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Creative Rhythm

there are specific things that weaken do their tendencies, that that will help us if we take advantage of them. Help us be prepared for ideas when we need them most. And so in this part I want to talk about the basics of rhythm, the basics of creative rhythm, of building structure, specifically a kind of scaffolding or infrastructure in our lives for our creative process that undergirds our process that prepares us for those moments when we have to be brilliant. A two moments notice because that's what we do is creative growth. Unfortunately, a lot of times we expect creativity to happen in the cracks and crevices of our life. And that's when the assassins creep in, when we're winging it, when we're shooting from the hip that the assassins creep into our life and they begin to a rude or creative process. So there are five elements of creative rhythm that we're gonna talk about over the course of this section, and again, I want to reiterate this is really important because I think a lot...

of times when people have issues with talking about creativity and in any way system izing the creative process, they say, Well, you can't put the formula on my creativity. Well, of course not. Of course, you can't buy the formula and there is no equal input equal up a proposition. You don't put stuff in this end and out on the other incomes, a creative idea, but because we're humans, because we have, ah, certain there certain tendencies that we have there certain ways that we make sense of the world, sort of our hard wired to perceive our environment and turn that into meeting. There are certain things that we can do that the better prepare us for those moments. So I want to talk about these five elements of rhythm or hopefully gonna have some really good discussion about how these play out and then we'll kind of go from there to. The first element of rhythm is focus. Focus is all about how we define the work. It's how we define the problems we're trying to solve. And we talked about this earlier. We talked about the fact that sometimes we're not good at defining the edges, the beginning in the end, and so we get carried along by our work instead of stopping to define artwork. But our minds are wired to solve problems. That's what our minds do. Our minds are where the form patterns we have to identify what a meaningful pattern is. We have to help our minds understand what we're looking for if we want to be effective in our work and effective in coming up with ideas at a moment's notice when we need them. So just by way of illustrating this, I'm gonna under the most terrifying words ever uttered in the history of humanity. Let me show you a magic trick. I just learned. Okay, but let's do this. All right, so four cards, five cards on the screen. I want everybody choose. One card. Just one card. You have a card. Got it. You card. Okay, I'm gonna take the cards away with a shuffle them. Put four of them back up on the screen. How many people see your card? Nobody. Greatest magic trick ever. Actually, these air for entirely different cards and the ones that put up the first time. Yeah, but it illustrates an important point, right? First of all, it is a killer magic trick to show your friends straight. Walk around with this card in your pocket and do it. It's really killer, especially life. But, um, it illustrates important point, which is this I gave you a problem to solve. You were brilliant at solving that problem. You did it. You kept your card in mind. That was all. You had to do that as a single task that you had to do. You kept your card in mind for that 20 seconds. But in so doing, you ignored the context of the problem. You ignored all the other cards because I told you just to focus on the one card, right? If you give your mind a problem, your mind will obsess on that problem. Your mind will solve that problem. That's why dissonance is so insidious that because your mind starts trying to solve all these ancillary problems in the organisational environment at the expense of the actual problem you want to be focusing on. But you can also go too far with defining the problem to the extent that you become so obsessed with a problem that you ignore the entire context for the problem. So we need to have regular rhythms in our life of defining the problem when, um I actually trying to do right now. What is the problem I'm really trying to solve right now and then stepping back and saying this is the problem I think I'm solving still makes sense in the context of all of the work that I'm doing. Does this problem is this actually problem solving? Right. Um, I trying to sell something completely different now because we have a finite amount of focus in our world. Find my finding amount of mental energy to put towards solving problems and and when we to microscopically to find that the problems were solving, we sometimes ignore the context at the expense of the work we have to be defining stepping back, looking at the context, redefining. And that's that iterative process we talked about in the first section. But there are many enemies of focus, many enemies of engagement, many enemies of defining our work effectively on. And one of them is this dynamic. I call the ping and the peeing, which we I think the chat room handed out. Really, the ping is this perpetual pinprick in my gut that says something like, Did you check your email right now, or you could take your Twitter feed. Right now you should check your voicemail because maybe the president of the United States is calling you with a national security crisis, right? That's the level of, by the way, has never happened. That's the level of urgency that the Ping delivers. It's the sense that there's something that I need to get around to. There's something This is the life philosophy of the pain. Lately, there's something out there that's more important than what's in front of me. Something out there is more important what's in front of me. That's the life philosophy of the pain. And it has its living in this state, as Linda Stone called it, of continuous partial attention. I've always kind of year, but I'm always kind of somewhere else because they're fomo fear of missing