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Updated November 3, 2022Youโre reading an excerpt of Creative Doing, by Herbert Lui. 75 practical techniques to unlock creative potential in your work, hobby, or next career. Purchase now for instant, lifetime access to the book.
Many of these prompts have been akin to invention: making ideas and trying new things. In Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard writes about how his company doesnโt inventโit discovers. โThereโs simply no time for inventing,โ he writes. Instead, the company talks directly to customers and learns how they use its products. The company digitally renders new ideas, makes samples, and works to shorten the time it takes to implement these changes. From those situations, Patagonia finds guidance on how its products evolve. Of course, this involves developing an understanding of people and providing them with a solution.
Your idea can be a solution. For example, if youโve heard a friend talk about how boring their new apartment or house is, you can paint something that gently alleviates some of that boredom or something so bold it completely shatters it. If youโre a programmer hearing someone talk about their problems with gardening, you can build a simple app to help solve them.
This prompt is about making something just for one person, someone you know, as a way of finding authentic creative expression. Productivity writer Tim Ferriss found the tone for his books when drafting an email to his best friend. Michelle Kuo, assigns letters to all of her students, whether itโs in classes at The American University of Paris or at a creative workshop for incarcerated people. She observes when people begin to write, they risk their voices sounding pretentious, because itโs common to believe โgood writingโ means impenetrable or abstruse. Kuo told me, โThereโs something about writing a letter that allows you to discover your conversational voice, which also means your forms of speech, your idioms, your little jokes. Sometimes, it also allows the voice to be funnier, to be self deprecating, and to desire actual connection. When a person knows who their exact audience is, it gives them more consistency, so theyโre not switching between different potential targets. When youโre consistent, then the reader trusts you. An outside reader trusts you.โ
Kuo suggests that if youโre into songwriting or the recording arts, an equivalent to the letter could be a ballad. Bernice Liu, also known as artist Spime, suggests a visual equivalent could be a signed painting or a portrait of someone you know.
One happy byproduct of focusing on connection as your inspiration is that it may bring you in contact with other artists and aspiring creatives with whom you can continue to share work and inspiration. When teaching kids in rural Arkansas, Kuo would assign โI Amโ poems, which consist of lines starting with โI amโฆ.โ She writes in her memoir, โI had asked the students to tape their โI Amโ poems on the walls, to make them proud of their own writing. Then I noticed something surprising: They wanted to read one anotherโs work. Certain studentsโwho, during my attempts at collective reading, put their heads down or slapped the head of a studious classmate, trying to keep him from โbeing good,โ as they called itโwould now stand attentively in front of a classmateโs poem, tracing the line methodically with an index finger, not saying a word.โ