Day 34: What would your superpower be?

A creative act is an authentic act. So how can you know what is genuinely yours to do? What are the essential human qualities with which you create action in your life? It can be a daunting question to ask; a question that can turn into a roadmap for a life-long journey. But it doesn’t need to be heavy. Often, our most promising avenues for action are created when we stop focusing on finding answers and start exploring different perspectives on the question.

Playfulness, for example, is a very effective way to try on a new perspective – if we can allow ourselves to be so childish. So, if you can, have a look at comics you know (or: once knew). Which figure do you think most closely serves as a parody of your own character? (If you are prepared for an uncomfortable perspective, ask your partner for advice.) And, if you could design your own superhero figure, what is the special quality you would give to her? Have a look here for inspiration. When and how do you see yourself using the worldly equivalent of this quality in your daily life?

Day 33: Creative change – creative reality?

How can we be truly creative with our work? What are the fundamentals of a creative act? In the coming four weeks, the define phase of my process, I am going to dig deeper into the four essential pillars of a creative change process:

Mirror: Who are you? A creative act is an authentic act. How can you know what is genuinely yours to do?

Antenna: What are you ready for? A creative act is a response to something that is in the air right now. How can you see and capture it?

Expedition: What does the impossible look like? A creative act takes place in a terrain you do not know yet. How can you navigate there?

Manufacture: What are you creating today? A creative act takes place in real life. The only possibility to find out if it works is to actually do it. What are you able to do right now?

Day 32: Impact is the result of a creative act

What matters most to me now? As I review the learnings of the past month, I can see that I am testing a hypothesis: Impact is the result of a creative act. Creativity is not the privilege of musicians, writers or painters. To me, creative acts are the mundane daily choices we make as human beings. It is the difference between writing a blogpost just to feed the blog versus experiencing something new and then reflecting on it in a blogpost. It is the difference between taking the decision that is most comfortable versus taking the decision that holds the greatest potential to learn. It is the choice between being the one who criticises versus being the one who makes a proposal and tries it. Leadership and innovation, just like impact, are what happens when we opt for the small creative acts every day.

The most profound insights from the last thirty days do not come from reading books. They come from the experience of the creation of art. And this is what matters most to me now: investigating the fundamentals of a creative process by experiencing and observing it. This conclusion isn’t pleasant, and it’s also not surprising. By now I know that what matters most is almost always also what makes me uncomfortable the most.

Day 31: Diamonds on the inside

One third of my exploration tour is already history. It’s time to take a step back and decide on how to structure the remaining 60 days of my challenge. One helpful tool to take such decisions in a creative process was developed by designers and is called the Double Diamond. I particularly like it because it reminds me of John Cleese and the possibility to make use of our minds in an “open mode” (in green) as well as in a “closed mode” (in red). Neither one is more valuable than the other and both are needed to make progress. The tricky thing is to be aware and purposefully select the one that best serves the task at hand.

The Double Diamond starts with a discovery phase. The purpose here is to explore the unexpected and see the world with a fresh eye. The process then continues with the define phase, where we try to make sense of all the possibilities and decide to focus our attention on what matters most. Here, the order of the day is to “park our darlings”: saying “yes” to something that matters inevitably means saying “no” to many other interesting options. In the development phase, we start producing prototypes of particular ideas, and in the last phase of delivery, a product is finalised. As for me, I am ready to proceed to the define phase. The question I am holding is: of all my discoveries, documented and undocumented, what matters most to me now?

Day 30: What is the story you are telling yourself about yourself?

Yesterday, I was dealing drugs at the park “Kleine Schanze” in Bern while my child was feeding bread to the ducks at the pond. Inexperienced as I am in this line of work, I was caught in the act by the police. I argued, I cried, and I cursed – all in vain. In the end, I was arrested, handcuffed and taken to prison. This was the scene we played in improv theatre.

