John Lacey » Inspiration

Sting: This Ain’t No Time For Doubting Your Power - Send Your Love

John Lacey — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 01:07:59 +0000

I’ve always adored this song (and particularly this remix). I’m hoping by listening to it today, on a day when I feel particularly meek, that I’ll be inspired to take life and run with it. Hey, I might even do some art.

Sting:

There’s no religion but sex and music
There’s no religion but sound and dancing
There’s no religion but line and color
There’s no religion but sacred trance

There’s no religion but the endless ocean
There’s no religion but the moon and stars
There’s no religion but time and motion
There’s no religion, just tribal scars

Throw a pebble in and watch the ocean
See the ripples vanish in the distance
It’s just the same with all the emotions
It’s just the same in every instance

There’s no religion but the joys of rhythm
There’s no religion but the rites of Spring
There’s no religion in the path of hate
No prayer but the one I sing

John Cogan: Ideas Are Everywhere!

John Lacey — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:54:27 +0000

It seems funny that I have an ‘inspiration’ category on this blog because actually most of the time the stuff I publish within it isn’t really inspiration so much as encouragement. And not because I’m a naturally optimistic Ned Flanders type character, but exactly because the opposite is true. I get discouraged a lot. I post the stuff I post there mostly for my own benefit, to sort of egg myself on even on those days when I feel like giving up…

I make this distinction between ideas and encouragement to preface this video from John Cogan. [I really enjoy watching his One Minute Art Class videos on YouTube.] John makes the observation that ideas are in fact everywhere! The challenge isn’t so much finding an idea, so much as committing to just one and developing it. The important skill in many respects is respecting your current idea enough to devote all your time, energy and attention to it in the present moment.

You can learn more about John Cogan at his website.

Sir Ken Robinson’s Spiritual Argument

John Lacey — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:30:38 +0000

I recently had the joy and pleasure of attending a webinar featuring Sir Ken Robinson. I’ve mentioned Sir Ken Robinson on this blog before, but to many people he is probably best known for the talk he gave at TED, where he wondered if schools killed creativity.

[Annoyingly I was literally the next person in the queue to ask a question during the Q&A session of the webinar when they ran out of time. But otherwise it was a truly amazing and inspirational experience - I concede I'm a huge fan of this gentleman, I think the ideas he talks and writes about are truly revolutionary.]

One of the things I found most compelling was how Robinson suggests that finding your passion is about much more than just a career or a hobby, that it can really affect the quality of your life and interactions with others. He describes his book, The Element, in part as a spiritual argument.

Sir Ken Robinson:

There’s a big argument in the book about this, about energy. And one way to think about it is that some activities give you energy and some take them from you. Human energy isn’t static and it’s not limited. If you do things that you love to do you can be physically exhausted by it but spiritually uplifted. If you do things that you don’t love to do you can be physically stable – you know, not worn out by it – but spiritually depleted. And I’ve seen this all the time, people get to the end of the week and they do things they don’t like and they’re just kind of empty, spiritually. But other people do things they love to do and it’s that thing ‘I could’ve danced all night!’ you know if they kept their energy, if their physical bodies held up a bit longer.

So one way of thinking about the book is it’s a spiritual argument. Spiritual in the sense that all life is essentially energy and it’s about our internal spirits, how our spirits connect with other people that determines the course of our lives and the quality of our lives.

You can listen to a recording of the webinar session at Conversations.net.

Teen Angst Journals

John Lacey — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:20:35 +0000

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It’s easy to forget sometimes where your initial passion for an artform came form, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while. It is not surprising that the idea of teenage poetry is such a cliche, because it is a time when there are a lot of changes happening in your life (“shit went down” as Mary Richert puts it in the video above) and for perhaps the first time in your life you’re really consciously reflecting upon the world around you and your role within it. Yet in later life we can look back at this period of life with creative contempt. After all the worst thing a person can say about your work is that is ‘sophomoric’ (even if you are a sophomore!).

For me this kind of reflection served an infinitely practical purpose, it helped me know myself. It was a way of mapping my own emotional landscape. In a very real sense I didn’t know what I thought until I read back what I had written (and this is true even today when it comes to blog posts and other writings). A page in a notebook could become a medium for conversations that never happened anywhere else and for confessions I didn’t dare say aloud.

