 Welcome to The Creative Life, a creative and collaborative production between ThinkTek Hawaii and the American Creativity Association. I'm Darlene Neuphoyd, your host, and our guest for today is Marilyn Schumann, coming to us from Seattle, Washington. Marilyn Schumann is an author, sought after speaker, thought leader, game developer, and creativity catalyst. Marilyn has quite a history with the American Creativity Association. She is a founding board member, past president, and presently serves on the board of directors. Probably, her most recognized book is Go, How to Speak and Act and Make Good Things, To Make Good Things Happen. Let's make some good things happen here and now, Marilyn, and get our discussion going. So to start out, just to help our viewers a bit, since there are so many dimensions to creativity and so many contexts, would you clarify your concept of creativity for our viewers and perhaps specifically your concept of creativity for today's conversation? Sir, creativity is what makes all kinds of things possible. It also is what helps us make challenges into improvements. It is a life force. It is looking at things to find what's new, what could be improved. It is very expansive and it needs to be nurtured. Nurturing being very important. I know that I've been in your workshops and I've had conversations with you and I know that you're very passionate about creativity and I know you also become so energized when anywhere that you are, when you speak about creativity and certainly can help others feel that way too. What got you started in developing your passion for creativity? I love that question. It started when I was seven years old. I grew up on a farm in the Midwest and my oldest brother, he was 10 and we were fixing a fence. We were adding a line of barbed wire across the regular fence to keep the cattle in and so I would hand him a piece of barbed wire and then he would bend it around the stake and twist it and I thought, oh, well, if I bend it before I give it to him, then we can go faster. So I bend it and I had it in the next stick that was bent and he said, oh, you're creative. Oh, wow. For my big brother to say I'm creative, that was the biggest, most expansive, most flattering, most exciting thing that I had been told at age seven. And so ever since then, I keep playing that in my mind, I'm creative, I'm creative. So two words, two seconds, a lifetime of a gift. And I mentioned that just because that says how quickly we can make a difference. Oh, that's really an interesting approach to that first, that first good feeling of creativity to have your brother be so intuitive to use the word creative in describing you can't help but think I wonder if you had not been so gingerly when you were bending those barbed wires, if he would have spoken the same, if there had been some kind of other situation. I've been through a lot of trouble together. How important then since you're talking about your brother and your personal experience, how important is your own creativity to you today? Oh, gosh, it's a life force. It feeds my soul. It inspires me. It pulls me up when I'm down. It causes me to look around and see what's there and also to see what could be there. I just, it's quite literally like it's in my bloodstream. And if it wasn't, I would be minimized, I would be diminished. You chose to use the word juicy in your title for today's session. What do you mean by juicy? I think I know. But what do you mean by juicy? Are we going to have something really curious to talk about here? Well, a juicy life is one that is outside the standards, outside, not only outside the box, there is no box, and you're leaving to have a concept of the box. You're just looking at, oh, what else could we do here? What's something that might be different that would be fun and or that would solve a problem or even prevent a problem, or simply be another way to do something maybe more efficiently or with less danger. I mean, thinking on the farm, we were always very conscious of challenges with danger. And it gives, it's almost like you have a new set of contact lenses and everything you look at has that perspective of, well, what could we tweak a little bit to make something better? I'm always pleased to hear someone say or hint towards doing away with the box, because I think the term think outside of the box is perhaps overused. And we know that we need to break down that box. But that leads me to see a question that came in for us, Marilyn. What are some tips for expanding your creativity? And I think you've already perhaps started to answer that question by saying that you have to think outside of the box. But the follow up to that question is also what blocks creativity? Well, number one, lots of people block creativity. And so creative people need to find other creative people who were a firm. And support their creative ideas. And as a, as a gross generalization, most everybody wants the results of creativity, but not everybody wants to support what it took to produce those results. And so a creative person would be well advised to find advocates. And they may have to be secret advocates, it depends on where you are. Some workplaces are just overwhelmingly creative, and you don't have to be careful about who you share your idea with or who presents your idea, but that's not necessarily the norm. And so when you're presenting your idea, give really careful thought to what are the best conditions that you could set up to