Now is the Time to Start Playing (More) Music

When I was 26 years, I did not believe I could ever, ever, play music or respectably sing or write my own songs. My mindset was: Other people are musical but I'm not (My family, for example, used to plug their ears when I tried to sing). I knew I would love to be able to play an instrument and to express myself musically--but without any training or encouragement, I had accepted that this would never be part of my life. Sound familiar?

When it comes to our personal creativity, we have a culture that both subtly and obviously urges us to become spectators rather than creators, to listen to experts playing music rather than playing it ourselves. We come to believe that we can't play or draw or sing or sculpt or [enter your unpursued-artistic-itch here]--that it's out of the realm of our possibility for this lifetime--because otherwise we would have started young and be naturally gifted and recognized by others.

Well, I'm here to tell you: You CAN learn to play music at any age. AND with summer (and more group gatherings) beckoning, it's time to get started. You do need some desire and some tolerance for physical challenge, but mostly you just need a shift in mindset--from not me to why not me. In my case at 27, I simply began to hang out with a new musical friend, the multi-talented Michael Obadia, whom I simply got to watch. Instead of gazing at some superstar on stage doing impossible magic, I saw Michael strum the guitar, move his fingers, change chords, occasionally screw up, and write songs that expressed his own vision and mood. It dawned on me, Hey, I could try that. So I found myself picking up a guitar, learning and experimenting with chords, getting calluses on my fingertips and suddenly putting sounds together in a way that made me want to come back to them again and again. Before I realized it I was putting my own words to these repeated sounds and had somehow become a songwriter. Thanks to the Kreativity Network, which facilitated people sharing different creative pursuits at live events, I got better and better at singing and performing--and opening up what was once an impossibly locked vault to find treasure that I didn't know I was allowed to find.

As we've learned from the great musicians of our time, you are never too old to play and play well. You will have many years to enjoy making music if you start now. Are you one of the people who used to play the piano or were in orchestra in high school but gave it up? You'll be surprised how quickly you can tap into those long-dormant skills. I give six-week starter lessons guaranteed to get you actually jamming on guitar or piano in no time at all. Maybe for you it's singing or the flute or the conga or the harmonica. The key is to find out what moves you musically and pursue it, get support for it, and hang out with other people who like to do it. But it starts with that shift in mindset from what you thought defined you.

Everytime I play music in front of others, whether it's at a Creativity Jam or corporate teambuilding session, I think back to my former belief and am grateful that I have music in my life in a way I hadn't imagined as a young adult. There is nothing quite like jamming musically with others--it's universal, multi-generational, and connects you more deeply to yourself and to a greater spirit than your own. And it's also an essential skill to learn and practice in order to transform our culture toward the more creative future we need.

Innovation Summit highlights

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." ~Charles Darwin

From the mouths or slides of speakers at Thursday's 2009 Innovation Summit in Chicago, sponsored by Innovate Now, which focused on innovation, design and sustainability...

"I firmly believe that innovation comes from diversity."
"To me, innovation has to affect thousands of people at the bottom of the pyramid."
"We need to think through a new model of education: What do we need to learn? What skills do we need to have?"
~Sam Pitroda, Chairman, National Knowledge Commission, India

"What if the problems are bigger than we think?"
"A new discipline of innovation is emerging today because companies need new discoveries and strategies to drive organic growth...[and] operational excellence is no longer differentiating enough."
~Larry Keeley, President, Doblin, Inc.

"Design is a way of thinking...our problems are only getting tougher so the demand to think differently is here to stay."
~Mark Greiner, SVP, WorkSpace Futures

"I like to think of product design as a collection of mini-insights."
~Rob Pew, Board Chairman, Steelcase, Inc.

"The world is becoming a city."
~Jeb Brugman, author of Welcome to the Urban Revolution

"We have to reframe the way we live our lives...China and India are not going to change until we change." ~Patrick Whitney, IIT Professor

"Perhaps we need to return to 'repair' [not disposing of things we buy]."
~Bruce Nussbaum, New School professor and Businessweek columnist

"Many countries like Denmark and even UAE are way ahead of us on sustainability." ~Gordon Gill, Architect

"Chicago is positioned to be the greenest city in America."
~Kathryn Tholin, CEO, Center for Neighborhood Technology

The Classic Entrepreneurial Story of Cereality

Before we discuss Cereality, whose story was told by co-founder David Roth last week here in Chicago, here are a few quick questions about your creative inclinations regarding food:
Do you prefer to cook by recipe or by seeing what you have in your fridge/cupboards and improvising?
Do you prefer a few favorite restaurants or would you rather experience new ones (despite their unpredictability)?
Do you cook/order the same few dishes or do you choose new offerings you never tried before?

Now, I respect people who like what they like or can produce a consistently winning dish via recipe, but your creativity quotient is higher when you seek out the new and are willing to experiment. I happen to be a variety junkie. My favorite meal is one during which I can sample many different tastes. My bias is to constantly create new combinations, try unusual pairings, and I appreciate opportunities to experiment, which is the general idea behind Cereality, perhaps opening a new store near you.

