freelance paradigm

Part 1 Part 2 Part 4

Even if a person has a clear and uncluttered mind and has a well developed imagination, there are still obstacles ahead his or hers creativity. The most significant is

Fear of the Unknown UncertaintyUnfamiliarity
We all have certain fears of unknown things built into our minds. It is normal. But it can also inhibit creative process severely. There are three basic factors that shape this fear:

- Evolutionary-genetic
- Educational (again)
- Social

The fear of the unknown uncertainty unfamiliarity is built in deeply into our nervous system. For millions and millions of years it kept us alive, but now, in a society in which 'staying alive' is no longer difficult, this mechanism backfires. It simply means that trough the evolution we evolved to a state in which we avoid things or situations that appear strange to us because it is safer. Our brain likes to categorize things. We think in stereotypes whether we like it or not. Apples are healthy and tigers are dangerous. There could be a nice kitty among those tigers and perhaps there is a poisonous apple somewhere in the basket, but from the evolutionary point of view it is not very effective to scrutinize every apple or every tiger each time we encounter either of it. It is better to fear all tigers once you learn how dangerous they are. So with time we learn that fire is hot, salt water is not drinkable and speaking your mind will get you into social trouble. It takes time, of course. This is why children present this fear in its minimum amount (and hence they are often regarded as creative).
All that and much more is what we call experience and contributes to the fact that we grow out of creativity, not into it. Because in the core of every creative process there is trying something novel, something that hasn't been tried before. Many times there is no prior experience on which we could predict the outcome of our decision. The most creative people go trough periods of an extreme self-doubt and anxiety simply because they cannot know if their work will actually work and be of any value at all. Only the strongest can overcome this fear and actually win a battle against themselves. If a company or a workshop is to increase creativity among its members, the first priority would be to reduce the factors that contribute to this fear. We'll examine that in a second.

Again I have to spill some ink on the account of our education system which does almost everything it can to scare us even more! Trying out new ideas will by implication mean making a lot of mistakes. Our brain is simply not powerful enough to simulate every aspect of the idea (there are far to many arbitrary factors) so a high level of tolerance is required in order to actualize that small percentage of worthy ideas. But that tolerance is exactly what school lacks. Not just that; mistakes are stigmatized and regarded as something profoundly stupid and worthy of punishment. This is a remain of a pre-inustrial 19th century zeitgeist.
"I am not tying to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." (Ken Robinson, source at 5:35)

The fear of being wrong is induced by the system of testing, grading and ridicule of peers and teachers. By the time an average kid reaches the third grade (about 9-10 years old) the fear of being wrong is installed into his brain. As a result kids are under a lot of stress which was already noted in the second part of this series. Research and experience shows that children are extremely enthusiastic when they enter school but within 3-4 years almost all develop strong negative feelings towards going to school every morning. The thought of listening to dull lessons (again see part 2), writing a test or answering an oral exam is stressful enough to give cramps to most kids. Preschool kids are by their nature very curious; they want to know everything! Where does all that curiosity go once they reach school?!

Beside stress, an other side effect of this process is that most students don't focus on gaining knowledge anymore. They focus on staying alive, i.e. passing the next test. There is a huge difference between learning something out of curiosity or just stuffing your brain with data (or a skill) that will be used/needed that day and then quickly forgotten. A lot of what we call 'education' is just an exercise for middle-term memory.

Small minded teachers play a big role in inhibiting creativity and overlooking the talents which kids might have. It is far easier to call a kid weird or just say "Do as others do," than to actually put some effort into it and trying to understand the child. More about that in the last part of this series.

Plus there is a ridicule of the class. IMHO it is far better to organize learning into smaller groups where students bond on a more personal level. The amount of ridicule in smaller groups is negligible comparing to big classes. I am sure you can recall from your own experience that it is far easier to speak out in a group of 8 than 80. "What will people think," which is a strong blockade against new ideas is not that much present anymore. "What will people think" is just a 'social' version of "What if I am wrong." As we have seen from evolutionary and educational examples, being wrong means trouble!


Now the social part (the one which is not embeded into education) is quite complex, but I believe it can again be divided into two basic categories;
- problems with responsibility
- problems with virtues

The problems of responsibility are something that I wasn't aware of until I heard lectures by Aleksander Zadel (psychologist). In a nutshell: being responsible starts by giving people the right feedback on their actions. Your feedback will determine their future motivation and attitude towards life. Especially if you are a parent (or a teacher). If this is too abstract, let me give you his example.

This is a completely normal room for a teenager (by Adam NFK Smith):

But of course, most parents are not happy with that, so they order kid to clean up. The kid does his best, but when parents return to evaluate the work they usually say something like "But you forgot the socks under the bed..." They focus on the negative aspects. We all do in such situations, don't we! It is a wrong thing! Because the next thought the kid will have is "Whatever I do, nothing is good enough - there is no point in doing it, if I am always wrong/bad." This lack of encouragement can in most cases lead to passivity. In broader terms; such parents are raising a professional victim, someone who doesn't take fate into ones own hands and doesn't take any risks. I will repeat once more; taking risks is central to the idea of creativity.

