk:

The first time you do something, it’s science.
The second time it’s engineering.
Third time you’re just a technician.
I’m a scientist. Once I do something I want to do something else.

This is a great thing to quote next time someone asks you why you don’t just keep doing what you’ve done before!

Barbara’s post “On Eclectics, critics and how to grow up and quit fooling around” is here

Tim Smit led the creation of the £130 million Eden Project.

What was once a disused clay pit went on to become one of the most popular visitor attractions in the UK despite its relatively remote location in the hills behind St Austell in Cornwall.

Tim is, in my terms, very much a player. He takes on daring projects without knowing exactly how he’ll make them work, and uses a heap of creativity and bravery to make a success of them.

And he does all this while remaining a very down to earth and unpretentious guy.

I tracked him down to ask him some key questions about his approach to his remarkable projects and he very kindly took the time to answer them here.

You describe the Eden Project as “the world’s first rock ‘n’ roll scientific foundation”. What have you brought from the music industry that’s been helpful to you in entrepreneurship?

An understanding of marketing and showbusiness realising that the tools of the soundbite and so on have never been used on this area before. Also to remember that no one remembers the well behaved person at the party. Also if you are going to break the rules know what the rules are that you are breaking. It is cool to be a rebel if you know your stuff and very naive and damaging if you don’t.

To what extent did Eden follow the planned vision for it and to what extent did it evolve during its creation? [Question from @escapetocreate on twitter]

The vision physically remained the same throughout. Philosophically it evolved from the narrow confines of science, spectacle and plants to embrace livelihoods and community as we realised what the real drivers for change and sustainability were. This was something of a revelation and could only have evolved out of actually doing the work of construction and organisational team building and learning from it.

Do you ever get doubts? A lot of people said Eden wouldn’t work, how did you know it would?

I have known since my music business days that if you love something and you are not a freak there will millions of people like you out there so the only issue is getting to them. This is the basis of great marketing. So, no, I never had doubts.

You’ve achieved an enormous amount for someone who describes themselves as fundamentally lazy, what drives you to take on these projects rather than just taking it easy?

The fear of death and a rash desire to make unlikely promises. Which I then have to fulfil or lose face as a consequence.

You describe yourself as one of the least focussed people you could ever meet. How did you manage to stay focused on projects like Eden and Heligan that lasted several years?

By taking myself by surprise. Focus is overrated and completely misunderstood being able to focus like a grown up means flying like a falcon surveying the landscape below while being able to hone in on the slightest movement. Focus is not the role of a real CEO but the mark of an over promoted foot soldier. You can spot them a mile off!

What’s the single most important piece of advice you would give to someone about to embark on a project the scale of Eden?

Be honest about what you don’t know, persuade people better than you to join you and lose your fear of being disliked.

What can we look forward to next from you and the Eden Project?

Be surprised and don’t let your words hold you hostage!

~

Read more about The Eden Project

I also strongly recommend listening to Tim’s superb speech at the 2009 Institute of Directors Annual Convention where he talks about his earlier career in pop music, creating the Lost Gardens of Heligan and his approach to his work.

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Ever thought about writing a self-help book yourself? If so, you’ll be interested in Suzy Greaves’ interview with me on my experience of writing my book (which I am due to finish for Pearson Education next week). Suzy is one of the UK’s best life coaches and the author or two of her own excellent books.

Have a listen below to find out how I won my book deal, how I approached writing the book and some of the other useful things I learned along the way.

If that’s inspired you to have a crack at writing your own book, grab a place on Suzy’s 4 week course How To Write a Self Help Book next week.

Would you like to know where to focus your work so that you can get paid for doing what you love? The key is to find your “moment of magic”.

Think back to a recent time in your work that stands out as a great moment; one when you did something you know you are great at, you really enjoyed doing it, and it had a positive impact. What were you doing at that moment? What made it so enjoyable for you?

Your moment may come in many different forms - coming up with the new idea that makes a whole project run better, making a great joke in the middle of a presentation, saying something encouraging to a co-worker when they most need it, negotiating a huge discount on a purchase, pointing someone to just the right piece of information, tweaking a process or system to make it better, finding a clever way to automate a task, spotting the error in a plan before it starts. Look for something you got a great deal of pleasure out of - not just for the result (like a pat on the back from your boss or client) - but in the actual doing of it.

