When Financial Advisors Bail Out
Wall Street bail out got you down? Frying over how quickly the value of your home is depreciating? Anxious about the worth of your shrinking stock portfolio? No need to freak out. Keep your chin up. And remember to laugh. All bubbles pop. What goes up must come down. It's a law of nature. Eventually, everything seeks its own level. Like Alec Baldwin, in this funny Saturday Night Live spoof of what's going on with the economy.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2008A Wonderfully Refreshing Review of Awake at the Wheel
As you probably know by now, my book about the creative process -- Awake at the Wheel -- was published in May.
Like most new authors, it's appearance on the scene was a big deal for me. I checked my Amazon ranking five times a day. I did a bunch of interviews. I forwarded the good reviews to all my friends and family.
But after four months, a new book is no longer new.
Which is why yesterday was such a nice surprise. That's when I stumbled across the September 12th review of my book by someone I'd never heard of before, never sent a review copy to, never played the "you scratch my blog, I'll scratch yours" game.
There was something about the review that really touched me. Made me feel that all my howling at the moon was worth it.
So, thank you, Cristina Favreau, for your heartfelt, authentic, and very positive review of Awake at the Wheel.
I thank you. My publisher thanks you. And my fabulous publicist thanks you.
Like Og, you rock.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:52 AM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2008The Top Seven High Tech Excuses
One way to measure just how omnipresent technology has become in our lives these days is to notice the number of times our EXCUSES include a techno-bent.
In days gone by, breaking a commitment had far more of a human aspect to it, as in "The babysitter was late" or... "I got caught in traffic" or... "The dog ate my homework."
No more. These days, high tech excuses rule -- simple, and often untrue, ways of saving face (and maybe your job.) Here's some of the most common ones:
1. "The server's down."
2. "You're breaking up."
3. "Your email ended up in my spam folder."
4. "I'm out of range."
5. "My laptop crashed."
6. "I can't find my Blackberry."
7. "I forgot to recharge my battery."
I know I'm forgetting some. What? The first three people who send me a reasonable excuse get a free copy of my new book (unless I can think of a really good high tech excuse not to mail it.)
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:36 PM | Comments (9)
September 06, 2008Doing the Seeming Impossible
OK. Here's a wake up call for all of us who think our life or work challenges are impossible. Click below to see what this chap accomplished, then ask yourself whether or not what YOU'RE trying to accomplish (i.e. invent a new product, grow your business, make a new transition, establish a culture of innovation, forgive someone etc.) is really so difficult to pull off.
For more inspiration, click on the link below the YouTube video.
MORE INSPIRATION TO GO BEYOND THE "IMPOSSIBLE"
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Goethe
"There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start. - Charles Baudelaire
"What is now proved was once only imagined." - William Blake
"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"Genius is infinite painstaking." - Michelangelo
"A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind." - Antoine Saint-Exupery
"Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission." - Peter Drucker
"No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered." - Winston Churchill
"If you can dream it, you can do it." - Walt Disney
"I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done." - Henry Ford
And here's an intro to my new book about a neanderthal who also accomplished the seeming impossible. Go for it!
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:35 AM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2008How to Increase Your Odds of Getting a Big AHA!
What is it that allows some people to get creative breakthroughs while others get only creative breakdowns -- alternately blaming themselves, society, their company, and their increasingly suspect astrological configurations?
Is it true that people who experience breakthroughs are "gifted"? Or are there other factors at work -- factors that we (the people) have more control over than we might think?
While nobody can deny that some people seem to be blessed with "creative leanings" (i.e. Mozart at 4), research has shown that anyone can increase their chances of coming up with new and original ideas -- even have the much sought after AHA! experience -- that is, IF they immerse themselves in the little understood process of creation.
Time and again, the literature bears this out: great creative breakthroughs usually happen only after intense periods of intention, immersion, struggle -- even madness.
It is sustained and focused effort towards a specific goal -- not luck, wishing, or caffeine -- that ultimately prepares the ground for creative insight.
This kind of effort does not always generate immediate results and sometimes leads people to conclude that it's just not in the cards for them.
Alas, they forget during their inevitable encounters with doubt, that the BIG AHA! is never far away and can happen at any time, any place, under any condition.
Let's take a look at some classic examples:
RENE DESCARTES
Recognized as the "father of modern science," Rene Descartes offers a very interesting footnote to the history of creative breakthrough.
An exceptionally gifted student in 17th century France, young Rene dropped out of school at the age of 17 upon realizing that the only thing he had learned was that he was completely ignorant. Law school proved no better, nor did a brief stint in the military, or an aborted career as a gambler.
Frustrated with the choices available to him, Descartes decided to retire at the ripe old age of 20. While his parents, teachers, and friends pleaded with him to change his mind, young Rene was adamant, and for the next two years did little else but stay in bed, read, think, dream, and write.
Curiously, one night in the second year of his retreat, Descartes had a dream in which the essence of what we now know as the "scientific method" was revealed to him.
In time, his discovery was shared with the scientific community and Western science had a new hero. Ah, the paradox of it all!