When the idea that "nothing is good enough" is enforced trough parenting, education and other social mechanisms, the sick version of perfectionism might develop. Perfectionism has two sides and I suspect they can be divided in the terms of time (I am sure they exist, but not sure about classification... I'll be glad to discuss it within the comments). Being perfectionist in the terms of your expectations (i.e. future) is IMHO a positive thing. You want to do your best, so you study hard to complete the project the best you possibly can, or you practice piano for many extra hours before a concert, or you go on a trip and you make sure nothing slips you mind; tickets, insurance, medications, an extra pair of underwear...That is a good thing!
But what about being a perfectionist in the terms of your past? I believe that is pathological. Being pedantic about things that are already done or things you can do nothing about and giving yourself a hard time about it is just bad. People have perfectionist expectations about weather. After 30 days of sun and 1 day of rain many of them will be depressed and will go on nagging about it. Sometimes you meet a person which is having really bad time because of a headache. And that headache is the first after months of a healthy life. Is it that hard to accept the fact that everything in nature has a rhythm and it can't always be as one expects? Just embrace the flaws and imperfections? These people have such high expectations that they can't live a happy life. And they fear experimenting (=being creative) because they think it is a battle that is already lost. So what if it rains! So what if you happen to have a bad day! Isn't it natural? So what if the majority of the ideas turns out to be crap?! It is so much easier to live if one accepts the concept of the imperfect world.

The second problem is about our virtues. It is about how we value and reward creativity and good ideas. In western countries this might not be such a big deal, but in post-communist countries such as Slovenia, ex-Soviet countries, Czech Republic, Slovakia (etc) this is very problematic. A tourist who wonders this countries might not even notice that; people are nice, roads are well made (mostly), people have computers, internet, companies are doing great (mostly)... Everything appears the same as in Germany or France. But that is just the surface.

To explain, I will use another metaphor which I will borrow from a professor of social science whom I was listening on college. Suppose you turn on your TV and there is an athletic event on; 10 km run and you begin watching in the middle of the race. You have no idea what was happening before and the camera shows the leading runner. Beside him there is an other one which appears to run beside him. What you don't know is, that the leader was so fast that he caught up with the last runner who is actually one lap behind.

One lap behind! That is what post-communist countries are. At first glance they appear to run side by side with the leaders, but actually they lack one phase of development. Most developed countries went from feudal to industrial phase somewhere in 19th century. Then they had a century and a half of development to reach today's point. Most of the 'our' countries skipped that and went directly from feudal to social-communist regime, which is mildly put, just another version of feudal system. What I mean to say is; it has similar propaganda. Similar virtues are promoted and valued. One such is physical labor. There is no need to think too much, physical work is what defines a man. Artists are just lazy assholes who avoid work and live on others' expense. Just see this. Decades of this kind of brainwashing will leave a mark in nation's mentality. Even today it is hard to persuade people that creative work is stil 'work' and that artists, writers, musicians, photographers (...) deserve to be payed just as well. And not just artists; creative ideas in other fields of work are undervalued as well. Being creative is simply not recognized as a virtue. Developed societies, which are at least one lap ahead of us, already went trough this and other stages of moral evolution. They know creative thinking is a torch that enlightens a way towards a better future. Artists and scientists are people of avantgarde who will use their minds to find better ways for others' hands to work. In Germany it is (more or less) perfectly clear that Andreas Gursky's photo is worth a million euros, while in Slovenia people will tend to say: "But he did it in only two hours¹. How can he earn so much in two hours?" Or when somebody finds a more effective way of doing something and uses the extra time to read books or go on trips, that individual risks of being labeled as lazy. I could go on with this, but I believe you see my point. There are simply no social incentives to be creative if creativity is not regarded as a virtue.

In this part we talked a lot about ideas and why we don't have more of them. Even though ideas are important for creativity, they are not creativity per se. Why is that so is the subject of the last part of this series.

¹ That is actually not true at all. Gursky spends quite a lot of time working.

Some say that this global warming thing might end up the life on Earth. It is far too pessimistic to assume that our contribution can sterilize the planet. We can easily erase our kind, but life will eventually win. It is enough for a few rats, some lizards and a couple of bacteria to survive and we'll have the same richness of life within 20 million years (that happened when dinosaurs were gone).

But one thing is striking. It took about 530 million years since The Cambrian explosion to make practically all evolution of complex life which ends up with an intelligent one. Since the Sun still has about 2 billion healthy years of shining, that could easily result into 3 or even 4 more such evolutions. Each of them can end up with intelligent life even sooner (given the ever lower possibility for meteor collision). It's a pity we won't be there to see it.