out. There's this sense that there might be something out there that I need to be engaged with, rather than the things that from me, you think that's the most effective way to delve deeply into your problems and solve them. No, of course not. And some people rationalize this with the ping and they say, Well, you know that's me being created. That's me going out looking for stimuli. I'm going out and I'm doing all these things. But the problem is that we're never here. Were never with the problem. We don't abide in the problem we're trying to solve. Instead, we're constantly fractured and our mind can't gain traction because we're always jumping from thing to thing to think. I believe that technology is an extension of my capacity to accomplish my will. So I want to do something. I want to accomplish something. I reach the end of my means, and there's something I want to accomplish. Well, technology bridges, that gap, which is great, that's fantastic. And you what? That bridge is growing longer and longer over the last even decades of our lives, meaning that I get to the end of my will. There's something on a comedy Aiken Doom, or of that Now than I ever could before have more means of self expression, more means of connecting with others, staying in tune with what's going on in the world. All those things because of technology is an extension of my capacity to accomplish my will. That's great. We're learning a fundamentally new way of being human technology is changing. Our biology in some way through a Z we're finding from from research is changing the way we perceive the world. Now that's all fine and good. Except when I say technology is an extension, my capacity accomplished my will. Well, it's my will to be in the know all the time. It's my will to feel connected all the time. Everyone, it's my will to be comfortable. It's my will to be in through obtained. And so you know, we have more technology in our phone than the technology that we used to put people on the moon. And yet we use it to hurl birds at pigs all day, right when we get bored. Um, thank you very much. You know, there's Maurin, that graphic processor that is rendering all of those animations on your phone that what they used to send people to. It's amazing, you know, just for the graphics itself. But it's my will. To be entertained means that sometimes that's at the expense of mental cycles. It could be used for my work, So I'm distracted you Netflix. We talked about that on the break right it's I'm distracted by Netflix. You know, I have all these other options at my disposal. This is Ah ah, problem. We have to count it. We have to learn to deal with the pink just by way of illustration. Brilliant guy writer Merlin Man who thinks a lot about this stuff. Things like productivity, creativity. He I saw once where he calculated that if you check your email every five minutes over the course of an average work year, just an average work year between, say, 9 to 5 or whatever I think it was, you will check your email 24,000 times. Now that's not going into your email. That's not doing anything about it. That's just glancing to see if that little red dot is lit up on your phone to see if there's anything out there right breaking your focus. Something out there might be more important than what's in front of me 24, times. What do we do other than breathe 24,000 times a year, right. Many of us are checking our email. Some people were things like every five minutes. I mean, try like every 30 seconds I'm pulling out. We've got that phantom buzzing thing now Have you got experience that where you think your phone is buzzing? But it's really not? What is that? You know, it's It's our mind telling us something that there might be important when you pay attention right there is this kind of sense that I'm afraid I'm going to miss out on something. Okay, so 24,000 times I took this a step further, and I calculated that if every time you break your focus to go check your email or check your phone or check your Twitter feed every time you do that, let's say that it takes you 10 seconds just 10 seconds to regain the depth of focus that you had when you were initially engaged. 10 seconds. Now most experts, whether I would say anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes, some say as long as 20 minutes to really get back in and get your mind back in the frame that you had before you broke it. But let's say 10 seconds severely conservative. Over the course of an average year, you will spend 66.6 hours not doing anything about your email not going into your email or your Twitter feed or whatever, just glancing to see if anything out there is more important than what's in front of 66.6 hours. Now, how many of you struggle with feeling like you have time to do the work that's most important to you? Yeah, yeah, we all do. We all feel that pressure, right? We've done a couple of things there. First of all, 666 We have proven email is evil, so you're welcome. Congratulations. Take that to your manager. But the second thing is, we've proven that there are all of these hours that we spend distracted following the pink. We all want more time. We all feel under the gun to get things done and way. Think nothing of slicing a part time, 10 seconds at a time and giving you the way of the pain. Just saying I'm going to slice my time up and go do this. We have no idea what that's actually costing us in real costs, in terms of not just the physical time we have are the focus that we have, but extrapolate that to the amount of value that we're not creating because we're constantly distracted. How many? How little systemic thinking are we doing in our life? Because we're constantly distracted? We're not pulling together these these dynamics now. People have always said, since the beginning of time, people have said, You know, the printing press, the world's going to hell, you know? Now somebody in Germany can read something that was written in England. Oh, this is terrible, right? Or locomotives? People were not meant to go 50 miles or whatever it is that people have always said that stuff. But I think we're learning a fundamentally new way of being human. This is unlike anything we've ever experienced before. I mean, we're approaching