increase the likelihood of the first presentation being successful. Because otherwise there may not be a second presentation. Marilyn, how do you, how do you recognize other creatives? And if, if that is so, how, how, how might you give us some examples? Or how might we, we enhance our methods of finding more creatives or those that would respect the concept of creativity? Well, first of all, just notice people around you. Who are the ones that people go to, if there's a problem that needs to be solved right away? Also in meetings, who's the one that has a little bit of humor added into something that's very serious? Who are the ones that, when you ask for an idea, they give you three or five or ten? Who are the people that affirm somebody else's creative idea as opposed to take that idea to the next meeting and present it as their own? And also to be really good advocates for ourselves so that we don't step into the lion's den with our treasured, very precious idea and put it out as a wrong beat. We are very careful with who and where and when we share ideas. And the bigger the idea is, the more important it is to be careful and wisely choose who to share it with. And actually, darling, that takes me to another point. And that is how we, how we use our language, how we ask questions. And one key element of that is, if you ask the question, well, I have an idea. Do you have time to listen to it? Well, number one, that's a yes, no question. And most of the time those generate a no. So you ask questions that no does not fit. So there are the who's, the why's, the when's, and the which, and the where. Those are the questions that move us forward. Like, who would be a good idea, who would be the person for me to share this idea with? Or in which meeting would it be best for this idea to be brought up? You're looking for information, not permission. And you're also looking for how to create the best situation, the best circumstances for your idea to be received. Let's flip that a little bit, because we know in reality, we don't have the luxury of perhaps participating in a meeting where everyone is open to creativity. Or perhaps they feel that they have an openness, but they don't demonstrate that. And might be using killer statements and saying that that just won't work. How do you convert those people to bring them to the other side, to the good side? Well, that's a really good question and that could take some time. However, what I would say is I had a situation where I was going to be presenting an idea and then the manager that I was presenting the idea says, oh, well, if you can convince X person, then we'll go ahead. And I said, no, no, no, you are talking about the one who is the greatest resistor. That's not where you start. You start with the ones that are most likely to be receptive. The ones that are recognized as idea champions, the people who like to have new ideas, not the people who love to shoot them down. And I once had a I was giving a presentation with several people, one of whom was an engineer and he was just emphatic that first of all, you have to hear from all the critics. I said, no, no, by that time, the idea has been dead. So never mind. No, you find the advocates and you also make requests when you find an advocate that is with you, you might ask them what ways they see for you to proceed most effectively. Can you think of a situation that was extremely difficult for you? You followed your pattern, you followed all your suggestions. And then there was an aha moment that turned turned the whole situation around. So by that I mean that you had someone perhaps with negative thoughts and presenting barriers and you use your strategies. And is there a particular strategy that emerges more often than others that you've used successfully? Well, one is to be very careful about how much attention do you give to the one who loves to be the shoot down person? And in one meeting we had really good momentum going and then this man stands up to make his comment. There was no need to stand, but he chose to stand. And then he said, well, I hate to play devil's advocate, but and I said, good, then don't. And I went on to somebody else. And so he didn't get to play the role he said he hated to play, which is his favorite. I'm looking, I'm glancing at another question or part of part of the previous question that's coming in. Why are creative limits essential to creativity? And then our center's parenthetically says, in other words, why does having unlimited creative freedom restrict creativity? Very interesting. Oh, it is. And actually, I'll just pop over to using creativity in writing for an example. When somebody says when a teacher, for example, says, OK, I want you to write a story. That's a big wide open total freedom idea. And it's hard to get started. But if you give the idea with a little bit of something to it, a little bit of structure is very freeing. Total freedom is very inhibiting. We have to get into something that we can take a hold of to move forward with. I remember being in one of my daughter's classrooms when she was very young, and you know how in in the lower level classrooms, there are all kinds of posters. And even through the grade, you'll see posters with key thoughts. And I was really pleased with this particular teacher and the effect she had on my daughter being about seven years old. And the teacher always and she did have this on her bulletin board, but she always remembered and brought the idea