I don’t think I appreciated it at the time but knowing myself helped my self-confidence enormously. Knowing who you are and what you think and what you value creates such a profound sense of stability in your life. You’re not as easily disoriented when life throws something in your path because you have a personal framework through which to process such things. But even more than that identifying myself as a writer, and taking a lot of pride in my writing, completely changed my life. It gave me a sense of purpose and a sense of identity. The way other people related to me changed too. It’s a funny kind of alchemy, to take all that energy and somehow etch out art and purpose and understanding. [I want to stress the word energy in that sentence too because that is what it was for me. When I started writing I didn't use words, I literally scribbled. It was borne out of great loneliness and confusion and a gnawing gaping empty feeling in my stomach. Eventually those frenetic scribbles became words - at first other people's, song lyrics mostly, and eventually my own. Had someone described this journey to me before I took it myself I would've thought them quite mad.]

So by all means revisit those ‘teen angst journals’ if you are fortunate enough to still have them in your posession. But don’t get hung up on your technique, your own perceived artistry or lackthereof. Rather revisit the passion that brought you here – that initial ‘big bang’ of your own creativity, your own personal creative genesis. I am willing to bet that there are things you knew back then that you have since forgotten and themes and ideas that would be worth revisiting with the life experience you have now.

Sometimes I Take Inspiration From Nature

John Lacey — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:00:07 +0000

Sometimes I take inspiration from nature.
I wonder what nature takes inspiration from…?

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I was having one of those days when everything that could go wrong did. Even attempting to write about my woes in blogform didn’t seem to help. Eventually I decided I was going crazy and needed to get out of the house. So I did. There’s an area of bushland near my house and I like to walk around there sometimes. There are steps heading down the cliff fashioned out of sandstone. I made my way down one of these sets of stairs. I suddenly realised I wasn’t alone, I could hear something – but what?

There in front of me were not one but two Lyrebirds. Majestic brownly coloured birds renowned for their ability to mimick sounds. Clearly these birds took inspiration from everything – from machinery, from other birds, whatever they could hear was fair game!

We all seek originality, we all want a voice and an expression that is somehow uniquely ours. But we have to appreciate that we are in some ways small continuances in much larger artistic traditions and within humanity itself. And it’s not like fellow travelers were staring and pointing and shouting, “What derivative nonsense!” The performance was astounding, the tribute compelling, the technique hard to imagine… and what other animal would’ve had the creativity to showcase and juxtapose such a collection of sounds?!

What do you take inspiration from?

Good Taste And The Gap

John Lacey — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:33:23 +0000

Cynthia Harrison wonders if she isn’t a bit ‘mental’. She writes:

I’ve always wondered if writing is a sign of a mental problem–for me specifically, not for other writers. I mean, really, why would I want to do something for which I am routinely rejected? And for so long? I’ve been writing for 40 years. Trying to publish a novel for 30 years. Well, off and on, between kids and marriages and degrees and teaching jobs, but still. Why haven’t I given up?

Well lots of people do quit. Does that make them sane?

Ira Glass, host of This American Life, talks in terms of good taste – that passion and understanding you have of your artform – and the gap between that good taste, that thing that you aspire to, and your current abilities.

Ira Glass:

And you get into this thing that I don’t even know how to describe but it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great, it’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste – the thing that got you into the game – your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? Like you can tell that it’s still sort of crappy.

A lot of people never get past that phase, a lot of people at that point they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be, they knew that it fell short. [...] But we knew like it didn’t have the special ‘thing’ that we wanted it to have. And the thing I would say to you is that everyone goes through that.

So I guess there are two ways of ‘dealing’ with the gap. Either you decide it’s too large – or too unimportant – and quit, or you keep working to overcome it. You overcome it by creating that great body of work Ira speaks about, by continuing to show up to the page or canvas [or whatever your medium is].

Thanks to Joshua Withers for bringing this video to my attention.