something that could be called ah, missions like I know what's happening around the world at the moment snow that used to take me a day before that. It took a couple weeks. I know instantly there's an uprising in the country. Poom. I'm there. I know it right, my friend, you know, have some life event boom. I know it immediately. So it's this. It's the the infrequent and irregular returns that keeps us coming back. It's like, well, once out of every four or five times or something really cool there. So we just constantly check. We keep going back. Has us divided divides our minds, prevents us from delving deeply. So we have to learn to tame the ping if we want to be effective. So couple of strategies for that one, that one. Ah, group that I worked with when they would do lunch meetings. That was really kind of brilliant. They would do a cellphone stack, which meant when we go out to lunch meeting everybody, stacks there fell in the middle of the table, the 1st 1 to grab their from pays. The bill comes out of their budget. It's kind of brilliant. Another guy that I saw was somebody it south by Southwest and create what you call a cellphone sleeping bag, which is this little thing. You stick your phone into just to kind of remove it as a temptation, because even if you sit it over there somewhere, you're always kind of thinking. I wonder what's going on over there right now, right? So you put it in. You can't see it when it words and beeps and lights up in all that. That's just kind of we have to have. Technology is not bad technologies. Great extension in my capacity accomplish my will. It gives me platforms for expression. All that's wonderful. But we have to have times of disconnecting, of processing, of thinking, systemically of delving deeply into our work in a focused way. Okay, so we have to learn to deal with the Ping if we want to be effective. One way to do that is to define our work by establishing challenges on challenges of very specific problem statements. These are questions that were trying to answer in order to be more effective at drilling down on what we're really doing, What problem I really trying to solve. And we're talking about very specific questions. So there are two parts of any creative project any creative work. There are actually two very distinct parts that we have to deal with. Um and ah ah, lot of times we confused these, and that's where a lot of problems and tension and frustration and creative work comes from. There's project strategy, and there's creative strategy, and those are two very distinct things. Projects Strategy is answering the five W's who, what when where? Why, Right. So who are we doing this for? Who's going to experience it? Um, who is a stakeholder in this project? Could be a client. Could be a customer. Whatever the coup is going to be the stakeholder here. What? What? What? What problem Of my being tasked with solving physically. What is it that I'm trying to do here? When are there any time parameters on this, right? When is it due? What are the expectations? Related? The timing. When is it gonna be utilized? If I'm creating something that's gonna be used five years from now, that's gonna create a different set of parameters for how I'm thinking about the project. Right. Where? What's the context for the work? How is it gonna find form? How is it? How are people gonna interact with it and why? What's the deeper purpose for this work? What is it we're trying to accomplish through this work? Okay, So what's the outcome? Not just what is the thing, but what is the outcome? What's the value that's being created here? Who? What? When? Where? Why now? Pretty obvious. But you would be shocked to know how many creatives and organizations jump straight to how they get a project. And the first thing they ask is how we're gonna make this happen, right? They haven't stopped. Ask who am I doing it for? What exactly is it were even being tasked with creating here? You know, what is the value that's being created? When is it gonna be experienced? Where? So what is the context for it and why? Why are we doing this? Is there a better thing we could be doing other than this? Why are we even doing it? What is the deep through line for this work? People don't do that. They don't stop to define their work that way, and they jump straight to how they jump straight into doing the project. So it creates a lot of frustration. That hallway we talked about earlier with the gaming stuff that you dio you're moving down the hallway. If you jump in halfway down the hallway and you just have to start making stuff, I'm just going to do it without stopping to define what it is you're doing. There would be a lot of redundancy, frustration, duplication of effort. And that's what I see in organizations, especially with whether a lot of silos working on the same project at the same time. Tones of duplication, of effort, frustration. They're working on different problems because they haven't defined them effectively, right? And so you get close to the end of the project and you realize we have wasted hours and hours and tons of effort and tons of creative energy solving problems nobody needed to solve because we haven't stopped to define these five w. And then once you get a really clear project strategy, meaning we can effectively all sit down with a brief and say, I know exactly what these are, By the way, this works for your photographer. If you're a designer, I don't care what you do. If your writer I don't care what you're doing. If you're doing it in the service of a client, you're standing in the gap. For a client, you have to start with these five questions. First, you have to begin with who, what, when, where, why, and drill those down with your client and understand the context. And once you've established that, say listen, Long hallway again. This is the first stage we're gonna drill those down. And once we draw them down, it's gonna be a giant, hermetically sealed door that's gonna drop and we're not gonna go back, right, Because I need to start working on this and you start working on how, which is the creative strategy. So once I have established the project strategy that provides the framework, then for me to jump into creative strategy and