Horeb International

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I saw a dirty blue sock on my way to the train station today. It laid on the granite bridge step beside the river near the University. It looked lonely and lost. I wondered how it got there. Where was the other sock? Was the owner looking for it or even cared? If this sock had a mouth, I bet it would have an interesting story to tell about itself and its journey to this granite bridge step. All these questions about this blue sock made me realise that everything and everyone has a story to tell.

There is so much competing for our attention in the marketplace that companies are willing to be controversial in order to differentiate themselves from their rivals and get our attention. Have you seen the new Dr Pepper Ten video advert? Check out the video below if you haven’t seen it.

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There are three things that I believe really focuses the mind: a good question, a S.M.A.R.T goal, and a serious deadline. I plan to talk about deadlines in this blog post as a result of something that happened to me last week. We live in an age of distraction. There is so much competing for our attention that we are overwhelmed and this encourages us to procrastinate.

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Thought experiment: if I offered you two rocks like the ones above and asked you to choose one to push. Which one would you choose to push? The small rock on top or the large one below? I bet your choice of the small rock is probably based on the assumption that you think I want you to push your chosen rock on a level ground surface. We face two types of rocks in life: struggles and challenges. There is the human tendency to try to deal with both obstacles with the same strategies and approaches. These two obstacles require two completely different responses and actions.

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Three men were asked to view a seed and when asked what they saw:

The first man said he saw a seed.

The second man said he saw a tree.

While the third man said he saw a forest.

One object, yet three different ways of seeing the same thing: the short term, midterm and long term perspectives. 

“I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favour to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.” Book of Ecclesiastes (9:11)

On Friday, September 30^th 1955, James Dean who had just finished shooting his latest movie, Giant, was with his mechanic in his Porsche 550 Spyder to Salinas, California to race his new car. He was involved in a car accident that day and the only fatality was the twenty-four year old actor. James Dean did only three movies before he died and all three were released after his death. There is no doubt that he was very talented and destined to be a movie star.

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I just finished reading a book called “The Peter Principle”. The principle derives its name from Laurence J. Peter, an academic, who developed it. The Peter Principle occurs when an individual in an organisation is promoted from a position of competence to one of incompetence. Laurence Peter felt that this could happen to any employee in any organisation.

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We are all told that stealing is bad, but not all stealing is bad. Sometimes stealing can be good. The great artist, Pablo Picasso, once said that good artists copy while great artists steal. In a previous blog post, I discussed the concept of creativity as a remix. I argued that everything created today is inspired by something in the past. James Burke stated that we look to the past to prepare for the future because there is nowhere else to look. In this post, I intend to explore the notion of good creative stealing as advocated by Austin Kleon who just released a book called “Steal like an artist”.

Image Credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery

I attended a creativity workshop a few weeks ago at work. During a group discussion, we talked about the issue of time pressures as an obstacle to creativity. The busyness of work makes it so easy to fall back on the same mindless habitual patterns instead of coming up with creative and better methods of working. I shared two metaphorical images during the discussion which I will elaborate further in this blog post.

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There is a great verse in the Bible, in the Book of Ecclesiastes which reads “what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”  This verse is often cited in relation to the process of creativity, surmising that nothing created is truly original but everything is a remix or a mash-up of a previous creation.