Creative Problem Solving: "Jack's Notebook" Review

Teaching creative problem solving is so often done with diagrams, acronyms and theories. Many good systems exist, but key would be remembering to use their points at moments when new ideas are needed. Did this hunch to write a story that also teaches work as advertised? Turns out that linking the steps of using a process to drive the plot of a story makes new points memorable. I've started three businesses from scratch from pretty much nothing. This story had a great deal in common with my own personal experience of start up - containing both the serendipity of how priorities are established & reinforced, along with why investors want to endorse your particular idea so you might get a better idea of who to approach among those people you already know to make your business idea available for their financial backing.

This story is a fun one to read because it portrays a young man who learns how to gradually become an entrepreneur instead of the wage slave he has been trained to be. From having a couple of dead end jobs, Jack seizes a way to make his many dreams come true from a seemingly random meeting with an interesting person who offers to help him with advice and new thinking strategies. Exactly what "help" means becomes more and more fascinating and involving as Jack's story unfolds.

Applying one of the creative thinking techniques from this book spurred me to re-read it from the point of view of the mentor. Culturally, we don't have many examples of people who use their authority compassionately and thoughtfully; this mentor character portrays an example worth emulating. Many would use the term of "Angel" for a key person who is in the position to open doors for us. Reversing that, it struck me how unusual it seems to be to find even one learner who would actually take advantage of what a mentor has to offer wholeheartedly. What makes the mentor character believable is his ability to choose how he is going to react to circumstances. This mentor has rather humbly learned to trust the value of observing, thinking strategically & creatively under pressure, when survival instincts usually cut off options. But this old guy knows how to open the conduit to ideas by suspending fear & judgments - and he teaches how.

This book struck me how, no matter what my age is, what if I had the opportunity of a lifetime dream staring at me in the face now - could I recognize it on the front end? What resistance in myself would I need to answer? What are the opportunities to make my dreams come true now that are going over my head? Does there exist now among people I know an effective mentor for me? Are there other people who could offer me the sort of support and information that I need, the sort of support and good ideas that this young man in this story got at the right time and way? It even had me thinking of how would I recognize a student who wants to learn what I have to teach.

That this new form of using fiction to illustrate a learning process would spur me to ask these questions for myself made Jack's Notebook meaningful for me. Perhaps this story and its teaching information will work that way for you too. Jack's Notebook is highly recommended.
Here's a link to get the book on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/ca92bt

Why I Hand Out Compliments

    My father had just turned fifty in December in 1941. He had wanted company to celebrate New Year's Eve with, but instead had found himself alone and bereft of any friendship at all.

    He carefully considered his state of affairs. He observed about himself that he had been often focused during his life on what other people had thought of him.

    He considered what he was going to do about this, because it made him unhappy not to have the pleasures of lasting personal connections.
    He decided that the answer might be to offer to others what he so desired for himself. There were many people he knew who were amazing people. They had amazing qualities that came to them as naturally as breathing. So he decided to show people how much he thought of who they were, what their special innate qualities were and to express directly to them what all of these meant for him personally, and for self-knowledge.

    He settled in San Diego where he met my mother, a woman 25 years younger and married her, starting a new family and a new life.

    As his youngest daughter, I got to see firsthand how he expressed his resolve to bring out people's better qualities many decades later. I was there when he brought a woman to our house so he could show her an antique painting that he'd collected.

    When she entered the house, it was obvious that she was a self-conscious person who was shy about even shaking hands to greet our family, whereas our family ritual was hugging any new arrival and each other. She did not match the current social opinions of what was considered "attractive." She avoided looking at herself in all the mirrors my dad had hung all over the house. She had tried to make herself look presentable.

    My father ushered her up to where the painting had been hung. From a fascination with lighting and also to protect the pigments, he had located the painting in a very dark room with its own light. The woman took off her sunglasses.

    My dad pontificated a bit about the painting while he pretended to fumble for the light. "We have reason to believe that this painting was the last of this style for this painter of that era. Some believe it was his 'masterpiece.' The title inscribed on the back was 'Love's Folly.'" He clicked the light on that illuminated the painting and stood back.

    The painting depicted two hands; a man's hand reaching over the wall to hand a flower to a woman's hand which included many rings. Here's what she saw...

    My dad backed off to admire the painting, and took his visitor's hand in his to invite her to walk closer to examine it. He said, "This artist, in the masterpiece of his career, chose a woman's hand that looks remarkably just like your hand. He depicted the most stunning, irresistibly beautiful shape for a hand that he could imagine."

    My father held her hand up next to the hand in the very realistic painting. She couldn't deny her hands could have been the artist's model.

    The woman sputtered. She was used to compliments from others that she could turn aside as untrue. But this compliment stared her in the face in a way that made brushing it off impossible.

    After being admonished with a comment from my mother, who said, "Oh, he just does these things to people," the woman decided that it was an entirely admissible possibility to accept such a compliment from a happily married man. She managed to finally be able to leak out a meek, "Thank you."