say Great, now I've got my parameters. I know the problems. I want my mind, the soul. I've defined the challenge. I'm trying to help. Now I can actually delve into and develop a creative strategy for how I might want to accomplish that. Okay, we don't do this. We're terrible at this because as creatives, we think we'll just let me roam free. Give me the project. Let me go do it right. That's the worst thing we can dio. We have to be defining our work if we want to be effective in creating. So this spending, even a day, even a full day really defining this will save you days and days and days and days or maybe weeks and months have been having. The project is of effort on the back end of doing this. If you can drill it down at first, I see a lot of head. Nothing. That's good, right? So this is what it means to define your work by establishing challenges, Very specific problem statements. The challenges are gonna live over here. Right? So once you've defined this, let's say you're creating. So what would be like a who in your world, like, who would be somebody would create a project for a title in there, working on maybe a new I P. Okay, the world has never seen or ever heard it before. Okay. All right. So that would be somebody you would be creating something for. You work visually developing it of what it looks like, you know. Okay. And who would be the client for you? Who would be the customer for you directly would be their creative directors. Art directors depends. Okay. And then the customer. So when you're solving the problem, who's the end customer for your work? Um, players, the type of players. Okay. And is there a profile? That would be typical? Who would that be for you? Well, you got all types. You've got age. You've got you know, gender. You've got, um, fans of a certain type of genre. Okay, so you might say, for example, we're creating this for an 18 year old male, right? Who until the making is that I don't know your industry. Really? Who would be like a demo that you would shoot for? Uh, depends on the time. So let's say like an RPG. A fantasy role playing game. Got generally male, ages 18. You know, depends. You know, if it's the platform as you mentioned, is it gonna be mobile? Is there gonna be on the console? Is it for hard core gamers? Is it for casual gamers? You know, that dictates the leg. So let's say male 18 to 35. Hard core gamer, right? Who's very experienced with gains like there are hardcore gamers what they do, they know they'll know a terrible game the moment they fire it up. They'll say, this is not This isn't good, right? Right. That is gonna be very different than developing a game. For this is obvious. Ran, who is developing a game for ah, 5 to 9 year old girl who is really in the strawberry shortcake and once the pot bubbles and learn how to count, right? I told you, Don't do that. I know, but it's a very different thing, and that's obvious. It's really obvious. But your mind doesn't necessarily know that, right? So just getting really specific about these things, because once you get specific about that, then you're starting your mind down the track of thinking. Okay, well, what is it that these people are into? Whether the kinds of things they're reading on, we'll talk about that a bit. We talk about some other things they're reading or they're experiencing they're doing, or like, How could I pull all of that together to help me develop this creative strategy? The more specific you get, the more clear of a picture you give your mind, the easier it is for you to make that leap, the how which is. Okay, let's develop the Korean strategy. What is that? What flows out of what's the obvious thing? It flows out of having to find these effectively that we're not. I mean, sometimes we just kind of get carried along by the work. So once you have this as a document or whatever, it is, even if it's just in your mind. Your photographer, right? You're thinking OK, What is this for? This photo shoot? What am I really trying to know? Know what? I really trying. No, no. What am I really trying to do here? Keep drilling down that you figure out what is the thing I'm really trying to do? And then only then you can delve into creative strategy. We don't have the luxury of unlimited time. Unlimited focus, unlimited energy. That's why this is so important. If we're just an artist out there making our way in the world, I'm gonna make whatever we want whenever we want. We have a patron or whatever. Fine. Do anything you want. That's totally fine. Right? But if you're creating on demand, if you're in an organization of clients, you have customers. You don't have that luxury. So we need to get really good at the front and it drilling this down. Okay, I'm not angry. I know. I sound like I get for us because there's so many organizations where they're not. They're not doing this right or we're creative as a business owner. So important, especially you have employees. So important to drill this down. Absolutely critical. Do that. Okay, so that's the defining challenge. Is defining very specific problems you're trying to solve Now the next step for the next practices to refine that by establishing what I call the Big Three. And the Big Three is the set of three problems that are keeping you awake at night. These are the three challenges that you're trying to solve. You need traction on, but you haven't yet figured out exactly what this How is so? You've got your problem statement, but you haven't figured out how you're gonna actually solve that problem. So you're gonna write them down those problems, statements, you're gonna put them on an index card, you're gonna keep them in your wallet. You keep in your purse, you're gonna keep them in your planner or your notebook wherever they keep him on the white board. Why am I saying? Don't put them, you know, in your phone, you know, and listen, I'm a tech junkie. I keep everything and, like, ever know and army focus. I'm a tech junkie. Okay? I give a plug for them. I keep everything in my phone. I do. I don't do that with my big Three. Why primacy in recency, your mind is wired. Remember the first thing you saw in the last thing you saw? If something is in front of you all the time, you're prompting your mind to be looking