Doing Good and Inspiring Creativity

I swear, this blog is like a bad relationship, on and off, on and off, with like a huge honeymoon period–I was literally so committed to blogging every day that one night I was in bed at 2am, realized I hadn’t blogged yet, so I jumped out of bed to type up an entry–and an epic crash after ~150 days. Who knows when/how often the posts will come now. When I have inspiration I suppose. Speaking of which, today was a very inspiring day.

Thanks to @Keshav Malani, I spent most of the day in San Francisco at the Do Good Lab School of Creativity, attending the workshops. It was an absolute blast.

• Three of the sessions were fully hands-on, salsa, tango, and mosaic building. It was interesting to see the different teaching styles.
• Salsa was my favorite by far — no coincidence that the teachers were the best by far. They didn’t teach anything super flashy or technical, just the basics and fundamentals but it really stuck so I feel like I’ve got those down even after an exciting day of learning.
• The mosaic workshop I enjoyed and might pick it up as a hobby if I’m stuck in a creative rut, but I felt she used too many technical terms so I had trouble following sometimes. It was really fun seeing the passion in some people as they went to town with a hammer and the cement paste (whatever it’s called).
• Tango was.. I don’t want to say it was a train wreck because it wasn’t, but I didn’t learn very much from watching. I did learn a lot from dancing with one of the professional dancers. There’s really no substitute for experience and practice.
• Storytelling was another workshop I attended. I get the feeling that many people (myself included) expected a workshop with concrete steps on how to improve your stories, things to focus/work on, etc. But of course, it’s a creativity day so the focus was on playing games, getting outside of our heads. One of the most interesting activities of the day, a bit intimidating, challenged us to feel emotions and in the process, expose ourselves. For example, I’d get up in front of everyone, would be provided with an emotion (happy, sad, angry, silly), and then I’d have to really feel that emotion, by repeating “I am sad. I am sad.” and making appropriate body gestures (hands covering face, etc), till I’m really feeling the emotion and then I’d add “I am sad when.. I have lost a friend that i thought I could trust..” etc. It’s a very.. powerful exercise. Fucking scary to completely expose yourself and let yourself go in front of an audience, and some people refused to do it (I don’t blame them). At the same time, it was kind of refreshing, exhilarating even.
• Finally was a creativity workshop led by Javier Ideami (badass name) of Ideami Studios. It was amazing. We played a few games and improv exercises  to get us to stop thinking and just go with it and we went over the different phases of the ideation process: insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, verification. He’s promised a copy of some of his teaching material so I might post that when I get it. Great guy.

The funny thing is, as inspiring as this day was, typing out this entry was not.. the most fun I’ve ever had. I had a bunch of inspiration and ideas on the drive home, and thank god my phone has a voice recorder (most of this post was recorded on the drive home). I think it really shows inspiration can happen at any time, so it IS important to carry a notebook, recorder, etc to jot down your ideas, because once that inspiration, that motivation’s gone, if you have no record of it, well you’re SOL.

till next time..

You want to become a people person?

1 part smile.

2 parts positivity.

1 healthy dose of curiosity.

It’s that simple. Be genuinely interested in people. Be happy that you’re there, in the moment, talking, interacting with them. That’s all it takes.