What Determines a Creative Life? What Determines Success?

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Determination

“Square peg in a round hole.” That’s what people used to call it.

Even as a kid I knew it was a silly waste of time to put a square peg in a round hole. That was just plain common sense To make the peg fit, it wouldn’t be a square peg anymore. It would hurt the peg, and the hole wouldn’t like it.

What makes some people grow up to live highly creative lives? Is it in their genes — “the way the tree was bent”? Is a creative life determined by their experience?

Yet, what is astonishing is the great variety of paths that led to eminence. Csikszentmihalyi

Though the 91 creative people in the study that became the book, Creativity, had unique characteristics and traits that made them stand out. The life paths that led to their creative contribution were not particularly different from what you might find any group of 91 citizens.

Some were precocious. Some were prodigies. Some didn’t seem to stand out as children.
Some had serious hardship growing up. Some suffered the death of parents. Others had happy childhoods without incident.
Some were ignored. Some had guides and teachers who helped their development. Some had devastating experiences with mentors.
Some seemed to always know their calling. Some searched for years to find their path.
Some were noticed early. Some struggled for years to gain recognition.

Those same circumstances describe the people I call my friends, none of whom yet have changed the world through Creativity with a capital C.

It seems that the men and women we studied were not shaped once and for all, either by their genes or by the events of early life. . . . Instead of being shaped by events, they shaped events to suit their purposes. . . .

According to this view, a creative life is still determined, but what determines it is a will moving across time — the fierce determination to succeed, to make sense of the world, to use whatever means to unravel some of the mysteries of the universe. Csikszentmihalyi

Fierce determination to succeed.

Success doesn’t happen without giving ourselves over fully to what we’re pursuing. It’s not the barriers that stop us, it’s the way we respond to them.

If we’re determined, we maneuver over, under, around, or through them. It doesn’t matter how difficult the problem we stick with it until we innovate, create, or cobble together a solution that solves it.

Determination removes options other than success: We refuse to define our outcomes as:

the fault of our parents.
an imperfection in our environment.
the result of bad timing.
bad luck or bad karma.
something outside of us.

As determination to succeed is key to world-changing creativity, it seems to follow that determination and creativity are key to success.

How have determination and creativity contributed in your past success? What are you determined to accomplish now?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Image: sxc.hu

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Get Enough Sand

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Through an Hourglass

People once used sand to mark time in an hourglass.

Marking time doesn’t seem to be living.
An hourglass hardly seems joyful.

Where I grew up the sand is rich, white, and unique. Its rounded grains of clear colorless quartz, diamond-like in hardness, are pure silica (silicon dioxide) uncontaminated by clay, loam, iron compounds, or other foreign substances.

White silica is sand for windows and marbles. As kids, it was cool to see the local factory logo on every car window in the nation. It was also cool to grab rejects behind the marble factory — flat disks of colored glass are fascinating to any kid not yet age 10.

Sometimes we wondered how tiny salt-like grains could become clear windows and colorful marbles. Most times we never thought about it at all.

The local dairy built a recreational lake on their property. They floored and bordered it with the pure white, clean, clean sand . . . Swimming lessons, dates, beach parties, even weddings took place there. Famous rock bands played there while we danced by the lake.

We had more than our share of sand in our shoes and our hair. That fact was pointed out nearly every time we walked within 20 feet of an adult.

Sand, grit, guts, gumption, moxie . . . We found those vibrant synonyms in a book in high school — the one with the metaphors. The same words might describe a well-lived life.

Where I come from the sand is unique.
I bet it’s unique where you come from too.
What if we take the sand out of the hourglass this weekend?

Get enough sand and we’ve got a beach.

Ever built a castle?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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What Parts of Your History Are You?

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We Are Who We Were

When I first came to blogging, I had decided to write my way into a new career. I was lucky enough to have a background that such things might be possible. So I set off with the metaphorical wind in my sails. It was working well for quite some while.