This moment may not be something that is in your job description or main business tasks - setting up your PC for maximum productivity or writing a funny email for a colleague’s birthday. If your current work is so off the mark that you can’t think of a single moment of this kind, look at your personal life for moments when you do something brilliantly, enjoy it and it’s valuable to other people. Often this thing took you very little time at all to do - even if a huge amount of experience and preparation led up to it.

This is your moment of magic. Make a note of it. Think of two or three other moments that stand out and write these down too. Can you see any common element that makes them so special to you? Write it down if so but don’t worry if not.

Now here’s a thought. How often are you doing your moment of magic currently in your work? Once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Only in your spare time? Imagine if you just did your moment of magic twice as often in a week. How much more valuable would you be to your employer or your business? You might find you were twice as valuable.

Now imagine expanding this moment so that your whole career revolves around it and much of your working week is filled with this experience. How much fun would that be? How valuable would you be? Can you see that it might be possible to get paid for providing all that value?

I need your help!

I’d like some examples of people’s moments of magic to put in my book for Pearson Education which I am just finishing. Please leave a comment with what you think your moment of magic is and I’ll contact you if I decide to put it in my book. Thanks!

Tom Hodgkinson is editor of bi-annual magazine The Idler and author of several excellent books including How To Be Idle, How To Be Free, and The Idle Parent.

He very kindly agreed to be interviewed for my upcoming book about how to get paid to play.

We did the interview as a video call over Skype and braved multiple connection dropouts and shockingly unflattering webcams to record it. (Tom’s the one on the right)

Watch the video below and discover Tom’s journey from worker to idler, why idling takes dedication, and how to write a book in your sleep.

Find out more about Tom and The Idler

Currently rewriting your own life story? Check out our “Find your story” London workshop in November

Leslie Scott created one the world’s favourite games, Jenga. Recently, she kindly agreed to be interviewed for my forthcoming book “Screw Work, Let’s Play”.

Here, she explains how she turned her baby brother’s playing bricks into the world’s second biggest selling game (topped only by Monopoly). She also explains how she kept going through debt and visits from the repo man - and what ‘Jenga’ actually means!

Have a listen now - just click the play button below:

Leslie’s book “About Jenga: The Remarkable Business of Creating a Game that Became a Household name” has just been published. Pre-order the book now on Amazon in the UK or buy it now in the US. Read more at her website AboutJenga.com

What would have happened if a young Paul McCartney had stayed in his job as a factory coil-winder back in 1961? He almost did:

I started working at a coil-winding factory called Massey and Coggins. My dad had told me to go out and get a job. I’d said, ‘I’ve got a job, I’m in a band.’ But after a couple of weeks of doing nothing with the band it was, ‘No, you have got to get a proper job.’ He virtually chucked me out of the house. So I went to the employment office and said, ‘Can I have a job? Just give me anything.’ And the first job was sweeping the yard at Massey and Coggins. I took it.

I went there and the personnel officer said, ‘We can’t have you sweeping the yard, you’re management material.’ And they started to train me from the shop floor up with that in mind. Of course, I wasn’t very good on the shop floor - I wasn’t a very good coil-winder.

One day John and George showed up in the yard that I should have been sweeping and told me we had a gig at the Cavern. I said, ‘No. I’ve got a steady job here and it pays £7 14s a week. They are training me here. That’s pretty good, I can’t expect more.’ And I was quite serious about this. But then - and with my dad’s warning still in my mind - I thought, ‘Sod it. I can’t stick this lot.’ I bunked over the wall and was never seen again by Massey and Coggins. Pretty shrewd move really, as things turned out.

From The Beatles Anthology

If you’re currently wasting your time in your own coil-winding hell, start making your escape. It might turn out to be a shrewd move for you too.

Pat Kane is one half of Scottish pop duo Hue and Cry. Famous for hits in the late 80s and early 90s like Labour of Love, the brothers are still making music today and released Open Soul earlier this year.