creativity with discipline because she in her mind, she just didn't want to remove all the barriers for the little ones. They still had some documentation they had to do. So what do you think about that creativity with discipline? How does that play out? I love it. It makes it even more efficient. And sometimes I've gotten frustrated in different presentations that people are offering. And they're being highly creative and creative and creative, but they don't create anything. And so the process is marvelous. But be clear about are you are you really wanting to just have the process which has this value or are you is there something that you want for an outcome? And if so, then you need to tame or structure or bring that those creative juices, if you will, into a bit of a direction because pure creativity. Gosh, we could do that for hours on end for days on end. And we wouldn't end up with anything but some really neat memories, perhaps, but a little bit of direct us into something that will produce some results. Yeah, so there there are those situations where or perhaps people that we have met or people that have the opinion, which is to me, somewhat of a myth. And that is that in order to be creative, you have to come up with something totally new to the world, to society. And, you know, I have some views, but you tell me yours, Marilyn. Oh, yes. So that's like saying you have to be the prize winner at the outset. But in reality, it could be that it's not the original invention or process that's most important. It's the one who tweaks it to make it incredibly more powerful or more efficient or more broad ranging in its impact. And so it also seems like that's a way to diminish people's creativity. It only counts if you do the great big breakthrough. It counts if it's creative. And who knows how can we ever trace how did some great breakthrough occur? It was through lots and lots and lots of processes, probably in conversations and reading and research and all kinds of different ways to get that information that produces perhaps a big idea and perhaps in addition or instead of the ones that made it so they tweaked it just a little bit. And that made it successful with the big public, as opposed to with a very small market. Not I suppose it's been a while back, but. In the in the American Creativity Association and many years ago in one of our conferences, we had the opportunity to be at 3M. I don't know if you remember that, Marilyn. And we were presented with a number of the 3M inventors, including the inventor of Post-it Notes. And I think when we discussed we being our group that had been invited, we found a commonality and that was that many of those inventors may not have started just as you explained from something completely new with an idea, but the idea for them was to break down whatever the it was they were working with into its parts and bring it back to a new conceptualization of something. Yes, yes. Well, actually, that takes me to another experience with the American Creativity Association, where Dr. David Tanner, who had like the 37 patents in the in the fiber field, and he was telling us about a woman, Stephanie Qualick, who was given she was a scientist and she was given the assignment to create a new family of fabrics, which is quite a challenge. And she was working on that. And that was Kepler. Wasn't that Kepler that she invented? Yes, but you're jumping my story. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, Marilyn. Well, you're right. You were so right on target with that because she was she had a concoction that was cloudy. And the people who were working with her said, no, no, it's got to be clear. And she proceeded with her cloudy liquid. And that did, in fact, produce Kevlar. So the bulletproof vests and all of that kind of thing did come from that. So, yes, you're right on. No, in our discussion, as we're talking about someone, you just mentioned that she she was told that it was cloudy. Maybe that's the difference, perhaps, between a creative individual and one that will just go along and take things as they hear them. That being that if if someone says you're working on something and it's cloudy and it's not going to turn into something, you just abandon it. But in her example, she did not and went on to to develop a life saving product that is still used to this day and will continue to be. And I suspect probably the fabric has been improved upon by by the sponsorship of that, which takes us to the word tenacity. What role do you think tenacity plays in creative development? It's essential. You look at the big big breakthroughs, you look at the people's history. And many of them have spent years and have been unsuccessful in lots and lots of experiments. But all of those experiments and experiences made it possible for the big breakthrough to come. And so in the in the moment when we are having these experiences and we're not necessarily thrilled with how how fast we're proceeding. That process is the pathway. We don't go from start to finish in one giant leap. We've got lots and lots of steps and all those little steps also may have little detours that create other possibilities. It's not necessarily just a single pathway to a single result. In what conditions do you think it's wise perhaps to share your ideas and creativity, your creativity or acts of creativity? That's a very important question. And I would say the number one rule is to be very careful and only to share with those that