creative maverick

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

Melissa Pierce is what I would call a Player. She is making a film called Life in Perpetual Beta about making life up as you go along - and she’s making it up as she goes along. She has no real experience of film making and I don’t think she knows exactly where the film is going.

And it’s already great.

She’s interviewing great people like Seth Godin (below) and Daniel Pink and Biz Stone (co-founder of twitter).

You can watch the film, which has been funded through individual donations canvassed on twitter, unfold on her blog.

Here’s how Melissa describes the project:

“Life in Perpetual Beta is a documentary film about the ways in which technology has/is/will change the ways in which we think about ourselves as individuals and a society. It is exploring the cultural shift that technology creates as it enables people to live less planned and more passionate lives.”

Watch Melissa being interviewed by one of her interviewees in very “Beta” style. It’s a great summary of the kind of approach I advocate in my book “Screw Work, Let’s Play”.

Chris Guillebeau makes a full-time living from his blog The Art of Non Conformity while travelling the world on his mission to visit every country on Earth. He very kindly agreed to be interviewed for my book “Screw Work, Let’s Play” and share a little of what’s made his lifestyle possible.

Chris, how do you answer the dinner party question “What do you do?”

I am a writer, entreprenuer, and world traveler. I publish the Art of Non-Conformity site and help people live remarkable lives.

You describe yourself as being on a five-year personal quest to visit every country in the world. How did you come up with this goal and why?

It’s a long story, but the short answer is that I realized I had been to about 50 countries due to a few years spent volunteering in Africa, and I wanted to see if I could go everywhere. Every good goal has a deadline, so I set mine for my 35th birthday in 2012.

Can you describe a moment that represents the lifestyle you’ve been striving to create?

I sometimes fly First or Business Class before checking into a $15 hostel - kind of ironic, but it’s fun. I really enjoyed being the only westerner in a bush taxi last month from Mozambique to Swaziland. Hopefully every day has moments like that - whether in Bhutan, where I’m going next, in Kuwait, where I just came from, or while working at home in Oregon.

The thing is that a lot of what I do is the same wherever I go, and personally I like that - I write, meet people, drink coffee, have fun.

How do you manage any fear or anxiety around your projects and your travel?

Great question. I experience a great deal of fear, anxiety, and insecurity - and probably anything else like that you can think of. The only difference is that I try not to let my fears determine my decisions. It’s definitely a process, not a single step.

You make an interesting suggestion in your excellent free guide to World Domination that it almost doesn’t matter what project you take on first, just go do something (which I wholeheartedly agree with) - can you explain a bit about this?

Everyone has an idea for a great project, but lots of people feel stuck and unable to start. I like this quote:

“The gap between ignorance and knowledge is much less than the gap between knowledge and action.”

I like that you have identified your central message so clearly; “you don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to”. How did you come to this realization or have you always known it?

It’s been a process, but thankfully I learned to question authority at an early age.

When I mentioned my book “Screw Work, Let’s Play”, you said “But I like my work!”. You’re certainly an advocate of hard work but do you find the line blurring with play and fun?

I love work. My philosophy is that if you don’t love what you do, you’re probably doing the wrong thing. Perhaps it’s not that far off from what your book is about.

You’ve put together a whole load of advice for artists to make a living in your Art Money Guide. What’s the single most important tip you can share that you learned from interviewing full-time artists and creating the guide?

Artists have to learn to take responsibility for their own careers instead of expecting galleries (or anyone else) to help them be successful. This is an important shift in mindset that is unfortunately quite rare.

I’m a big fan of personality profiling systems like Wealth Dynamics and Myers Briggs. Do you know your profile and if so do you have any sense of how your profile influences the way you’ve built your business and lifestyle?

Ironically, I just took it this week. I’m an INTJ - still not 100% sure what that means, but the description sounded good to me: The INTJ Personality

Can you name one belief or behaviour above all that has contributed to your success?

Don’t stop.

Find out more

Chris has written a superb and comprehensive guide for those who’d like to take their first steps to being a professional blogger, a full-time traveller or someone with a similarly unconventional lifestyle. It’s called “The Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself:  Creating Personal Freedom through a Very Small Business”.

Chris has also written “The Unconventional Guide to Art and Money: How to Thrive as an Artist without Selling Out”. I haven’t read it yet but if it’s as good as his first guide, it will be well worth checking out.

Read about everything else Chris does and fetch his free guides to World Domination and 279 Days to Overnight Success at artofnonconformity.com.

I was interviewed by Dave Monk on BBC Radio Essex on Tuesday about how to find work you love, even in a recession. Dave challenged me with some tough questions - have a listen to see how I answered questions like:

• Should you just fire off your CV to all the jobs you can find?
• Isn’t it just living in a dreamland to think you can get paid for doing what you love in the current economy?
• Why does someone who is very well qualified and very creative about finding work still find themselves unable to get a job?
• Aren’t some things you would love to do simply impossible - like wanting to become a rock star when you’re in your fifties?
• Surely if you have a mortgage and a family to feed, you might just have to take anything?
• What’s the alternative to job ads and recruitment consultants who don’t seem to be very helpful if you want to find a new line of work?
• Isn’t it a fact of life that some jobs are boring but pay well?