Aside from music, Pat is also a writer, consultant, play theorist, and activist. He is author of The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living and he kindly agreed to an interview to help me with my forthcoming book “Screw Work, Let’s Play”.

Read where Pat is today with his mission to convert us from the work ethic to the play ethic.

Welcome Pat. I’d like to kick off by asking the dinner party question “What do you do?” (It’s a very worker-oriented question but I’m interested to see the creative ways players find to answer it)

I sing, I make songs; I write reviews, commentary, and theory; I parent, love, and (as the footballers say) try to keep my engine going.

What is the play ethic?

The play ethic is what comes after the obsolescence of the work ethic. The work ethic is an ideology or belief-system which asserts that any job has dignity and worth, despite how alienated it makes you feel or how disjunct it is from your desires and aspirations, because society recognises this submission to the job as the basis of social order.

The play ethic is an alternative belief-system, which asserts that in an age of mass higher education, continuing advances in personal and social autonomy, and ubiquitous digital networks (and their associated devices), we have a surplus of human potential and energy, which will not be satisfied by the old workplace routines of duty and submission.

The identity of a ‘player’ - optimistic, willing to try and experiment, open to participating with peers in a multitude of projects - fits this new landscape, this new social order, much better. But we need to forge a convincing ‘play ethic’, particularly for organisations and government, which will help them to change their structures (or make way for new ones) to accommodate the expanding constituency of networked players.

What’s the state of play 5 years on from the publication of your book? How is your mission going?

I feel that my project has contributed its small part to a much wider legitimation of the power and potential of play in mainstream British and American society, particularly in organisational studies, education, social policy and even advertising (I did a lot early consultation with advertisers!). I look at initiatives like the UK government’s nine-figure commitment to encouraging play in schools and early development, and I see a lot of the research I was adducing about the cognitive and civic benefits of keeping play at the centre of children’s lives being quoted.

I know that there are a few initiatives - like The School of Life and the The School of Everything - which were directly inspired by my writing and advocacy. And the continuing invites to speak at events from Sydney to New York, from primary educators to Nokia and Lego, tell me that I have carved out a reasonable expertise, and am having a reasonable impact, on a wider variety of sectors.

Several of the players I have been interviewing and studying come from a background in the music industry (Tim Smit of the Eden Project, Derek Sivers of CDBaby). What does the world of pop & rock music in particular have to offer to the play ethic?

Making rock and pop regularly gives you an unalienated experience of expressing your passions through technique and technology, in collaboration with other people - which is the definition, it would seem to me, of a play ethic!

The trendy management term ‘ad-hocracy’ was tailor-made for the music business: there, people demand enough time and space to experiment, try things out, follow their noses. And they will construct the situations, however provisional or fragile or flaky, that enable them to get the result they have an investment in. All of life is a ‘gig’ for a musician - an event where you perform with and before others - and I think that this prepares you for a life of self-starting, flexible working and enterpreneurship. We’re all players in the most profound sense - courting possibility, living with its openness, not fearing it.

If you could get one message through to the worker - someone feeling trapped by the work ethic - what would you say?

Going back to musicians, I would say that you have to accept that there’s a price you pay for living a profoundly playful life - which is that there is less stability in some of the more recognised features of an adult life, but more stability in others. Clearly, if you’re chained to a mortgage/big-car/foreign-holidays/high-consumption lifestyle, then you need a constancy of income - which usually only comes from the kind of occupational commitment (one company, one building, one practice) that most players are unwilling to make. If you can downshift some aspects of your life, you can “up-shift” many others - for example, pouring your energies into a practice or project that makes you feel more alive and purposeful than you’ve ever been; finding more looseness in your life into which can enter new relationships, the opportunity to reinforce old ones.

I’ve come to believe that the players’ life is what you could call ‘post-consumerist’, or participative - and in an age where we might well be looking at ecological limits on consumption, a play ethic might be one of our main hopes for building a sense of positive identity about ourselves, when the status items lose their status.

Social Media has moved on since you wrote the book and is becoming an even more powerful force for change in both business and society. How do you see it supporting the play ethic now?