While scientists far and wide heralded Descartes for his contribution to Western, rational science, no one (in their right mind) would acknowledge that the root of Descartes' discovery (and indeed, the root of what most scientists today base their knowledge on) came to him in a dream - a non-rational, non-linear, altered state of consciousness in the mind of a dropout!
Descartes story is not at all uncommon.
The truth, the breakthrough, the AHA! came to him only after years of intense, conscious effort. Like ripe fruit, the answer made its appearance at the right time -- a time when he wasn't trying, but had let himself be receptive to the promptings of his own subconscious mind.
ELIAS HOWE
Elias Howe had struggled for years in his attempt to invent a lock stitch sewing machine. His early designs, though inspired, were flawed. Indeed, the needle he designed had a hole in the middle of the shank, which simply didn't work.
Then, one night, depressed at how slowly things were going, Howe dreamed he was captured by a bunch of savages who took him prisoner before the King.
"Elias Howe," screamed the monarch, "I command you upon the pain of death to finish this machine at once!"
Try as he might, Howe still could not find the solution. The King, making good on his word, immediately ordered his troops to take Howe to the place of "execution" (dream pun intended).
As Howe was being led away, he looked up and noticed that the spears the savages were carrying had eye-shaped holes near the top! Voila!
In a flash, Howe awoke, jumped out of bed, and spent the rest of the night whittling a model of the new, improved needle -- the design breakthrough that quickly brought his experiments to a successful conclusion.
RICHARD WAGNER
At the age of 40, Richard Wagner was going through a serious mid-life crisis. His artistic career was stalled, his marriage was falling apart, and his finances were in shambles. Desperate, he decided to travel, hoping to find some inspiration. Traveling, however, only tired him.
Then, one morning, just at the moment when he finally gave up on his frantic effort to invoke his muse, Wagner heard a musical theme in a dream -- one that was about to change his life and the history of music.
Explained Wagner, "After a night spent in fever and sleeplessness, I forced myself to take a long walk through the country. It looked dreary and desolate. Upon my return, I lay down on a hard couch. Sleep would not come, but I sank into a kind of somnambulance, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing noise formed itself into a musical sound, the chord of E flat major, whence developed melodic passages of increasing motion. I awoke in sudden terror, recognizing that the orchestral prelude to Das Rheingold, which must have lain long latent within me, had at last been revealed to me. I decided to return to Zurich at once and begin the composition of my great poem."
MOZART
A prodigy? Yes. Gifted? Yes. Unusually receptive? Yes. But also tuned in to the state of mind that preceded great creative breakthroughs.
Explained Mozart, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer -- say traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them. Those pleasures that please me, I retain in memory, and am accustomed... to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it....agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, and to t he peculiarities of the various instruments. All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them.....all at once. What a delight I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream...."
RUDYARD KIPLING
Many people who experience supernormal moments of great creativity report a willingness to let themselves be open to the non-logical, non-linear, and unexplainable promptings of an inner voice.
Maybe you call it a "hunch" or "intuition," but whatever you call it, know that paying attention to it is often the key to manifesting your vision or idea. Rudyard Kipling, the English writer, was very much in touch with this faculty.
"Most men," wrote Kipling, "keep their personal Daemon (guardian spirit) under an alias which varies with their literary or scientific attainments. Mine came to me early when I sat bewildered among other notions. 'Take me and no other,' it said. I obeyed and was rewarded. After that, I learned to lean upon him and recognize the sign of his approach. If ever I held back anything of myself (even though I had to throw it out afterwards), I paid for it by missing what I knew the tale lacked.....I took good care to walk delicately, lest my Daemon should withdraw. I know that he did not, because when my books were finished they said so themselves with almost the water-hammer click of a tap turned off........'Note here.' When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey...."
AUGUST KEKULE
It is not only writers and composers that have creative breakthroughs. Molecular scientists do, too.
Notes the Flemish scientist, Kekule, "One fine evening I was returning by the last bus through the deserted streets of the metropolis, which are at other times so full of life. I fell into a reverie, and lo! the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. Whenever those diminutive beings had appeared to me before, they had always been in motion, but I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how frequently, how smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller, while the whole kept whirring in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain....I spent part of the night putting on paper at least a sketch of these dream forms."
Then, years later, the big illumination: "I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures....long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting and snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes! As if by a flash of lightening I awoke. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen."
Kekule had made a most remarkable discovery -- that benzene is a cyclic or ring structure and the carbon chain at the molecular core of the compound does indeed form a chain that "swallows its own tail".
TCHAIKOVSKY
OK, all you aspiring creators, how about a tip from the man who composed the Nutcracker Suite?
"Generally, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly...It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms....I forget everything and behave like a mad man. Everything within me starts pulsing and quivering. Hardly have I begun the sketch, before one thought follows another. In the midst of this magic process, it frequently happens that some external interruption awakes me from my somnabulistic state....Dreadful indeed are such interruptions....They break the thread of the inspiration."
To learn more about how to get breakthrough ideas, click here.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:08 PM | Comments (1)