Dave makes it a very lively interview. Have a listen now - just click the play button below

Let me know what you think.

Derek Sivers is a remarkable guy. He’s best known as the founder of CD Baby which he sold for $22 million last year but he’s also been a professional musician and at one point a circus clown.

He is very much a Scanner who has found a way to manage his addiction to learning, creativity and variety to launch multiple businesses and have fun doing it. When I read that he treats his work as play, I knew I had to interview for him for my book “Screw Work, Let’s Play”.

Derek is a real joy to listen to. You can listen to our entire interview right now and hear how he answers the dreaded question “What do you do”, what beliefs and habits have contributed to his success, and what was the most important haircut of his life…

Just click the play button below

Got some good ideas of your own?

If listening to Derek has inspired you to go further with your own ideas,
join us in The Ideas Lab on 12th August.

Derek Sivers has been a circus clown, professional musician and a very successful entrepreneur. Last year, he sold his company CD Baby for $22 million, the majority of which will go to The Independent Musician’s Charitable Trust, an organization that he created to fund and support music education for future generations.

Derek is a fascinating guy as I found out yesterday when I interviewed him for my book - we’ll be releasing the recording here soon. He’s a Scanner and a very successful one at that. I discovered in speaking to him just how similar musicianship is to entrepreneurship.

Derek has created a rather wonderful 71 page guide for musicians called “How to call attention to your music”. You can download it for free at his site here. If you’re a musician I suggest you download it now. (There are no affiliate links or up-sells involved)

Here is some of his excellent advice:

Be an extreme version of yourself

Define yourself.
Show your weirdness.
Bring out all your quirks.

Your public persona, the image you show to the world, should be an extreme version of yourself.

and

Proudly exclude some people

Proudly say what you’re NOT:  “If you like Celine Dion, you’ll hate us.” …and people who hate Celine Dion will love you, or at least give you a chance.

You can’t please everyone in this world.  Recklessly exclude people.

How could you apply this advice to your music or your art project or your business?

Download the free guide here.

Our greatest fear in creativity is not that we are crap but that we are mediocre - of moderate to low abilities. Crap is easier; you know you missed and should look elsewhere. Mediocre is far more challenging.

Yet mediocrity is something you need to come to terms with because much of your work will fall into this band. You need to dare to try something, and risk landing in the mediocre zone. Mediocrity is your basecamp on the way to a peak of excellence. It’s the mulch from which your best work grows.

If you’re blocked, you probably have a fear of creating mediocre work. Embrace the possibility. Dare to be mediocre.

“What’s your favourite animal?” people would ask me when I was a child. It’s one of those questions you get asked a lot as a child (and never again as an adult). I would say “Penguin”.

Not dog, cat, lion, tiger, horse. I picked the animal that seemed furthest from my suburban home in the Midlands. My pet was also not a dog or a cat but a tortoise. Several tortoises in fact.

Looking back in my self-critical moments, I thought that I must have been trying to be “different for the sake of it” (and that apparently this is a bad thing). But in fact creative mavericks and Scanners thrive on innovation; our minds rush to the edges - the edges of what’s considered normal, what’s socially acceptable, what is established thinking and technique. Because it’s at the edges that the new things are happening, things are changing, new discoveries are being made.

As the set representing established thinking and accepted practices slowly expands, we rush to the edges where something is just being uncovered, created or included so that we can see it, enjoy it, add to it.

Standing at the edges, everything on the inside looks old, dull, done.

We’re looking outwards to see what’s coming next, where the sun is just coming up for the first time. For me it’s in psychotherapy, coaching, writing, humour, business, marketing, working styles, web 2.0, technology, user interface, pituitary treatment, healthcare, happiness.

Which edge do you rush to?

It’s funny that my first reaction this morning after last night’s talk by San Sharma at Scanners Night on Social Media is to quit 2 social networking sites.

What I’ve realised is that if I want to play all day and get paid, it’s essential I surround myself with people of similar values - people who are creative, playful, entrepreneurial and are forging their own maverick lifestyle.

San last night said in his quick review of social networking sites, “LinkedIn is like facebook for er…” and I chipped in “boring people”.

LinkedIn is a very standard business networking site. It’s full of straight up business people, consultants and so on. Nothing wrong with that (I was one until a few years ago), it’s just not the people I really enjoy hanging out with.

Ecademy is similar but more annoying. I’ve had enough of pointless connection requests from random people around the world I have no interest in talking to. So I’ve quit my membership of that too.

You might think it harmless to just remain a member in case something useful might come your way but even this very light commitment still uses some attention at the back of my mind - and attention is the most precious resource I have. Now, I no longer need to pretend to myself that one day I’m going to go to another of ecademy’s networking events.

My profiles are still up on both sites but I’ve cancelled paid membership and switched off all pointless notifications. Maybe one day I’ll delete my profile but for now it increases the chance of people finding me when I have such a common name. (Actually I’ve just discovered my name has made it onto the front page of google so maybe I don’t need the profiles!)

Success is as much about what you quit as what you commit to. The brave decisions in life are not between the bad and the good but between the good enough and the excellent. So I’m focussing on the networks and events that are an excellent fit for me and put me in closer contact with the people I love to hang out with - places like Scanners Night and Twitter.

What will you quit?