When I was completing the Play Ethic in 2003, one could see the new eco-system of networks and participation growing - mostly in cutting-edge hi-tech areas like open source and free software. But the expansion of that into everyday life is extremely encouraging to me. It’s almost as if tens of millions of people are voting with their attention spans, when they engage with everything from Twitter to Facebook to You Tube to whatever blogging platform they have. They’re asserting their joy in mutual communication, in tailoring their public identities to exactly the specifications they want (and also opening that identity out to commentary by others), right in the heart of networked capitalism - those ‘homing from work’ behaviours which so infuriate the key-stroke counters of management and business. They should be (and some are) responding positively to this mass desire for people to enthusiastically build structures and networks around themselves - tapping into this energy in order to make productive life more satisfying, and its products and services more meaningful to both producers and consumers. But it’s usually rendered as just “playing around”. A shame, but it will incrementally change.

What does the recent financial meltdown mean to both the work ethic and play ethic?

I think the ‘ethical’ part of the play ethic is about placing the idea of creativity, activity and collaboration - rather than being programmed, being defined by consumption, taking orders - at the centre of a society. I do think this means a shift of energies and commitment from a society with a certain model of growth, to one with a different model of growth - where it’s a growth in happiness, or the richness of one’s interactions, or the satisfaction in one’s labours and projects, that becomes our collective target for the future.

I think the coming age of fiscal and financial austerity - the hangover from our days of credit-fuelled consumerism - could provide the necessary conditions for that to move from the margins to the centre of policy, politics and daily life. We won’t have the money to solve our problems and assuage our existential angsts - we’ll have to innovate, act and collaborate to fill those wholes. I hope the idea of a ‘play ethic’ is useful in that scenario.

I’m interested in the internal shift a person needs to make to move from worker to player - beliefs to question, habits to transform. What do you think is the biggest part of this?

I’m very interested in that too! The more I deep-dive into the psychology and neurology of play, the more I think that one of the main tasks for the play ethic is to engage in an argument about human nature. So much of the story of play for advanced mammals like us is that it’s necessary to keep us adaptive - Brian Sutton-Smith calls play ‘adaptive potentiation’, the testing-out and prototyping of behaviours and possibilities, so that we can endlessly refine and improve our response to everyday challenges and opportunities. And I think that modern people, living in societies that have many resources to support our actions, can actually bring play as a rehearsal for real life, and real life itself, a lot closer together. But yes, there needs to be an internal shift to match all the external shifts that are inviting us to a playful life. I think we have to try and listen to this deeply-constituted inner dynamic of play in our selves - and I think we can become profoundly deaf to that. I’m certainly interested in meditation, whether contemplative or as a result of some active practise, as a way of getting ‘above yourself’, so you can see the patterns of life that you’re trapped in.

I have to say personally, that my life with my children - not just playing with them as they grow-up, but also in terms of the miracle of their autonomy, the glory of watching their gradual self-empowerment - was also crucial to deepening my sense of myself as a player. That’s not available for everyone, but it was essential for me.

How does play sit with hard work in your own working life and in the lives of the other players you have met? Can play be hard work?

I like to use the terms of the philosopher and theological James Carse, when he talked about finite and infinite games. “Hard work”, committed labour through a field of activity heading towards a determinate goal, is what Carse would call the ‘finite game’ - a series of tight victories over necessity and urgency.

In my own life, I compare it to the singing practice I have to do every day as a musician - a kind of exacting, pains-taking self-labour, a struggle to improve technique and control. But I do that in the service of Carse’s ‘infinite game’ - the game not oriented to victory, but to extending and enriching the game itself, to seeing new horizons and new rules through playing the game itself.

If I stay on top of my technique, I will maintain the possibiity of having those transcendant gigs where my voice, myself and the whole room merges - or where something genuinely new and unprecedented pops out of my mouth. But I have *chosen* this ‘hard-work’, this finite game, because it serves the ‘infinite game’ of expression and exploration. See it as the circle of hard work within the bigger circle of the horizon of play. And incidentally, to reverse those two - to put infinity at the heart of the finite, or to see victory as something to be endlessly toiled for, the intoxication of the ‘winner’ as worthwhile in itself, is to me a kind of hell on earth.

Players, it seems to me, will naturally tread on other people’s beliefs and taboos. I’m sure you must have met some controversy and disapproval in your own work. How do you respond to it?