On top on what I wrote here, lets see is what it is already happening now. Press agencies are often taking local photographers instead of sending their top guys on an assignment. Equipment and knowledge got a lot more accessible, so you can have a photographer on the place who is good enough and you don't need to send an American or German photographer there (to Africa, for example). This is of course a lot cheaper.

I think this will go one step further. Not only that the local photographers will contribute more, amateurs will too. I don't mean just amateur photographers who buy fancy cameras and make their own little exhibitions, I mean people who don't have a clue about photography. People like my dad who has a camera in his cell phone. These people are all around and they carry cameras along with them. They can record material that was never recorded before, simply because they are there when it happens and some PRO photographer wasn't. So why not submit that to the press? Just for the fun of it.

And just to be clear; every broken window in a local shop doesn't have to be photographed by a professional. Most of trivial news can be easily visualized by random folks who just happened to be there. But when something big happens, well, then you need the top guys. You can't send an amateur to cover the Olympics, can you? Or Obama's inauguration. Perhaps if press saves some money on trivial events with the amateur contributions, PRO's can be payed better on big stuff. That would probably call for less photo journalists.

Some other photographers took a different path. They make really good stories on their own (as freelancers) and then they try to sell it or get a grant. In Perpignan there were quite many who work this way. Ed Ou, for example, made a story about victims of radiation in Kazahstan. But I think that this model doesn't really create incentives for people to join this profession unless the rewards are great (which they aren't).

Every crysis ends up with something new invented. The old model not being fit for the circumstances anymore is the reason we got into trouble in the first place. Sometimes it takes a generation to change, but often we don't have that much time. We'll see how this turns out.

I decided to hit the road and go on a tour around high-schools in western Slovenia to promote UMMI summer camps and in doing so speak about issues with creativity and giftedness. My main points are:

- giftedness is a property of mind which has to be carefully nurtured, otherwise skills will diminish to average at best,
- creativity is not a property of mind, it is a way of thinking. It is seeing each thing afresh and approaching problems with playfulness, courage and bravery,
- creative and gifted people are often misunderstood, hence they feel alone,
- but they are not!



I am recording every lecture and I shall publish the best version ASAP. After each lecture I try to encourage debate about this issues to get some feedback. It is a great experience and there is still 5 places to go!

People tend to assert certain names to certain things and find relations among them. Usually we call those names categories. For example; you may have heard of classical music, rap, pop, rock... or landscape photography, portraiture, fashion, sports... or parts of the brain like cortex, cerebellum, thalamus...

This is all OK, but the problem is, that most of the people take those categories too seriously or too literally. There is no distinct border between classical or rock music because those two categories of the same category of art (again, category) share many similarities and even common grounds. Of course, they have some differences, but where would you draw the line??? These labels are here not because they would represent some real categories, they are here just to help us communicate and they serve well as long as we keep in mind that things are a lot more organic and complex in reality.

The same goes for every other kind of category; categories in art, categories in tools even categories in different types of personalities, modes of thinking, creativity processes and so on!

Even experts (especially psychologists have this tendency) like to have things sorted out in drawers; keep a name for every thing that occurs. But the life is complex and organic; people can't just fit in a drawer because much like rock and classical music, there is no distinct line between musical or graphical kind of creativity. Again; these words are here just to help us understand each other and do not represent real (=physical) differences in direct and literal terms as many would have liked. This would have given a lot of consolation for many who would like to think that they have figured the world out. But they haven't. In fact they are often using fancy words to cover up their infantile understanding.

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Perhaps it has to do with survival; people who have their experiences sorted out are in better position to survive (tigers are dangerous, olives are good, apples are healthy...), but in modern society we should know better than that. We should understand that the underlying nature of the world is a lot more astonishing than we could even begin to understand and that the words we come up with to describe it may represent only a selected few of its surface properties.

So yes; use "categories" but only to the extent where you are still aware of the fact that this are just words, made up by humans and do not necessarily reflect the actual nature of things.


Image by striatic

I will present two examples and then I will draw a conclusion.

1. The other day I was watching a lecture on TED, where the speaker (Michael Pollan) made an interesting analogy; let's take a look at the bees. They are drawn to the flowers by their looks and smell. The flowers actually make them fly onto them and "forces them" to help them (flowers) procreate. The bee is actually fooled by the flower but gets honney in return!

2. Imagine species that are really good at surviving, like sharks or aligators (or humans?), which have been around since before the dinosaurs and have changed only a little during that time. They must be really perfectly built for their purpose of living. Now; wouldn't be just great for you if you could make a shark or an aligator depend on you? That would, in a way, make your survival a lot easier. Is like befriending powerful people. There actually are birds which clean aligators teeth and I imagine those birds are somehow in advantage over the other birds, for they have a really stable source of food and protection.