you trust. And there's a reason why they have NDA, non-disclosure agreements. People need to be protective of their ideas and protect them early on. And within that, if you don't have an advocate, if you're a very creative person and you don't have an advocate where you are, maybe that's not where you should be. Or maybe you can find an advocate in some other organization who would still be supporting your creative process, your development, your whole experience. But I would much rather have someone regret not having shared with just the right person to having them go ahead and share. And it was the very wrong person. When you lose your baby to somebody that doesn't love it, that's tough. That's really tough. We know and we read so much and we have colleagues that have life coaches. Do you view a life coach or someone that's coaching you as the same as an advocate? Or might they be able to be one in the same person? Perhaps that's a better way of asking the question. Yes, they certainly could be one of the same. However, if I have a goal to have my creativity take a new form or I want an advocate for this new game that I've just developed, a life coach is probably not a match for that. They might be supportive of me and my general work. But when it comes to specific things, and specific applications of creativity, I would want somebody or some buddies who have experience, who have passion, who have a very open mind and gets excited about them. I would not want to take my precious new wondrous idea to somebody who says, oh, yeah, next. And they've never really even gotten the concept of what it was. So you wouldn't even give a little nudge, nudge them along. Turn them around. That takes me to the question. I know you have two popular games. How on earth did you move from all the exciting things you do to developing games? And if I'm correct, the two games are Greenlight and Buffalo. Buffalo is the game that I've the first game that I created. And Buffalo stands for brain on fast forward. If you look up the diction in the dictionary, the word Buffalo means a popular hit or a success. And that's what I wanted for this game in terms of causing people to think of new ideas very quickly. And I've been I've been all about creative thinking for no, well, since I was seven, but more for decades. And I've heard people say, you know, you can't do anything creative if you're not really a creative genius or something of that sort. And I know, no, everybody can do this. It varies with how much they can do it, how fast and how breakthrough and so on. But my my intention was there are ways that you can be creative instantly. And so that was the purpose of the game and it still is. And people literally create breakthrough ideas in seconds. They amaze themselves. But what is the reason why it works is because our brains love novelty. And most of the time we borrow our brains with a same old same old. And so when you have a tool that is prompting your brain, is feeding your brain new ingredients from which to make a new concoction, I said, Yahoo, let's go. Wow, that's that's very helpful to think that we have a responsibility to not for our brain. There's a lot in that statement, actually. How would you like to be recognized by for your creativity? And by whom, when and where? Oh, well, the marketplace. But aside from that, or no, in addition to that, from we've got to have practical creativity in here, too. I'd like to be recognized as someone who recognizes others' creativity and helps them see it for themselves. And so in this conversation, I just request that people notice, catch yourself being creative and then do that creativity, find other people who support you in that. And then, biggest of all, present it, find ways and places and people whereby you can share your specific creative product or idea or process. And actually, at this point, I want to just pop over for a second to a situation where my seven year old six or seven year old nephew was touring with his brother, with his father, rather, a factory that where they had the chickens that were producing eggs and they had a place in their assembly line where the eggs went from one place to another and they had a high breakage and they couldn't figure out what the problem was. And this little guy said, you see that corner over there? Make that rounded instead of square up the problem, just like that. He didn't have the preconceived notions. He had fresh eyes, fresh eyes. Clearly, that's that's the magic of the little ones, isn't it? The fact that they do have fresh eyes and they are they haven't been tainted in many ways as we have. And we have to have to overcome that in our process of creativity and moving forward. Well, Marilyn, this has been a pleasure as always. And I hope our viewers have had some important insight and we hope the time that they spent with us offered them a perspective, enabling them to recognize their ability to be creative in their day to day living and to get their creative juices going. And to live in a juicy life, juicy life towards a juicy life. That's right. Look forward to that juicy life and as we move along. You've been watching The Creative Life on Think Tech, Hawaii with our guest creativity expert, Marilyn Schumann. Join us in two weeks for the next edition of The Creative Life. Until then, aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech, Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. 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