Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 48
Every episode of ‘Exploring Your Creative Genius’ opens with WCHL’s promise that I will share an “expansive view on what it means to be creative.” And regularly during a show I remind you that I don’t offer definitions, agreeing with Johannes Goethe (1749-1832) who said ‘thinking is better than knowing’. It’s a lesson my Duke students’ taught me early in my teaching there, that if I defined something they thought they now knew what they needed to know and many would stop thinking for themselves about what the word or term could mean to them.
For sure there are instances when ‘knowing’ is paramount, like if you are going to cut me open to work on my heart I want you to know what you are doing. But when you are actively thinking about what it means for you to be creative and entrepreneurial and generative and innovative, it is much more valuable to you than someone defining it for you.
So in each show I offer a handful of behaviors and indications, facets and aspects of what being creatively entrepreneurial looks like so you can craft your own understanding, the one most useful to you for your always changing circumstances.
Here’s a bunch collected in one place.
Being Creatively Entrepreneurial is Intentionally:
Seeing problems as opportunities to make things better by making better things, designing better services, developing better organizations.
Looking at what others have been looking at and seeing what no one else has seen + Intentionally stepping away from status quo perspectives or thinking, determined to break the chains of the familiar.
Being Generative in the increment by being Generous and Adaptive and Resilient and Flexible so you are delivering more in the inches and the minutes of daily life.
Being Ingenious….doing what you can with what you have where you are.
Giving folks your undivided attention.
Adapting….Developing….Building….Initiating….Imagining
Discovering….Engineering….Narrating….Orchestrating
Growing….Nurturing….Inventing…Combining….Extending
Collaborating….Teaching….Learning….Appreciating….Refreshing
Painting….Leveraging….Experimenting….Designing….Storytelling
Synthesizing….Cultivating….Pollinating….Exploring….Serving
Leading….Risking….Empathizing….Aspiring….Playing….Fostering
Organizing….Celebrating….Thinking….Wondering….Wandering
Singing….Shaping….Constructing….Inquiring….Restoring….Failing
Attempting….Sustaining….Forging….Energizing….Investing
Researching….Fertilizing….Investigating….Helping….Questioning
Dancing….Trusting….Inviting….Beginning….Listening….Improving
Changing….Acting….Parenting….Dancing….Debating….Planting
Becoming….Listening
A current favorite is Appreciating. Can you appreciate a friend or associate’s new idea causing it to appreciate in value?
This list isn’t complete. Where do you find yourself on it? What’s your sense of self as a creatively entrepreneurial person?
Pick three concepts randomly and find as many relationships between and among them that you can.
“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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