Here's the scoop (or bowl): Roth and his partner Rick Bacher started with the somewhat questionable idea of having a retail location that would serve only cereal, and through an amazing array of creative decisions (and entrepreneurial perseverance), they created a brand and store that became a classic American example of entrepreneurship. (While Roth resisted franchising Cereality for as long as he could, multiple copy-cats and legal issues led him to selling it to franchise giant Kahala-Cold Stone in 2007.)

Like other quick-serve outlets who have innovated similarly, Cereality's creativity began with customer choice, offering cereal your way in whatever combination of cereal, fruit, nuts and milk you desired. Creativity and playfulness were an indispensable part of the entire brand and culture: Employees wear pajamas, you use a sloop (a straw and spoon in one that allows you to slurp up that remaining milk), and the entire experience in the store is part of the pleasure.



The creativity extended as well to the entire process of building the business, which you'll get some sense of in the video above. As Roth made clear in his talk, entrepreneurship is not for the easily discouraged. Starts and stops and “midcourse corrections” were constant, and he learned that the key was always to come back to their own original vision, the personality and culture they uniquely imagined. They tried a food service company to run the stores, but they ended up taking them back themselves. They hired restaurant industry executives but got rid of them.

Inventive PR campaigns and strategic, cross-industry partnerships were essential, but perhaps the most innovative idea helped them get a needed sponsor: They offered to provide data on the habits of customers in exchange for financing. Quaker liked that idea and the whole enterprise so much that they paid even more cash and signed on as the sole provider of hot breakfast choices.

The process from idea to implementation is a long one, and less passionate entrepreneurs may have given up long before they opened their second store, not to mention sold the brand for a hefty sum. But the constant flow of creative ideas--even with failures along the way--helped Cereality become a reality and great American business story.

If We Want Chicago Innovation, Columbia College Can Help Manifest

My last blog entry resulted in several ideas submitted in response to the Chicagoland Chamber Foundation President's challenge: How can we make Chicago the center for innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity? You can read them in the comments--and are encouraged to submit one of your own at any time. The winners of free tickets to the Innovation Summit will be contacted by tomorrow...

In the meantime, I was downtown yesterday exploring one of the sometimes overlooked creative engines in our fair city: the always-expressive and in many ways creatively-unrivalled Columbia College. With more than 120 academic programs and nearly 11,000 students, Columbia College Chicago is the largest and most diverse private arts and media college in the nation. Yesterday it displayed its wares and flair through dozens of venues and events known as Manifest, perhaps the largest urban arts festival in the country.

It was a cornucopia of expression throughout the south loop. I was particularly blown away by the Interdisciplinary Arts department's exhibition (a couple examples shown), featuring often interactive installations that stretched the bounds of originality and used different media, material and combinations in astounding ways. It reminded me of an indoor Burning Man, one of the most mind-expanding art, expression and community experiences now on the planet, mostly unknown to Chicagoans. Both Manifest and Burning Man have this in common: You get to see and experience the manifestation of human imagination in forms never seen before--and probably never seen again.

For those of you local, get on Columbia's email list for events and you'll discover events, speakers and performances throughout the year that will surely keep your own imagination stirring.

Can Chicago Innovate Now?

Chicago has been showing some serious gumption these days. We've sent a new crew to lead the country--Obama, Emanuel, Jarrett and Axelrod--and are the leading candidate to bring the Olympics back to the U.S. in 2016. But given that changes are often a bit slow to hit us here in the middle of the country, the question remains: Can Chicago be a leader of innovation?

“I strongly believe that creating an ecosystem that supports and encourages widespread adoption of innovative practices within our businesses will become the single most important thing we can do at this time in our history," says James Tyree, chair of Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and CEO of Mesirow Financial. He recently made the case to business leaders that an Innovation Czar is needed to transform Illinois.

Geographical hubs and regions, as Richard Florida makes clear, are essential for a prospering United States of Creativity, and Chicago is making its move with its Innovate Now initiative, dedicated to transforming Chicagoland and all of Illinois into a global center for innovation. This unique collaboration among business, academia and the public and nonprofit sectors was created over three years ago to create a new model to spur economic development in the new global economy. Innovation leaders will be gathering for the 2009 Innovation Summit (tickets still available) next Thursday, May 21st in downtown Chicago. The theme is “design + innovation = sustainability." The Summit asks this question, among others: How can the interplay of design and innovation assist individual businesses and organizations in achieving growth while at the same time contributing to sustainability objectives?

Let's be honest. Getting the Midwest to embrace innovation is not a simple task. I spoke last week with Lance Pressl, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Foundation, one of the key Innovate Now partners, who shared some of his challenges, which includes the sometimes hard-to-change culture of Chicago.

Here's my two cents. For creativity to thrive systemically, we have to encourage risk and bring together people and ideas that don't often intersect. Right now there are too many meetings and conferences here where primarily white men in suits talk at you. Chicago needs more challenges to the status quo, more diversity in our conference rooms, more breaches of convention, more unusual partnerships, more appreciation of failure and, I'm not kidding about this one, more dancing.

