Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 47
My most recent radio show shared the recent thinking I have been doing about how the idea that each of us and all of us at our core are marvelously creative and entrepreneurial might inform our political conversations.
I referenced “The Dawn of Everything,” an ambitious book about our beginnings. The authors did a years long deep dive into field studies and ethnographic research of the past four or five decades — decades filled with new archaeological findings and understanding — and show the wonderful political imaginations our ancestors from all around the world displayed in the intentionally creative ways they organized and reorganized.
One chapter debunks our current belief that forming cities necessarily resulted in a state emerging to keep order. They show strong evidence that a number of cities grew quite large with no state or bureaucracy to keep the growing populations in check, nor evidence of centralized storage facilities that would suggest peonage relationships.
So with this optimistic understanding of the human capacity to create the community organizations that best attend to our individual and collective needs, I made a self-admitted ‘radically naïve’ call for us to bring our creative political imaginations forward in these times of extraordinary change and turmoil.
Does it seem possible that times like these, with fierce cynicism baked in, that a radical naivete serve us?
A while ago I began recruiting my family and colleagues to a political understanding that could play an important part in saving our country — how radically naïve is that?
As I listen to their thoughts they’re helping me shape that understanding into this three part idea: our nation’s critical need for common ground is found in our shared creative genius; we are living together in the first days of a shared future of Unknowable Unknowns; we should be Rationally Optimistic about that Future since there is no better preparation for the Unknowable Future than each of us and all of us developing our common ground natural born strengths by intentionally developing our creative and entrepreneurial capacities, and helping others develop theirs.
Now I am recruiting you.
American’s don’t like each other—large majorities from both parties see the other side as an immoral enemy. Our current political language has been so weaponized it can’t help.
What I believe with good reason can help is our embrace of the common ground in the NASA involved research that we are all born with such remarkable creative qualities 98% of 1600 five-year-olds performed on a creativity assessment at NASA’s Creative Genius level.
I’ve shared that research finding with close to 20K folks. It’s clear that this creative common ground is as attractive to the left as it is to the right, useful to rural and urban and suburban folks, important to old and young and those who have and to those who don’t yet. Folks eagerly embrace this common ground; when I suggest that each time they walk into a room it is filled with creative geniuses, they dig it.
A second important common ground: we are living together in the first days of the Future of Unknowable Unknowns. This Future is defined by unpredictable change. There will be more fierce disruptions like the one we went through except it won’t be anything like the one we just went through. And there will be wonderful thrilling opportunities we can’t image.
Evidence our Unknowable Future is here now is found just about anyplace we look.
There’s the impact of AI in all its guises. IBM announced it won’t hire any new employees to do work they anticipate AI will do and predicted nearly 8,000 jobs will be replaced in the next few years.
McKinsey Global Institute estimates 45 million jobs, a ¼ of employment, could be lost to AI by 2030.
There are thoughts AI will generate new jobs; Dell Technologies and The Institute for The Future predict that 85% of the jobs making up the economy in the next decade don’t exist today.
In the face of this Unknowable Future we should be Rationally Optimistic because the best way to prepare for an unpredictable Future is to intentionally develop our creative and entrepreneurial capacities.
That’s playing to our strengths since we were all born creative geniuses.
Our most creatively entrepreneurial selves are best prepared to create advantage while making our way through whatever we find in the Future, advantage for ourselves and our families and communities, and for our country.
In a later column I will share some thoughts on how I think this can play a role in politics. What’s your thoughts? Email me at Carl@creativepopulist.com.
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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