for solutions, right? Why science? Now it's your mind is trying. You're keeping these things in front. Your telling your mind this is important to pay attention to. This is your going through bookstores. You're sitting down with your spouse or significant other as you're going through your day. You're watching television. You're watching Netflix, your hurling birds at pigs. Whatever it is you're doing, your prompting your mind to be looking for solutions to those problems. Because there in front of you all the time, I used to keep them, you know, on my phone in the note, taking app or whatever. By the time I type my pass code, I opened up the app I navigated to the right folder. I completely forgot what is even trying to dio eso decidedly low tech keeping on an index card, the three problems. And by the way, if it's too, that's fine. If it's four, that's fine. You want to many more of that, but not. But if you leave the team, keep this problems on the white board, right, Put them up in front. Say, these are the three things we have to find a solution to keep them in front of you. Keep them in front. Your team, your prompting your mind to be looking for solutions instead of sitting down in the meeting next Tuesday and saying, Okay, who has ideas? You've been keeping these problems in front of people and you're prompting them to be looking. Okay, so that's the Big three. And I have been, by the way, this is the single practice that I get emails from people around the world saying Thank you so much for telling me to do this for real. This is the thing that has most revolutionized a lot of people's lives because they have this massive problems they're trying to solve, but they haven't really refined. These are the three I need to really devote focus and attention to, so it's huge on Ben related. To focus, try the cluster your work by establishing adjacency. What this means is like, for example, in a retail environment. You have this thing called intelligent adjacent, which means if you're buying a toothbrush and you also know you need toothpaste, you don't go from the toothbrush section over to where they keep the watermelons to buy toothpaste, right. They tend to keep the toothpaste right next to toothbrushes. Why intelligence decency is right. There is right next to it, and so you're likely to pick both up at the same time they go together. The same thing applies to our life into our work. We tend to try to do a little bit of cognitive work, a little bit of idea work, a little bit of brainstorming, ideation work, and then we'll do five minutes of that and then we'll do an email and then we'll do a phone call and then we'll go to a meeting will come back. We'll do more minutes of ideation, you know, thought time and then that's interrupted by some of these stepping into our office, interrupting us and and it's this constant task switching that we have to do, and we pay a task switching penalty every time we do that. When we go from thing to thing to thing and you are biology's not wired for that to go from thing to thing to think and to be able to delve deeply in and think and process the way that we need to to come up with really valuable ideas. So when I say cluster, you work by establishing adjacency, What I mean is trying to figure out how can I work My highly conceptual work into blocks of time said. I'm doing a lot of it all at the same time. And then how can I cluster more of my sort of frenetic, you know, bouncing from thing to thing work together so that it's not constantly interrupting your deep thought time. Now a lot of people say, Well, my boss won't let me do that. My manager will let me do that. I can't You know. It's not possible for me to do, and my response to that is I understand. I totally get that. There's some organizations other more forgiving than others because you're not being paid for time. You're being paid for value, right? So a lot of organizations say, Hey, you've proven to us that this actually helps you create value, so that's fine. Take two hours in the afternoon of uninterrupted time. That's great. Do that. If you need to do that. Some organizations don't do that. They're not as flexible. So if your work is important to you, then take the time to do what's necessary to do good work. What that means is you might have to go into work at seven o'clock in the morning to have an uninterrupted hour of conceptual time. You made it to block off two hours in the evening on Sunday night to do to do work outside of your work hours. If it's important to you, it needs to get done because that hour or two hours may actually prepare you to me being both more efficient and effective during the other 50 hours that you work that week or 40 hour whatever it is, whatever your work week is, right. So by doing what's necessary for you, the position yourself to be effective. You're actually reclaiming a lot of that in the rest of your week, instead of just expecting it to happen in the cracks and crevices to try to cluster your work as much as you can by establishing adjacency um, focus is a big deal. It is. I mean, you do any of you feel like you struggle in any way with focus? Yeah. Brennan. Yeah. There's new things that come in all the time. And it's like you said, Sometimes I'll be doing something and something that was really important to me. Somebody would come up or so an email come in all sizes two hours later and I'm like, Whoa, that really important thing. I just totally what I got so sidetracked like I'm focused on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and that's the thing. It's what was immensely important to you an hour before all of a sudden is on the back burner because something more urgent has come up. You know that, I think, is that word. Apparently margin is really not, but it's more. It's more urgent to someone else. Sure, Yeah, because people are depending on you, right? Not that sort of the most important thing in your world. Right there is the the I think it was Steven Covey matrix thing of Uhm I'm going totally botch this right. But there is urgency and importance are the two lines and these are things that are urgent and important. These are things that are important but not urgent. I'm getting this all backwards. So just