Gever Tulley: Sweet Success Or Gleeful Calamity

John Lacey — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:05:33 +0000

Gever Tulley, creator of The Tinkering School, speaking at TED:

Nothing ever turns out as planned … ever. (Laughter) And the kids soon learn that all projects go awry — (Laughter) and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success, or gleeful calamity. We start from doodles and sketches. And sometimes we make real plans. And sometimes we just start building. Building is at the heart of the experience. Hands on, deeply immersed and fully committed to the problem at hand. Robin and I, acting as collaborators, keep the landscape of the projects tilted towards completion. Success is in the doing. And failures are celebrated and analyzed. Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear.

Can you imagine how different your life might be if you started celebrating your failures?

The mind boggles… and that’s kind of the point.

Go Big or GTFO – But Just Keep Going!

John Lacey — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:16:52 +0000

I wrote about finding your power when no one cares. And that’s great, it is. But then there’s also the feeling that accompanies the realisation that – yes, really – NO ONE CARES. It is not much fun. Especially when you feel like you’re really doing great interesting stuff, really cultivating a talent, really developing a voice. At times you have to wonder if it is worth having a voice that nobody is prepared to listen to.

What if there was a territory that represented this struggle? Well, Ford Fiesta Movement team members Sam Proof and Jen Friel think there is. It’s the internet… or, erm, Los Angeles. Either way:

Go Big or GTFO, This … is the internet. LA is a city like no other, and a city that itself is most like the internet. It’s full to the brim with creative people wanting for a modicum of recognition. Opportunity is a bullet train speeding by at a thousand miles an hour. You can sit there and watch the blur, or you can take a leap, stick out a hand and grab on for the ride. – We’re going to give the LA community, (creative & viewer) the ride of it’s life.

I should probably tell you that I’ve known Sam Proof for several years now. We met in a Stickam chat room, he was a friend-of-a-friend… and at the time I remember him creating funny videos – often as Zeus or Jesus (it’s amazing what you can do with a beard and a toga). I’ve interviewed him on my podcast about online video creators (twice). I love catching his weekly web show Failpire whenever I can. And, yes, I even contribute periodically to another of his ventures – Podpocalypse.

What might be less apparent, even to those who know both of us, are the early morning (for him; late night with the time difference for me) peptalks and commiseration sessions.

At the beginning of the year an important part of my YouTube channel branding was drawn into question. The powers that be weren’t convinced that I had the right to use something in my videos that had been created specifically for use in those videos. It was annoying, but I wasn’t just annoyed – I was furious. It was the final straw in a growing sense of dissatisfaction about creating content online. My subscribers – my theoretical audience – was growing and yet the number of views a given video would receive was actually going down. Talk about diminishing returns…

As it happens, there’s a “90-9-1″ Rule For Participation Inequality online but even knowing this was cold comfort.

So when I recorded the first JOJCAST for the year, it was a miserable resentful lament. I told the world I was going to continue but on my own terms. Out of the ashes came some sorely needed encouragement:

I think we all struggle with this, and for those of us that are not in the 100,000 club I think we struggle with it nearly daily.

[...]

Good luck john, I’ll always be around to cheer you on

Stay Strong
-SamProof

And in that moment I think I finally understood the message of his catchcry ‘Stay Strong.’ To me that means keep going. It’s okay – indeed normal – to have doubts, to experience frustrations, but don’t give up! We all get by with a little help from our friends…

If you’re in that ‘other Internet’ Los Angeles, you can join Sam and Jen for the draw-a-thon on Thursday 4th March. And if you’re not, you can still follow their progress online.

Mary Richert on Struggle, Inputs and Inspiration

John Lacey — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:45:28 +0000

Mary Richert – in her first Internet video ever – talks about some of her favourite books. In these pages she finds a lot of encouragement and inspiration. I really want to emphasise three points Mary makes in this video.

Everybody struggles. This was a fact that I needed to be reminded of today. [I saw a "Quitting smoking is hard" ad earlier and a part of me scoffed and said, "Really? You should try writing a novel some time, buddy!"] It can really help your perspective to realise that even the people you admire have struggled. It really helps me to come back to John A. Keel talking about the Blank Page and to realise even Annie Lennox has moments of great doubt.

