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"Creativity requires an open mind...A creative process comes from displacing, disturbing, and destabilizing what you (think you) know." - Kyna Leski

A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.

This week I started Kyna Leslie's The Storm of Creativity, a study of the art and practice of creativity. "Create," she says, "comes for the Latin creāre. It means to make, produce, or cause to grow. In other words, when something is created, it comes into existence. This means that it is something new."

She observes that the first step in creating something new is unlearning the preconceptions we hold about what we want to create. "If your starting point is to name and identify potential solutions before unlearning, it will unlikely to lead to anything creative or outside what you already know."

I find her insight to be assuring. During these frightening times, times when reports of threats to our most basic ecological and democratic systems dominate most newsfeeds, it's important to remember that new ways of working, learning and living together will be that: new. Our opportunity now is to unlearn assumptions that clearly don't work.

Here's a few new learnings I plucked from the firehose this week

Happy Friday.

Personal Development
10 rules for working under pressure from a graphic prop designer

"For Welsh graphic prop designer Annie Atkins, the little things are big business. She’s designed quirky and pleasing everyday objects to fill the backgrounds of films and TV shows, including Wes Anderson’s stylish 'Isle of Dogs' and 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' Here she shares her 10 rules for working under pressure." - We Present

Sketchbook: Working Under Pressure. A Manifesto by Annie Atkins

Learning
Robert Poynton on why we need to hone our ability to improvise

Robert Boynton and a friend at play. On his website he says that he thinks of play and work as complements, not opposites.

"Such a complex world demands an improvised response. Even in theory, there could never be a script — all the money and all the computing power in the world could never produce one. Things are far too complex for that. The world, even our little bit of it, changes faster than we can track. Since everything is interconnected, it is unpredictable, and always will be. Our attempts to break it down into manageable pieces are of limited use, because wholes — like families, organisations or people — have properties that don’t lie in the parts.

"Yet somehow we cope. Prosper even. We succeed in ways we can’t imagine and get results we don’t expect for reasons we couldn’t anticipate. Though we rarely tell the story like that afterwards.

"We are, in fact, naturally good at creative adaptation and there is a substantial measure of it in all that we do. We flex, respond, adjust, re-adjust, amend, re ne, tailor or tweak what we are doing all the time. In short, like all living things, we are capable improvisers." - Robert Poynton

Book excerpt: Embrace the Unexpected

Book: Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life)

Advice
"Make your own bible."

Pages from one of Austin Kleon's "commonplace books"

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

How We Live
How to "lessen political polarization, improve motivation and performance in school and work, combat racism in our communities, and enhance health and well-being".

"In Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, Stanford University professor Geoffrey L. Cohen applies his and others’ groundbreaking research to the myriad problems of communal existence and offers concrete solutions for improving daily life at work, in school, in our homes, and in our communities. We all feel a deep need to belong, but most of us don’t fully appreciate that need in others. Often inadvertently, we behave in ways that threaten others’ sense of belonging. Yet small acts that establish connection, brief activities such as reflecting on our core values, and a suite of practices that Cohen defines as 'situation-crafting' have been shown to lessen political polarization, improve motivation and performance in school and work, combat racism in our communities, enhance health and well-being, and unleash the potential in ourselves and in our relationships." - Author's Website

Author's Website: We Live in Enormously Divisive Times.

Related Interview: The Science of Belonging and Connection and Academic Success

Branding
How relationships between brands and people are changing — and why it matters

A spread from the book What is post-branding? How to Counter Fundamentalist Marketplace Semiotics. The book is based on the premise "that there must be more than one way to design communication relevant to processes of developing collective identities. There must be a different way to promote identification that isn’t predatory and exploitative."

Regular readers, colleagues and friends know that my interest in branding is not in selling people things that they don't need, but ideas that they do.

So I noticed when two related articles recently found their way to my screen. The first is by Umair Haque, a writer I usually associate with watchdog warnings about the fragility of democracy and civilization. His observations about the maturing role of branding in our culture are welcomely thoughtful.

"Organizations — most of them — are here to last. Not that many are just in it to sell out tomorrow, though some, of course are. But the good ones? They’re trying to build foundations that last, in a world that’s turning into quicksand. The answer to this is to remember that tomorrow’s customers — young people and even younger people — want a better future. Desperately and powerfully. They want a better future more than they want the old stuff, in fact, which is why they’re barely interested in the orthodox messages of brands, or even entire categories of the economy, like luxury — they eschew climbing the old consumerist ladder of status as the only point of life. It’s for those hearts that tomorrow’s brands must aim, with the arrows of purpose, truth, and meaning." - Umair Haque

Article: What Is a Brand in the 21st Century, Anyways?

The second is an interview by Steven Heller with Jason Grant of Inkahoots Design Studio and Oliver Vodeb from RMIT School of Design. They are the authors of What is Post-Branding?, an exposition of the ideological underbelly and real-world impact of branding as traditionally practiced, and a framework for a critical alternative to it.