so you know, this is not the way it really went. There are things that they're not important and not urgent. They're things that are not important but urgent. And obviously the things that are urgent and important have to get done, right. So those are the things that you're going to spend. The organization is gonna come screaming at you, saying this is important. Then you have to get it done right away, right? And that's true. It's and it's very, very much the case. There are things that they're important, but they're not urgent. Those are the things we tend to neglect. Those are the things that we think. Well, I can put those on the back border because things like cluster in your time defining your work, although they're very important, but they're not necessarily urgent. You can get by for a while without doing them, and it's not gonna create a problem for you. But eventually it will catch up with you. If you're not doing these things, so you have to do these things as well. Obviously not important, not urgent. Why are we even doing that? This is like playing angry birds and checking Twitter right like you don't really have to do. Those things were not important. They're not really urgent. Typically, unless it's a function of your job, you manage social media or something, but but there's nothing wrong with it. It's just that you shouldn't let it get in the way of your work. Of course, not important but urgent. This is where many creatives and many organizations fall down. It's the little stuff that are urgencies within the organization that somebody finds to be important. And so they come to you and they say This has to get done right away, and so you jump on it at the expense of this other stuff that needs to get done. We only have so much focus, so much time, so much energy to go around. So we spend our time doing all these things that aren't really important to our work, but their urgent that somebody else and we do them. So the better we get as an organization having these conversations, the less endemic this will be and the more we can focus on the work that's really urgent and really important, because we have to do that and also on the important work. That's maybe not as urgent, but it's important things like developing capacity, taking time to think, generate ideas in the way that we won't be up against the gun later. So that's that. The urgency thing is a focus killer. Absolute especially not not important and urgent things. Do you guys have similar experiences with Focus happens in development all the time. I mean, that's where you get a good project manager and they they're your watchdog, you know, don't they'll help filter love it up to a lot of the team members. Um, but for me, I like to use rituals in my day, you know? So I usually have, like, a routine I got through. And so, um, if I'm not, if I need to get down to the urgent, important stuff which is creating and really focusing, that's when I put on the headphones, turn on the music and I can't hear I can't get distracted. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Focus. It is one of the issues that I think everyone seems to have. But sometimes I think that by losing focus for a brief second in thinking about another side project, it kind of starts another creative process. My brain, that I can revisit later, you know, have to snap back. We have to stand back. That's right. But the problem I don't think it's all evil, is what I'm trying to say. Like being a little bit scatterbrained, not Scatterbrain. No, it's not. It's absolutely not. But the problem is, when it comes at the expense of your focus on the work, you have to get done right. Scott Belski, who started Be Hands and radical, Making ideas happening. Call. Just think he has. This thing called the Project Plateau is absolutely brilliant, he says. People creative to get really excited by the project that first and then they hit this kind of plateau where they're not getting the same kind of returns that they got in the beginning. There's not that initial surge of excitement, and so what they do is they jumped to a new project. They start a new project instead of dealing with one that they're working. I figure out How do I get through the plateau and continue on. Instead, they get kind of bored with it, and they jumped to a new thing. And that's that's a symptom of fractured focus. It's because sometimes the reason you hit that plateau is because I've kind of solved the problem solving. But now I'm realizing it's a different problem. But I haven't defined that yet, and we don't have certainty around the problem we're trying to solve. It could be the motivating to be frustrating. And so it's this pressure of one. Don't really know what to do with this. I'm gonna go do something. I know how to dio. I'm gonna jump the tracks and go do something else. Start a new thing. I'm terrible. We'll talk about this a little bit. I am terrible at this. I am such a drifter. I bounce from idea, idea idea. I have to discipline myself to say not until I finish or I'm gonna abandon this all together and go on to something else. That's fine, too. There's a time you quit, but you can't be bouncing from thing to thing and have all these half completed projects in your world. It zaps your focus zaps your energy. Absolutely, yes, it's interesting. We're getting some comments in the chat room that I wouldn't say that passing the blame. But I totally understand the culture that they're describing where it's other people's urgency. Yes, what is what's stopping them from focusing on Going to go Blue is saying it's other urgencies is a huge obstacle for me because then I end up having to pull all nighters for deadlines, etcetera on a wag 6 to 7 says, My last workplace was lived in a constant state of emergency, and I think we all recognize that that's what pulls focus, I think, absolutely and and listen, there are some very unhealthy organizations out there. I mean, there are some organizations that are that are in need of urgent care or hate, like emergency room type stuff, because we're not talking about process because we're not building rhythm. We're not building practices into our life to prepare us. Instead, everybody in the organization operates on the whim of