    She had a much different smile on her face on her way out the door than when she arrived.

Tacit Agreements & How to Change Them

We love to work, play and live with people who "read our minds" successfully. Like playing music together, tacit agreements coming from a shared subculture can sometimes give a very pleasurable conviction of bonding. It's is pleasurable how easy it can be to “read” each other's intentions and needs in the context of shared values and circumstances. However, tacit agreements can be tricky to manage if they need to change.

Many of these circumstantial "agreements" and tacit understandings are made below the awareness level of their long-term effects that can cause unintended conflict somewhere down the road. This can happen for many reasons.

• The people involved may be playing a role that may or may not fit who they really are – or who they are becoming or have become.
  
• Perhaps an extraordinary circumstance goes on and on that later comes to emphasize differences between the two people's values or situations when previously they felt similar.
  
• Perhaps a person wants to be the best of who they can be, so their intent is to step into their dreams of who they want to be - no matter that they aren't quite there yet...and the other person decides they're a "lying poser" because they're in the position of cleaning up after the mess left behind.
  
• Perhaps someone is going through a phase in their life where situations are changing; later they settle into what they will become that could be much different than how they were - when they were poised on the edge of the act of changing.

It's really handy if another new tacit agreement can be allowed to evolve so it can take the place of an outdated one. This benefits from taking some thought to what has worked splendidly in the past. Many of us have trouble observing and spelling out what we have done as naturally as breathing; but this is quite valuable to groom as a skill.

For instance, a couple who worked and lived together found themselves always arguing about differences they once regarded as advantages. They decided on a three-point approach to their problem; every time conflict rose up, to apologize and note down what they wanted to communicate immediately and save it to be delivered all at once at a regularly agreed time. They decided when the concerns and complaints, although some of them needed to be communicated, were too volatile to be delivered in person, they would write them down. They also decided to use classic co-counseling techniques. Then, they brainstormed to figure out what was a guaranteed fun time they could share together regularly as a break in their work day. Since they had been together long enough so they couldn't go back to "dating" per se, they decided to learn something new that they could do together. This gave chances for new experiences to happen that emphacized harmonious, constructive experiences that re-newed the significant connections of the constructive difference of the two people that had been previously making them fall apart.

How people feel about changing things usually need to be factored in. As many people know, it's sometimes easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission - especially when the answer will always be "no" or "I'm scared." The challenge in tacit agreements is to find out how much it matters to the people involved if the agreements are done differently or are not done.

Being able to do this artfully will avoid the ritualistic ways of fulfilling the expectations of a relationship that most people must fall back on. Relationships can go sour when a person must play a role instead of being themselves because, so many roles are like jobs that can be done by others. Better for the people involved to have a means for ongoing delightful surprises and potentials that change with the times.

Sometimes the whole idea will make you feel like a turkey.

When starting a relationship and with your every action concerning the other person, you are evolving a tacit agreement of how people are supposed to treat each other. Problems come when you tacitly agree to match slightly different cultural standards, causing what could become endless confusion where these differences overlap. In that situation, tacit agreements may require you to do more than you really want to continue doing, or to accept or assign a meaning that you don't want your actions to have. This is why it's handy to clarify tacit agreements.

There are a number of ways to clear up tacit agreements gone bad.

One way is to conduct a situational 'test' that involves what the person might do if you do this or that to see what they do. Now, many of us aren't very practiced at designing these tests or interpreting them. So the longer you can go on without decided what the results are, the better, because then it allows for more experiments to be done before the conclusion is delivered.

The next step is to conduct these "tests" and indicate clearly in a positive way what you'd like the result to be or why you're wondering why they always do the same thing. This is a way to see if the person is willing to go for what you propose. You can tell them what it means to you and if they are paying attention, this may help the two of you get on the same page. A good question is how can each person have free rein to invent ways to address each other's concerns, without having to read minds?

At some point with relationships where tacit agreements are being established, you'll need or want to find out how much what you are doing matters to the other person in proportion to how much trouble it is for you. If either person can't make changes for implied or expressed agreements with their partner, it’s not good for either of them or the longevity of the relationship. Either way tacit agreements can lead to big disappointments when people figure out that the deal they thought they were making or definitions of bonding in friendship or love was quite different for their partner than they expected.

Accident Of Birth

Beautiful women must make peace with how others react to them at some point in their lives. Problems coming from other women must be dealt with as well. Lots of people wouldn't have much sympathy for these sorts of problems; like having to deal with being rich. But they are very real.

I speak from experience. Once I was young and stunningly beautiful. I did not need to hear about how beautiful, how skinny, how I looked like a model, how my nose was perfect, my lips were so luscious, hair so easy to manage, how I should just wave my ass to get guys to do things for me, anything I wanted.

Heard it every day of my life from someone, if not in words, in the looks they gave me. Wildly resented being born by an accident of birth and defined as sexually beautiful by my culture. Then the odd looks when I commented that it was very strange to be beautiful and to always wonder if someone was doing something for me or with me merely because they liked looking at me. It was sort of like being rich and wondering if your friends liked you because of what you had or because of what you could give them at some point in the future.