I was sure. I was certain. I put myself out there. I brought my “beginner’s mind” to the situation. I brought my best thinking to the new problems that I eagerly came to conquer and solve. It was refreshing, invigorating. I was in the game again. At least I thought so.

Then I woke up.

I realized something was missing, more than something — whole parts of my skillset, my experience, and my history. I wasn’t talking about or using what had taken me a career to acquire. When I left my old situation, I left behind useful parts of me.

Twice in the last week, I’ve had a conversation with people who’ve done the same thing I did — walked away from talents or skills when they walked away from a situation that no longer gave them room to grow.

An intelligent someone said last night, “All of this time I’ve been totally missing what I love to do.”

Sometimes life is so much about learning and building that we totally miss the hole in the wall. We forget that we build our future on what we’ve learned and accomplished before. Our skills and talents become part of who we’ve always been and who we are.

Our experience is the mortar that holds us together. Our history is the glue that connects us to each other. Fashion and buzz words fade away. Memories and learning are what remain.

I’m a teacher. I’m a writer. Try as I might to do other, in some way, those are what I’ll always be.

What parts of your history are you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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The Humanity in Unnatural Spaces

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Not People Places

Yesterday while people were meeting. I went walking to find something worth a photograph. I thought maybe I’d find something inspiring, something motivating. I was hoping for soft lines and curves set there by nature. Instead what I found were the hard lines and curves of concrete.

Nature had no hand these spaces. People hands had done the making.

As I walked through them, long before the cars, buses, and foot traffic, I recognized that, in their own way, the lines and curves came to gether with the light to make something not unpleasant, almost cheerful and oddly elegant. A thoughtful designer saw to it that the frontmost walls let in the natural light while blocking the street scene and its noises. I was grateful that the committee who approved the work had kept the touch of deep blue relief that was the ceiling.

As I waited, I imagined the space filled with people. The simplicity of the scene became chaotic and stressful with the movement, noise, and echoes.

Try as we might, humans don’t seem to make peaceful spaces for people outside the high ceilings of a place of worship, a library, or a space filled with a loving fmaily.

Have you found humanity in other places not made by nature?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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One-Way Relationships with People We Don’t Know Exist

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about a village of relationships with people we don’t know.

I spent many summers in a village. The main street had a bank, a grocery, a bar, a funeral home, a church, a park, and and an ice cream shop. You could find a bowling alley, a school, a gas station, and the city dump.

The town was too small for a stop light. Traffic didn’t find it useful. The kids I played with in that village had the run of the place. We knew who lived in every house on every street. We knew who told great stories, who let us use their yard, and who gave out the best treats on Halloween.

People were connected by stories and by history. Everyone knew my aunt who I stayed with. They knew she was my dad’s sister. They knew him. They knew me. We knew them and their families too.

In my own town, the scale was slightly larger. Still we knew when something was being built anywhere on any street.

I knew all of the kids in my neighborhood and all of the kids in my school. If we met folks from across town, it was easy to find out who we all knew. Even now, when someone from my hometown happens along, it’s “Oh you’re from there, do you know . . .?” The answer usually gets to a “yes,” by question three.

This virtual village can be similar, but a huge difference occurs shortly after a person takes up residence here.

At some point we cross a line that only famous people used to see. That’s when we find that we know far fewer people than the number of people who believe they know us. Social networking and social media have put this process on an even faster track, but it seems a natural phenomena of an interactive web. We attract, collect, and connect with

people who read what we write without leaving word,
people who follow our feeds, our photos, and our twitters,
people who from across time who will read in some future years,
possibly one day intelligent life from other places than this planet . . .

Surely those people think they know us. They form opinions and decide our beliefs without benefit of any personal interaction — just as we might do about Heath Ledger’s final role and the end of his life — and like Heath, we don’t even know that these people exist.

It changes something to consider that people are having one-way relationships with us.

How do you manage a village of relationships like that? Or do you not?