one person who makes a decision, and that then trickles down through the entire organization, and somebody ends up spending all weekend trying to fix something that we should have talked about three weeks ago. That's why a lot of the work that I do is actually working with companies and helping to figure out What does this process need to look like so that we don't end up at the state of emergency every single time? There are always gonna be emergencies. That's always gonna happen. There's always gonna be a client. Circumstances gonna change. Context is going to change, right? Something is going to happen at some point that's going to require somebody to stay late or work over the week. It's going to happen. It can't be the norm. It cannot be so for creatives and organizations alike. I advise people you need to have a break. The glass strategy right? What that means is, and we're getting a little bit off the rails. But I think it said it was important because it's focused thing. I think it's a place where people feel the most tension organizationally that time, which will talk about as well. But if most buildings by code, they have to have fire extinguishers, and this fire extinguishers typically are behind glass, and what does it say on the glass? Says Break in case of emergency. Great. You don't break the glad you'll just go through and say, I think I want to play with fire extinguisher cheek ray and you break the glass you played. No, it's for emergencies only. Most organizations are operating on such thin margins of focus, of time, of energy that they have no room for those emergency. So it comes at the expense of the people involved. I always tell organizations, Listen, you will have emergencies. It will happen at some point. You're going to come up against the wall. You're gonna be maxed out at some point because of unforeseen circuit. Don't let it be because you weren't prepared. Let it be because of unforeseen circumstances. But when that happens, you need to have a break. The glass strategy meeting. You've got a budget set aside that is untouched, and it's for hiring freelancers. It's for research. It's for going back and redoing things that need to be done over again. Whatever it is, you've got all of this here on the side that never gets touched. But every year it's in the budget and it's going to be there because we need to have that strategy for when there is an emergency. The problem is, most organizations not only don't have that, because if they did have it, they would just take advantage of it and just use it right away like Oh, there's a marginal emergency will use it or they are not. They're not structuring their systems so that they don't have ever get to that point. They're operating on razor thin margins, which is not the way to do your best work. Definitely that a wags 6 to 7 says prevent fires. Don't constantly put them out and always attack the nearest fire first. Do you agree with that? I agree completely. I mean, you can spend your entire time putting out brushfires. Meanwhile, there's a terrible force fire over the next hill, right? And you're thinking you're doing great work as you're putting all of these brush fires, but you're not solving the source of the problem, which is this fire that's over the hill that keeps speeding the fire that you're putting out. You have to attack the core of the problem and many organisations. The problem is that we're not a having these conversations, so we don't we haven't defined our work effectively. So we get pretty far into the process. And then somebody says, Wait a minute. Why are we doing that? Let's do this thing instead. Somebody with authority. And when that happens, we have to. Everybody has to pivot. We have to do something completely different. And all that work is just wasted. It's all you know it goes into. I call it the creative landfill. Hey, it all goes into the creative landfill never to be revisited because we haven't been preparing ourselves along the way again. The absence of limitation is the enemy of art. We need limitations. We need structure. We need to have these conversations early. We need infrastructure to support our creative process individually and organizationally. So all this has to happen in the context of teams as well as individually. Do you know what I can see? I can see Ah, whole team just watching this workshop and sitting around and getting on the pain, That same page about that Break the glass, so Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I work with things, we do, we have this very specific conversations about their circumstance. Right? So it's let's get very specifically into. Let's talk about whether it's tension points. Are you absolute? This is a major issue, major issue, because we are all at the whim of some decision maker. Everybody is whether it's a client. We're at their mercy, worth the whim of whatever decision they make. The wind blows one way, and they say we're gonna completely change the strategy. Well, I get caught up in that. If I have not been preparing myself along the way, I'm gonna fry. I'm gonna I'm gonna burn out, so thank you. All right, so that's focus. Sort of. That's focus. The second element of rhythm is relationships. There's a myth out there of the loan innovator. The loan created the Lone Ranger. You know, I'm gonna doctor about that. I'm gonna go out. I'm going to create the next IPad in a cabin in South Georgia, and I'm gonna come out and say, Look, what I made to the innovation is not a solo sport. Creativity is not a solo sport. It's the collective grasp for the next. Even those people that we look at and say Wow, look at that Brilliant invented, a brilliant, creative, a lot of those people. If not most of those people have networks of others in their life that are fueling their creative process, that air inspiring them that are challenging them. People who are maybe doing similar kinds of work that are challenging and up their game that they can bounce ideas off. We need those kinds of people in our world. But the more successful we become over time, the easier this that close ourselves off the others and to become our world becomes a smaller and smaller set of concentric circles. Or it's easy to only have relationships of