"We define the essence of post-branding as designing 'collective identity that can create relations which include the interdependencies, needs and desires of a broad constituency, rather than the exclusive priorities of a minority corrupting power.' And we lay out a framework with three main dimensions and corresponding principles as a strategic counter to branding’s totalizing, predatory ideology. These dimensions are: 1) transparency and open-source principles; 2) participatory design approaches, and; 3) diversity and commoning. The ideas themselves aren’t new, but using them to replace branding’s exploitative principles can be radical." - Jason Grant and Oliver Vodeb

Article: The Daily Heller: Is Post-Branding a Thing?

Communications, Persuasion
The truth isn't loud enough. How to use the science of story building to move hearts and minds for the public good

Ann Christiano is the Director and Annie Neimand was Director of Research at the Center for Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida.

"The corporate sector has long taken advantage of science to market products from tobacco to alcohol to dish detergent. For the most part, the social sector has not made the same shift. Social service organizations may conduct their own research through focus groups and surveys, but most lack the resources to root their communications strategies in published academic research. Scholarship that can help you understand attention, motivation, and emotion may be the most powerful and affordable tool you’re not using.

"When people working on behalf of social causes have rooted their strategy in science, intentionally or not, they have tended to be highly successful. In the last several decades, we’ve seen significant social change: the fight for racial and gender equity, the reduction of smoking and drunk driving deaths, and the passage of marriage equality laws. You might look at these changes and see them as a reflection of a naturally changing society. But in fact, these changes were designed by thoughtful communicators who used practices that we now see are supported by behavioral, cognitive, and social science, and that you can apply to enlist people in your cause.

"In our work we have identified five principles based in social science that will help organizations connect their work to what people care most about." - Ann Christiano & Annie Neimand

Article: The Science of What Makes People Care

Related Article: Communicating Science for Good

Learning, Activism
"We need to make the voices supporting diverse books and opposing book bans even louder."

In 2019 Maia Kobabe released Gender Queer: A Memoir. The graphic story, drawn and written by the author, recounts Kobabe's journey from adolescence to adulthood and eir exploration of gender identity and sexuality, ultimately identifying as being outside of the gender binary.

While working on the book, e was unsure if anyone outside of eir family and close friends would read it. But the early support of librarians and two American Library Association Awards helped sell three print runs in the first year. Since then Gender Queer has been published in eight languages, and it has also been the most banned in the U.S. for the past two years.

Earlier this month Kebab drew and wrote a story about eir experience of becoming a de facto spokesperson for diverse voices.

Graphic essay: I Made the Most Banned Book in America

Related article: How a Debut Graphic Memoir Became the Most Banned Book in the Country

Related article: Book Bans Are Rising Sharply in Public Libraries

One-liners

Article: Dancing may have special benefits for brain development.

Article: Lots of sitting may boost older adults' dementia risk.

Article: Which cities will still be livable in a world altered by climate change?

Article: Human cells display a mathematical pattern that repeats in nature and language.

Article: How a San Antonio architecture studio transformed an auto dealership building into an "office so wonderful to work in that we ultimately get people thinking, ‘Why would I stay at home?’”.

Playlist

Video: Lee Fields - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

As a kid Lee Fields knew that he wanted to be a musician. When he was 17 he left North Carolina to start his career as a soul and blues singer in New York. Within two years, in 1969 he released his first single. Except for a stint as a real estate agent in the early 80s, when disco knocked soul music off of the charts for a few years, Lee Fields has been working steadily since then.

In 2009 he recorded a song, Honey Dove, with a band he calls The Expressions. This set the path he's still walking. They're on tour now, promoting a new album, Sentimental Fool, on Daptone Records. Two weeks ago they stopped by the studios of Seattle's KEXP and performed a mini-concert. It's sweet soul music, served up fresh and new.

Weekly Mixtape
Sweet soul and blues music, some old and most new, served fresh.

Playlist: Honey Dove

Image of the Week
The Livraria Lello & Irmão, commonly known in English as the Lello Bookstore, is a bookstore located in the northern Portuguese municipality of Porto. One of the oldest bookstores in Portugal, the store's website claims it is "the most beautiful bookstore in the world".

According to Wikipedia, "the ample interior space is marked by a forked staircase connecting to a gallery on the first floor with detailed wood balusters. Over this staircase is a large 8 by 3.5 metres (26 ft × 11 ft) stained glass window, with the central motto Decus in Labore and monogram of the owners. The ceiling and interiors are treated exhaustively with painted plaster, designed to resemble sculpted wood surfaces and decorative elements. The building still retains the rails and wooden cart once used to move books around the store between the shelves."

What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
If you get value from Love & Work, please pass it on.

You can learn more about me and my work here: mitchanthony.net

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