The conclusion: Are we (humans) any better any better than the bees? I believe not! We too are fooled by tomatoes, cows, pigs and some birds (chickens and turkeys) which now flourish as species. If you have problem imagining that, it is probably because you see tomatoes as "food" and not as a "plant" in the ecosystem (a couple of years living in a city and shopping in supermarkets will actually do that kind of damage to your brain). But that's what it really is! Tomatoes are just plants that grow around in some places! They produce very juicy and tasty fruits which fool us to plant them more and more. In terms of business: tomatoes (along with some other plants like potatoes...) made a risky but very profitable investment. As long as we are here, they have nothing to worry about.
The deal we have with cows, birds and pigs is even more perverse; yes, we do kill individual cows but we take a really good care for the population which has never been larger.

Perhaps this is not the most scientific way to look at the evolutin, but it sure is a lot of fun!

Not much to say; the latest my.opera upgrade messed up my costum css designs. I hope that guys will solve this soon. I kinda like this one.
I added a new poll to the the sidebar. I want to know how much television do you watch now. Did internet change your watching habits? It did for me. I voted for the last option

And yes... spring is knocking on the door! Finally!

I wish you a very happy, healthy and creative year of 2008*! Have as much fun as you possibly can!
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I am not really sure what exactly are we celebrating. I was doing a little bit of research and I found out that the dates for the New Years Eve vary from one era or culture to an other. I personally believe that it initially has to do with the pagan celebration of the southern solstice after which the day is getting longer (and the Sun wins over the dark forces of the night) on the northern hemisphere. This logic is no good for the modern people of the southern hemisphere who are now forced to celebrate New Years Eve and Christmas during their summer, when the sun is highest in the sky and now the dark forces of the night are getting stronger. Richard Dawkins often mentiones northern hemisphere chauvinism, and he must be right on that (see the quote below)
However, some callendars are having new year's eve around equinox in March, which sounds more fair for the both hemispheres, but I quess the symbolic meaning is less significant then. I was trying to find some data on Australian Aboriginal calendar, but failed. If anyone has some decent link on that, please post it within the comments.

Originally posted by Richard Dawkins:

In a science-fiction starship, the astronauts were homesick: "Just to think that it's springtime back on Earth!" You may not immediately see what's wrong with this, so ingrained is our unconscious northern hemisphere chauvinism in those of us who live there, and even some who don't. "Unconscious" is exactly right. That is where consciousness-raising comes in. I it is for a deeper reason than gimmicky fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy maps of the world with the south pole on top. What a splendid consciousness-raiser those maps would be, pinned to the walls of our northern hemisphere classrooms.. Day after day, the children would be reminded that 'north' is an arbitrary polarity which has no monopoly on 'up'. The map would intrigue them as well as raise their consciousness.

(Dawkins, Richard: The God delusion, Bantam Press, Great Britain, 2006, pages 114-115)

PS: It is 2008, AND WE STILL HAVE NO FLYING CARS!

Every other Saturday is usually a day for basketball in our town. It's not just about the game (I usually don't care much about it), it's more like a social event. People gather to spend some time together and maybe go on a drink afterwords.
And eversince we have a Puma dancers team, timeouts are especially sweet. I did some photos last year, and I think it was the time to repeat the session .

And of course; Puma's have their own my.opera site (beside having personal one's).

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What is one to say when an honour is given. Is a modest "Thank you" enough? So I say; thank you for reading my blog, thank you for connecting to the idea that is behind of it and after all: thank you for expresing that with your vote. I am deeply honoured.

Of course the benefit is mutual. A bit more than a year ago I was in serious doubts wether I should start a blog or not. At that time it seemed like everyone has it. Why should I do it? What do I have to say, I'm just an ordinary guy. Hm...

So I figured out, that I should treat my blog like "my own news paper". Be a reporter and reader at the same time. Report on things that happen arround me (and maybe a little bit about me). When I was browsing blogs of people form all over the world, I have found their places and stories interesting, so it should work vice-versa. A statue in Ljubljana, that I go by everyday, seems nearely invisible and very ordinary to me, but it should be an attraction for someone who lives on the other side of the globe, right?

A little bit of subjective opinion can't do harm. This is what separates a blog from an official media. And that's what makes it interesting.

Then there is an idea of sharing knowledge and ideas to raise up the awareness. I already wrote about that. So at the end of all, I believe there are many reasons why to start a blog.

Thank you for giving me an oppurtunity to speak out. Thank you My Opera for this wonderful atmosphere* that you've created here and that inspires us to make it even better.

yours,
Nikio


* did you notice how nice are members here to eachother. In many other communities there are A LOT of posts and comments that express hate, that are insulting or even backstabing. Here this things are practicly nonexistent!