obligation, like Aunt Mildred wants to have tea or convenience like, Well, I work with these people, so I'm just around them all the time. But we're not intentionally seeking out relationships that are inspiring that air stimulating their challenging us to go to another level or worse. And I talk about this. A lot in the new book Die Empty were connected to others, but we're not doing it in an authentic way, so we're not doing it in the way that's actually helping our work. Instead, we're glossing over conflict, right? We're trying to put the conflict beneath the surface rather than bring you down, talking about so couple of strategies to help us with relationships. The first is to start with I call circles. And a circle is a group of 5 to 7 people that get together every 5 to 7 weeks or so. And you're gonna ask three questions in the context of a Circle Number one. What are you working on right now? So what work are you doing that's important to you? Let's talk about that. Number two, what can we help you with? So, based on what you know about the people in this circle, what problems are you trying to sold that you would like for us to dialogue with you about and and And how might we be able to bring our unique perspective and expertise to the problems you're trying to sell? The third question and this is I think probably the most important question in the context of a circle is what is inspiring you right now. What is it that you're seeing your noticing your experience? What's inspiring? What's fueling your fire right now? What is really firing you at putting the fire in your belly? Three fires in the same sentence. What is firing you up? What's putting the fire in your belly? That's causing you to be excited about your work or excited about the world. Excited about ideas? What is the idea that you're fixating on? Let's talk about that. And then let's talk about how to apply that to the work that we're doing. Okay. It's a great way to stay fueled. Many of the things that have gone into my stimulus cue, the things that have informed my work have come out of asking somebody else. I respect what's inspiring you right now. What do you see? What do you know? The same, Um, what's what's putting a fire in your gut? Okay, so that's a circle. And again, it's every 5 to 7 weeks if you're into the organization, by the way, try to do this inside the context of his organization, but do it with people you don't normally interact with. So get people from other divisions, other or other parts of the organization, get together and talk about these things. A lot of times, you'll find similar conversations are happening in different parts of the organization, and there's a lot of duplicated thought and effort going on, you have no idea was going on. And then you can start talking about ideas and inspiration. And what do you guys talk about? It creates all of this interesting dialogue, and there I say, synergy inside the organization. When that happens, a lot of cross pollination that wouldn't otherwise happen. So this could be a great tactic within an organization. But in your individual life, if you're a photographer, if your designer pulled together other people and ask them about their work, ask them what they're working on, asking how you can help and ask them what's inspiring them. The second strategy is what I call a head to head and head had. It's similar to a circle in a way, but it's pulling together one other person. So the criteria the I use is, if I could see inside of someone's notebook, you who is the person I would want to see in their notebook to see what they're thinking, how they're processing the world. That's the person that I want to be my head to head because I wanted somebody respect to me whose work I respect, and you're gonna get together with this person, however, often makes sense for you, so it could be every month. It could be a couple months, whatever it is. But you're gonna get with this person. And when you get with them, the goal is you're gonna bring something to the table you've learned you've seen you've experienced. You're gonna prepare. Ah, kind of teaching for the other person. Here's something I've learned about since the last time we got together. Here's how that's been changing the way I perceive my life in my work. So think about it's kind of like preparing a little mini Ted talk. I'm not gonna get up on the stage and present to them, and it's gonna be over lunch or coffee. But you're presenting something that you're actually teaching to them an idea, a concept. They're gonna do the same thing for you. So if they're from a different field or whatever, they're gonna come to you and say, Hey, here's something cool I've learned. Here's how this is applying to my work And here's what I think about. Here's why it's important and all this stuff, right? And then you're gonna have a dialogue about how each of those ideas applies to the work that you're both accountable for. Now. Why is this important first alive people everything right now, like I barely have time to see my family. And now you're telling me, Build all these other relationships and, well, yes, and these relationships are going to create capacity in the other areas of your life. All right. They're gonna fill your well so that when you have to have an idea, you're gonna be better position better prepared to do that. Maybe that will take you 20 minutes or 1/2 hour as opposed to three hours or four hours. Because you've been spilling your well. You've got lots of things at your disposal. And not only that, but you've been having conversations about ideas and about how they apply to your where you been doing that with other people in the context of circles and head to heads. So it's about efficient. Effective is not just efficiency in your life. In your works, we all need other people. When you stay connected okay with other people, choose people who will challenge you. Choose people who maybe you don't always understand because maybe there. So don't don't shoot for the person that will make you feel smart. In other words, you for the person who will make you feel dumb sometimes. And you have to ask for clarification when you have these head to heads tremendously, tremendously powerful practice.