It got me thinking about stories. One of the reasons why I am a bad drug dealer is that I don’t have any such story. For better or worse, I don’t know the feeling of walking in the street with a bag full of illegal white powder. I don’t have any vocabulary to fix a secret meet-up with my accomplice. (That is not actually true. I remember “stash” from watching The Wire). The experiment leaves me with one obvious observation and a pandora’s box of questions: There is an immense possibility of “selves” that I have never been or imagined myself to be. But then, which one is my story? The one I have been and imagined, the one I own? And, to what extent do we, as human beings, have the possibility to become someone outside the story we have been telling ourselves about ourselves?

Day 29: Change is irreconcilable contradiction

A creative change process is a perpetuum mobile of extremes. It’s freedom and structure. Focus and vision. Belief in ego-self and surrender to higher-purpose. Knowing it all and not-knowing it all, too. Learning and un-learning. Being professional and being a beginner.

Whenever we think we have “figured it out” and are finally able to settle for one end of the story, the other kicks in to remind us that it’s not that simple. Actually, it even doesn’t feel like it’s one extreme after the other. It must be from a space of simultaneous and irreconcilable contradictions that change emerges.

Day 28: A plan is not your best bet

If you are creating something truly new in your life right now, you probably know the feeling of walking in the fog. If you were educated and socialised in “the West”, it could be that your habitual response to an unclear situation is to make an ambitious and/or detailed plan. And it could also be that you have struggled to keep up with that plan. The trick, then, is not to increase effort, courage or discipline. The trick is to check if you have other instruments available in your toolbox. A plan is not your best bet in uncharted territory.

One option to navigate in the fog is to train your sense of direction. This is your natural capacity to know something even though you cannot express it with words just yet. Actively using all your senses doesn’t mean you will lose your mind. It just means you will have used all the available data to corroborate information. The second instrument available to you is to take a step. This is the smallest possible move or action of the “new” that is real and safe enough to take right now. (Updating the plan doesn’t qualify as an action.)

Day 27: Creativity is…

Creativity is magnificence.

Creativity is salt and pepper for every day life.

Creativity is gamble.

Creativity is disturbance.

Creativity is unreliable.

Creativity doesn’t manage files.

Creativity doesn’t comply with strategic plans.

Creativity takes the entire operation to the next level.

Creativity empowers the owner of the idea.

Creativity changes the balance of power.

Day 26: The message that breaks the silence

Last Friday, I did stand in front of an adult audience and I improvised a song. To make matters worse: a traditional Swiss children’s song. But this is not yet the silly part of the experiment. The silly part is how serious I took it when I got stuck. Playfulness? Gone. Joy? Far from. Alert blankness? Nice idea.

Well, sometimes you win – and sometimes you learn. What I learned is that song improvisation needs gaps. You might think that when you sing a song, your voice is your only instrument. As a matter of fact, you have another one: the silence. It is the absence of sound that is needed to structure, emphasise and build momentum in a performance. It is active silence that you provide to your co-actors so that they can do their part, too. And, another useful learning for my future work: never is the attention of an audience higher than when you are about to break your silence. Silence is a very powerful instrument to place an important message.

Day 25: Is there anything you do every day that scares you?

Is there anything in your life you do every day that scares you? Personally, I am only scared of things I almost never do. Like standing in front of a group of people and improvise a song, for example. It is as terrifying an idea to me as my living in the Middle East was to some of my friends back in Switzerland. So, the question is: are we scared of something and therefore we don’t do it? Or, are we not doing something and therefore we are scared of it?

An aspiring entrepreneur and immigrant from China to the US, this guy here was scared of getting rejected by investors. He decided to find out if something could be done about it. What happens when we dare asking for what we need? Is it possible to overcome the fear of being rejected? He might never have convinced an investor to support his start-up, but his 100 days of rejection therapy turned into a successful business anyway. And the waitress he asked for a dance actually said “yes” (on day 54). Which, as it turns out, can be so much more terrifying than getting a “no”.