If you want to be creative you have to have input. Quite removed from the romantic notion of the artist as an aloof loner, the truth is creativity is enriched by collecting experiences and ideas. Julia Cameron talks in terms of filling the artist’s well. Australia playwright Michael Gow suggested that when you use your imagination you literally empty your mind. This is a resource that can be depleted. As an artist you need to acknowledge that and work to rectify it.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the big picture. Mary’s work is predominantly in the field of creative non-fiction. Sometimes it is hard to make sense of history while it is happening, especially if it is happening to you. This was something I found working on a memoir project. I was always secretly waiting for a point in my personal life that would lend itself to a satisfactory conclusion for the work. What I concluded was that it was difficult to understand the moment you’re having while you’re having it.

I want to take this opportunity to really applaud Mary on her first video. I’ve been making online videos for several years now and I think a lot of people sit back and think that it is such an easy thing to do. I have very distinct memories early on of being completely unnerved by the prospect and just staring into the lens of the camera, hoping desperately for something intelligent to come from my mouth. I hope she makes more! It is a wonderful extension to the great work she does on her blog.

When No One Cares…

John Lacey — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:23:46 +0000

I sometimes get disappointed when something I produce doesn’t get much of a reception. You hope that a project is worthwhile and that somebody somewhere is getting something out of it, and as much as I look for some intrinsic merit to the things I do, I am still sometimes left wondering.

But what if no one caring was actually a good thing?

In the last week I’ve heard two writers explore this issue on separate podcasts. I Should Be Writing’s Mur Lafferty explores the freedom to be found in this condition, while Seth Godin points out that the cost of failing has fallen to nothing at all.

Mur Lafferty on Amateur Writing: Good Parts and Bad:

Being interviewed on podcasts, I mention one thing I love about podcast fiction is I can write whatever the hell I want. Whatever I want. And I can give it to my listeners and they can listen or not. I can write zombie humour audio dramas. I can write a series of novellas about mythology and the afterlife. I can write about superheroes. I could turn around and write chicklit tomorrow. I could write mysteries. I mean, no one is going to pigeonhole me. I can write whatever I want to. And that, I realise is not only the Internet, but it’s also just I am so new that no one cares!

You know, I’ve talked about not caring before, the fact that no one cares that you’re a writer and how that can be a wonderful thing. Because when no one cares you can do whatever you want. They’re not noticing you, they’re not judging you. And if they do notice, then someone cares – and that’s good. But on the other hand, you might be kinda getting yourself into the hole where you’ll be for the rest of your career.

[...]

But your freedom is no one is telling you you can’t. And I think, newbies and wannabes – all of us amateurs – we don’t recognize and appreciate that more often. We don’t say, “You know what, it’s fantastic that no one gives a crap about what I write. I can write whatever I want!”

Seth Godin talking to Merlin Mann on 43 Folders:

The cost of failing has dropped by faster than the cost of a chip. You know, my Dad owns a factory in Buffalo, New York, that bends steel and makes hospital cribs and has union organized labor. The cost of getting that factory was really high and if he screws up it’s going to be really expensive. The cost of getting a blog is $12 and if you screw up no one’s going to notice because they weren’t reading in the first place. What we’ve discovered in the last ten years is that it’s easier than ever to record an album, to treat a customer with respect, to put a new idea out there, to write a book and publish it for free. All these things cost almost nothing and the lizard brain hasn’t caught up to that yet. The lizard brain doesn’t realize that the cost of failure is not that a sabre tooth tiger eats you, but that the cost of failure is nothing. So what 43 Folders people ought to do, I think, is do something that people will ridicule, do something where you will fail, do something that’s a little bit nutty and see what happens. Because the worst thing that will happen is that you’ll fail and no one will notice.

John Lacey » Inspiration

Sting: This Ain’t No Time For Doubting Your Power - Send Your Love

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John Cogan: Ideas Are Everywhere!

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Sir Ken Robinson’s Spiritual Argument

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Teen Angst Journals

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Sometimes I Take Inspiration From Nature

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Good Taste And The Gap

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Gever Tulley: Sweet Success Or Gleeful Calamity

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Go Big or GTFO – But Just Keep Going!

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Mary Richert on Struggle, Inputs and Inspiration

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When No One Cares…

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