Most of the controversy comes from people who have invested so much in the work ethic, and have suffered the psychic injuries that result from living a heteronomous (not autonomous) life, that you literally pain them when you express or display a players’ sensibility or preferences. I understand that rage and annoyance - and often my response is to try and point to long-term social, technological and cultural trends which show that a life of purpose and productivity doesn’t have to be lived in a state of grim determination to succeed, or acceptance of one’s conformity.

One of the things I tried to do in the book was to point out what I thought the complement to play was, in a healthy society. What happens when an exuberant player fails, falls, gets exhausted or broken, runs out of ideas, hits a crisis of health (mental or physical)? So I’ve been attempting to say that ‘care’ is what should complement ‘play’ in the ideal society - not the ‘work-leisure trap’, or the ‘work-life balance’, but the ‘play-care continuum’.

If we grow into our identities as players, we should also value the care that’s required when our playful enterprises do not go as planned. And this is real ‘care’, involving the open-ended use of time and space, not just repairing people to be chucked back into a labour-market which has caused the damage in the first place.

One way to assuage the rage of a ‘worker’ is to say that we need collective regulation to increase these spaces of care - eg, four day weeks, a robust parental and sabbatical culture, a revitalised public provision of housing and facilities - to enable properly the players’ lifestyle. That is, everybody should get the benefits - not just jumped-up creative freelancers!

I want to follow your lead and help reclaim the label “Player” as a positive one. From your experience of adopting the word, what do you think are our chances?

I think we have a good chance, John - but I think it has to be founded on a deep and broad understanding of what we mean by play. We already have a discourse about players which is, in my view, narrow and agonistic - the big City “plays” and “players” swinging their dicks in the halls of Capital, the “playas” hustling for supremacy in the ghetto, never mind the empire of sports spectaculars coursing through our mass media. Play isn’t just about competition for victory - far, far from it. If we keep people attentive to the dynamic, plural nature of play in our species-being, the aim to reclaim ‘player’ as a positive term might be worth trying for.

What’s next for you and the play ethic project?

My aim for the next few years is to come to a deeper synthesis of my researches into, and experiences of, play - whether through writing, consulting or just living. It feels like a lifetime interest has opened up for me around this topic - and to walk my talk, I expect to be surprised by what it turfs up next for me!

Read more about Pat Kane and the Play Ethic here

Back in 2005, Alex Tew was a 21 year old student from Cricklade in Wiltshire and was about to begin a three-year Business Management course at the University of Nottingham. Alex was concerned that he would be left with a student loan that would take years to repay so he brainstormed ways to make some money on the Internet to fund himself.

The idea he came up was brilliantly simple. He decided to create a one page website featuring a grid of 1000 x 1000 pixels which he would sell as advertising space. The cost was $1 per pixel and purchasers would buy them in 10×10 blocks to add their own logo or advert, with a link to their own website. If he sold all the pixels, it would make him a millionaire.

When MillionDollarHomepage launched on 26 August 2005, it became an Internet phenomenon, at one point being ranked in the top 150 most visited websites in the world.

But what really made this website such a success?

It was the story.

The story of how a young student facing debt made a million on the ‘net was one that hundreds of journalists around the world wanted to write about. The story appeared again and again in newspapers and magazines and on the web. And it’s because that story got such exposure, that so many people visited the website (which after all was not very exciting or pretty to look at!) And because so many people were visiting the website, everyone wanted to buy the pixels to advertise their own products.

Alex sold every pixel and his final gross income was $1,037,100 - from a site that cost him 50 Euros to create. It was a million dollar story.

Tomorrow night, at Scanners Night in Central London, we are exploring story, poetry, truth and authenticity with the UK’s only professional bard, Sarah de Nordwall.

Whether you’re a writer, a speaker, a poet or an entrepreneur, a story is a powerful thing. Sarah will be running an exercise in the 2nd half of the evening to help you find an easy and snappy way to find your story and present it - whether the story is of your life, your business or your creative project.

If you’re in London tomorrow, come along. This will be a Scanners Night people will be talking about for some time to come.

Click here to book now and save £5