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Hi Reader! I hope you've had an amazing week.
This time next week, I'll be writing you from the south of France, where I'm speaking at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. I will somewhat provocatively be encouraging creative advertising professionals to create (non-agency) companies of their own. Wish me luck! Or wish me break-a-leg if you were ever a superstitious theater kid like me.
While I'm in Cannes, I'll also be facilitating a group of senior execs through discussions and exercises to squeeze the juice of genius out of their brilliant minds on behalf of a client.
If you've got a team that needs to develop creative solutions, generate innovative ideas, align priorities, inspire themselves — and do it all in the short amount of time you can get everyone's schedules to work together — let's find a time to talk.
This week's creative thinking workout: |
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Forced Serendipity
There's a band called System of a Down, who's biggest hit is called, "Chop Suey." As the story goes, the lead singer was suffering from writer's block and couldn't crack the lyrics as he was working on the song. Rick Rubin (of course it was Rick Rubin) was producing the track, and told Serj (the singer) to grab a random book off the shelf, open to a random page, and point to a random sentence. Turns out, that random sentence became a pivotal part of the biggest hit of their career.
Our mileage may vary, of course. But any time we need a kick of inspiration, we can borrow the same approach.
I call it "forced serendipity."
Now, the whole notion of Serendipity is that it's something good that happens when we aren't looking for it — so isn't "forcing it" antithetical? Sure. Maybe. Stop being a grammar-nut and just go with me here.
The thing is, we know we want something, but we don't know what. So let's take the search for that something out of our hands and see what the universe gives us.
Grab a random book, open to a random page, and pick a random sentence.
Now make something out of that. Write a thought leadership article. Write a poem. Create some art, and use the line as the title of the piece.
Whatever line we pick randomly is the line we were meant to have — because whatever we create wouldn't have happened any other way.
That's forced serendipity.
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Crushing the Soulcrushers
Crushing soulcrushers takes work. Letting things suck is easy.
When our minds spiral, is it ever about something positive?
Do we ever wake up in the middle of the night with an uncontrollable stream of thoughts about all the awesome things we expect to happen in the future?
Rarely to never-ever-ever.
It's easy to fall into negative thinking.
If we think about it, falling is easy. We don't have to try hard to fall, because it just happens. It happens when we let go. It happens when we're trying to do something else, and slip. It happens when something external knocks us down. Thanks to gravity doing its thing, falling is basically our natural state.
Yet we never fall into positive thinking.
Positive thinking is never our default state. I don't know why. Probably has something to do with ancient survival instincts, but it's super frustrating for our well-being in today's world.
To get to positive thoughts, we have to climb. And that takes effort. It can be exhausting, even. We have to consciously put one foot in front of the other and put energy into making it happen.
But the reward is so worth it. Climbing takes us places. It helps make us stronger and healthier. It literally helps us reach new heights.
So, every day let's do the work of climbing into positivity. Yeah, it takes work, but ultimately feels great.
Meanwhile, falling? Falling hurts.
Let's crush some soulcrushers,
-Tim-
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Let's Lightbulb | Creating outcome-oriented-offsites (ooo!) that are fun, creative, and insanely productive — helping leaders achieve goals that are twice as valuable, in half the time.
Try a no-risk, no-fee "One-Hour Offsite" with your team. Yes, it's actually only one hour. No, it's not actually an offsite — it's over Zoom. But your team will surprise yourselves with how much you'll accomplish in a short amount of time.
Just hit reply and say something along the lines of, "hey, tell me more about that thing."
Every week in this email, I share a new creative thinking exercise and tips on making our work fun again (#CrushingTheSoulcrushers).
Thanks for reading.
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