I'm looking forward to hearing from a range of world-class speakers at the Summit--but also will keep my ears peeled for the in-between conversations, the openness to the new and the evidence of the crazy, which adds just a little extra fuel to the engine of creativity.

Turning Problems into Opportunities with Tina

So, you and you friends are given an envelope with "seed funding" and challenged to make as much money with it as possible in just two hours. You open up the envelope and it contains a meager $5. What do you do?

This is the challenge Tina Seelig, the Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, gives her students each semester in a course on entrepreneurship. Her goal is to help foster an entrepreneurial mindset: One that sees problems as opportunities. Tina's new book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, offers many gems on how to take advantage of opportunities and live a more creative life.

I had a chance to meet and eat with Tina last week at a Stanford Alumni event here in Chicago. I was excited to see that Stanford as an institution has asserted its own commitment to a United States of Creativity, its introductory video emphasizing that "in the 21st century, the role of imagination and creativity will be more important than ever."

Tina's students find unexpected ways of profiting from limited resources--and she gives some examples in the video below. She also runs the Innovation Tournament, through which hundreds of budding entrepreneurs have found ways to turn a few post-it notes, rubber bands and water bottles into value-creating products and services.


With her distinctive enthusiasm and energy, she shared with us some of the ways she and others have found success: by breaking the rules, challenging assumptions and creating their own luck. A few of her key points of advice that we don't learn in school:
>See problems as opportunities: The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity
>Fail fast and frequently: Try many things, keep what works and keep moving forward
>Don't wait to be annointed: Forget the business plan, print your own business cards and jump off the cliff
>Never miss an opportunity to talk to people--and to be fabulous.

The Creative City, According to Dr. Florida

I got to visit with another Florida last week, this one Richard, the economist and best-selling author of the 2002 Rise of the Creative Class, which examined the growing social class of creative people--people in jobs outside of manufacturing and service--who are central to the economy. Rich Florida is another compelling voice in our ride toward the United States of Creativity, arguing that "creativity is the fundamental source of economic growth, and that it is an essential part of everyone's humanity that needs to be cultivated." He examines this new Creative Age from a particular expert angle: that of place and, in particular, the city.


When talented and creative people come together, he explains, they optimize and magnify each other's productivity, which drives economic development. His new book Who's Your City? further explores social science evidence of factors that make a city thrive, which he has described as the three Ts: Technology, Talent and Tolerance.

All three Ts are necessary, and it is the final one, tolerance, that perhaps is most important for city planners to understand. By tolerance he means diversity, and when a city is truly open to diverse cultures and ideas, Florida explains, they are more likely to become innovation hubs. Using different measures such as the Tolerance Index, Gay Index and Bohemian Index, he found the cities with the best creative economies attract and offer opportunities for people of different races, countries of origin, sexual orientation--and have the most openness to self-expression. Places that have a flourishing artistic and cultural environment "are the ones that generate creative economic outcomes and overall economic growth."

"I like to tell city leaders," he writes, "that finding ways to help support a local music scene can be just as important as investing in high-tech business and far more effective than building a downtown mall."

Hmmm, not only should you embrace your originality and inner-hippie, so should your mayor...

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Ode to Incubation (i.e., slacking off)

There is no question that getting away from where you are--whether physical environment, stress level or mindset--is a necessary part of the creative process. I spent part of the week in Florida, enjoying a twilight swim (below) and recharging.
Researchers have long acknowledged the importance of taking a break, often referred to as incubation in the creative process. We all have had the experience of not thinking about something and then, bam!, suddenly getting a new insight unexpectedly--often in the shower or while driving.

Incubation was a key part of the creative process steps first established by researcher Graham Wallas in the 1920s, and is still considered to be one the defining models today:
Preparation>>Incubation>>Illumination>>Verification
1. Preparation: the first stage, in which a problem is identified and then investigated from many different angles
2. Incubation: a stage at which conscious study of the problem is suspended
3. Illumination: the “ah ha” stage when a solution to the problem suddenly appears
4. Verification: the final stage, when the solution is tested.

Researcher Teresa Amabile and colleagues more recently defined incubation as follows: "A process of unconscious recombination of thought elements that were stimulated through conscious work at one point in time, resulting in novel and useful ideas at some later point in time." (ASQ, Sept 2005)

I like that--the unconscious recombination. As we've noted before, creativity and innovation often depend on combining previously uncombined elements, or, as Einstein called, "combinatorial play." Who knew that slacking off could be doing such great work!

Thomas Moore, in his classic audio On Creativity (which I highly recommend), makes clear that stopping, even drying up, is part of the creative process. "We don’t always have to be in a fertile place," he says. "The spring doesn’t have to be bubbling all the time, just as in nature there’s a time seasonally for the rivers and creeks to dry up. In the same way, our own creative process can have its moments of stoppage...there may be some very good reasons, good results from having a dry period.”

“It’s natural for the soul to stop, and that the stop, the blockage, the infertility, this in itself is a form of living the soulful life."