Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 58
The Creative Populists: Helping Folks Grow Their Creatively Entrepreneurial Qualities
Research revealed that at ages 4 and 5, 98% of us perform at NASA’s ‘Creative Genius’ levels; it also found that when we are 15 only 12% of us do. The Creative Populists (working title), a team of creatively entrepreneurial super heroes, will engage students especially in creative activities and entrepreneurial explorations that will help them retain and renew their creative genius.
Each character represents a core creatively entrepreneurial concept and all of the characters introduce an array of the qualities and talents that all young people should be developing intentionally as part of their education.
This program is based on three fundamentals—we are born with deep and broad creative and entrepreneurial qualities; the best educations are produced, not consumed; we learn best when we are having fun.
Help me complete the characters and consider their applications.
The Creative Humanz or Creative Populists
I became excited about this line up when almost immediately I discovered that our leader of the troop would be found in an exciting grass roots bottoms up self expression of creatively entrepreneurial behavior in American culture, the hip hop scene.
So meet the captain of The Creative Populists:
Dr. Entre
From the Walt Whitman housing projects of Fort Greene, the neighborhood in Brooklyn famous for progressive hip-hop, Dr. Entre was a transcendent hip-hop artist at 14, then known as Trew. His first album was called Trew TH. He changed his name to Dr. Entre when he became a successful hip-hop entrepreneur at 18, with his own recording label called Creating Advantages (as Chuck D said, “If you don’t own the master you’re owned by the master). Then he became a successful life style entrepreneur—offering high quality neighborhood priced goods manufactured locally—then a successful technology entrepreneur, and he continues to pursue interests in all those areas while he is increasingly focusing on his ‘moon shot’, an impossible to execute project of life changing importance that he just might pull off.
Perhaps that moon shot is Time Travel, perhaps it is achieving a Sustainable Abundance for all.
His power—he knows the street.
He knows the street because he grew up on the street, he still lives there. He is a leader in his communities because he serves them.
When he is in his super hero phase he touches the pavement with the palm of his hand and ‘knows the street’—he receives a dynamic image of the energy fields and data streams and sounds and sensations that provide him with a real time image of what is going on in a two block radius from where he stands. The patterns in the data help him predict what’s happening next.
He has great athleticism and sophisticated gadgets.
Along with his moon shot he has started a new business incubator in the neighborhood. He named it Creating Advantages, the name of his label.
Lois N. Clark
She is the explorer of the distant places, scouting the unknown, traveling to the far reaches of the physical world and the unlimited extremes of the digital and virtual worlds, returning with important understandings about what’s next.
Recently she’s been spending time at the bottom of the ocean, piloting deep sea exploration vehicles.
She was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, a staging station the pioneers’ and their Conestoga Wagons heading West. No one knows where she lives now.
Her powers—she can enter a deep subconscious state she calls WonderWanderLust and she is led to exactly where she ought to be next.
The Engenerator
At 16 he is a world class engineer inventor. His technical knowledge is broad and deep; he grew playing with the technologies and processes of 3D Printing/Small Batch Manufacturing/Maker Movement Production that will lead to the New Industrial Revolution and the renewal not just of our economy, but the revitalization of our culture.
That’s how he sees it.
He is proud to be from Detroit and is already taking on a leader’s role helping the city to recover and while he is home schooled he formed Club, a maker space for his neighborhood public high school. He teaches there.
His father is Native American, his mother born in India and came to work as a senior engineer at General Motors.
His father is Fox and Sauk; they traded furs with the French at Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit starting in the early 1700’s.
He knows the history of Detroit as a major manufacturing center and learns from his mother what they did best.
His power—he can make anything as the master of each of the various desktop manufacturing technologies that allow for rapid prototyping, open source design, 3-D printing, and small lot manufacturing.
He has designed proprietary desktop manufacturing technologies that accelerate the processes.
Additionally he has developed a mobile app that allows him to identify and plug into the existing networks of Maker Technologies nearest to him so he can quickly create whatever he needs, wherever he is.
He’s gifted musically as well, designing innovative musical instruments of remarkable qualities. He plays Native American songs.
Dee Sine
Her name is her destiny, her design talents are legendary. She is the youngest designer to have products in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum; the selection committee couldn’t decide which to choose, the Reclining Chair or the Solar Powered Portable Water Purification System, each completed before she was 21, so they included both.
Her power—when she applies her design talents to it, whatever it is, she can radically distort how others perceive it. She is even able to make something or someone appear to disappear.
She advocates for Design Thinking, and has added her own strategies.
She is from Japan, she came as a teenager, and is becoming a US Citizen.
The Rainmaker
The others characters are all young, from their mid teens to late 20’s, but the Rainmaker is much older.
Almost wizard-like older?
Long ago, for decades, he was a corporate boardroom power broker of such standing and repute he was respected and sometimes feared in boardrooms everywhere, known as the Reign Maker.
But a while back he realized he had to expose an incidence of corporate malfeasance— Big Oil hiding climate change data or the modern day slavery found in for profit prisons—and it was life changing; he became a corporate outlaw, and now he is hiding from ‘The Corporation’, keeping one step ahead.
As he travels, fearful not only of what ‘The Corporation’ might do to him but what corporations do to the human spirit he is a missionary for the importance of being and becoming the most creatively entrepreneurial culture we can.
Perhaps he had a role in bringing together the Creative Populists around Dr. Entre to take on the moon shot. In any case, it seems his is a supporting role.
The Arts?
The Ancient Greeks offered the Muses, 9 goddesses who inspired the Arts, each dedicated to an artistic expression—one to dance, another to theater, etc.
We collapse that to the 4 X-Pressions: Music Art, Visual Art, Performing Art, and Language Art. They are treated as a chorus, and one or two will partner up with a lead character. They aren’t all women.
I have used these characters with high school kids—I asked them to develop the characters and to make up stories; teachers have excitedly shared that the kids who never talk in class were the most active.
And I have used them with a public policy think tank, as prompts to open up their creative thinking: What would you be ready to take on if you had one of the Creative Populists committed to helping you? They reported they thinking more boldly, and thinking afresh.
The names considered are:
- The Creative Populists
- The Humans Being
- The Creative Humanz
- The Imaginal Cells
What do you think? Can you imagine adventures for them, or more members perhaps?
If you want to talk with me about these characters contact 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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