My response when I would get these admiring and sometimes cutting, envious comments from other women was to use humor. I would declare some platitude about the nature of comparison of bodily parts and it's wiser to compare yourself to yourself... in a suitably stupid and lousy Indian accent. I learned to trot this one out by preparing it ahead of time. To finish off the humorous effect, I tell them, Oooops, again I must have been spontaneously channeling Baba Hagen Daas. They will laugh and that will be that.

Now I'm not-so-happily fat while being treated for a hereditary hyperthyroid problem that has swung my weight to the other extreme. It's helping me to remember my reply to other women about how did I stay so skinny: "Probably something WAS wrong with me" - and it turned out to be true! Funny, huh? Not a bad idea to watch how you reply or react in this situation because by making the comment I made, perhaps it was "installing" some program with the reaction. Sometimes I wonder if this was true for me...but that's pretty obviously superstition. I was probably just stating facts.

To make peace with being beautiful by confronting the whole idea dead on, my first idea was to so what people told me I was: become a model. This did not work. Turns out I hated dealing with the sort of people who really were only concerned with how I looked and had no idea that who I was inside. They didn't get how the inside me was connected to what they saw on the outside. With a natural charisma that I had no idea how to turn on or off, when I walked into a room, everyone turned to look at me - and I did not know what to do with the attention. Hated the idea that beautiful women were trained to manipulate to get what they needed. Couldn't get rid of the attention I got, no matter how hard I tried to hide myself. I dressed in the most trashy, bulky, loose clothing I could find. It was an era of my life I would never wish on anyone.

A number of coincidental things happened to me in that era. I read Laura Huxley's "You Are Not The Target." It stunned me. At that point in time I was also learning Alexander Technique by attending daily teacher-training classes. As I learned to see postural expressions of character in other people, I realized that others could see my own postural attitudes and how they expressed who I was on the inside as well. Realized that people were probably responding to my own body language that expressed my internal character on some level - as well as the fact that I was a young, beautiful woman. Even if these guys were not conscious how they could discern this information, they could respond to it anyway. I had to give them credit for that, whether they knew what they were responding to or not.

Suddenly, getting this attention became my fault, instead of being an accident of birth. Learning that piece of the puzzle suddenly made my own attractiveness to be a little bit of my fault rather than just an accident of birth. Voila! A turnaround. I was so relieved.

Upon examination, I realized that men seemed to be handing women the power to make or break getting attention. In the past, I didn't want that power. Now that I knew what was going on, I could play with the energy handed to me when my natural charisma was turned on. In the past I was desperately trying to hide my own beauty and the power and interest it generated. I realized that I was making myself responsible for their story. Once I realized men were handing me power and then getting mad at me for having it, I could let that go. I could hand back the energy. It was OK that my interest in them was going to be construed by them to be a sexual interest - that was their business. All I had to do was to make it clear that wasn't what was happening for me on my end and move on. It had been essentially a virtual question posed by many men that I was refusing to answer. Now I could answer it.

Another interesting piece of the puzzle for me was a book about the differences in the way that men and women use language to establish rapport or trade information. She's written quite a few - the author is Deborah Tannen. Any one of them will do, but the one called "Talking 9 to 5, Power and control in the Workplace" is the one I'm thinking about that would be relevant to your situation.

In my life, I had hung out with men mostly in your life and probably adopted their speaking style to a great extent. Because of the company I kept I misunderstood what women are doing and why they are doing it. Women are so often looking to do the "trouble-telling" approach in order to establish rapport as a ritual. They are expecting another woman to say, "Hey, I've got other problems as serious as your weight stuff, check this out." Perhaps they are curious what you will do since you do not have their same complaints or objectives that are so obvious with them...

Anyway, interesting topic. Although many people feel that the question of women's liberation is a "been there, done that" subject, it's still very operative in our culture. Currently the topic has receded into the background - which makes it even more important to remember its cultural influence and power.

Time Flies & Slows

This year is the year of the boar, (if I've gotten it right.) Got to participate in pageantry by holding up a forty foot Chinese dragon. It was quite a challenge physically because I was near the front, untangling bamboo spines and hoops, but was quite a fun time.

I was born in the year of the water snake in the Chinese astrology, in the hour of the dog - which makes me an awfully sociable snake lady. Do you know your Chinese astrological sign?

Was thinking the other day how time seems to speed up and then slow down, back and forth during the course of my life. What reason it does it do that? What do you think about this?

Perhaps, the more events being noticed means more of time slowing down. When nothing in particular stands out, the faster time speeds up...

There's a species of tick that sits around on a branch for up to nearly 17 years in a state of semi-hibernation. ...Until a nice warm body happens to come within jumping reach and it seizes opportunity. In only a few days, it feeds on blood, makes babies and dies. Can you imagine what its perception of time would be?

How does time work for you?

Make Time: Sleep Less

Sleep less and you'll have the time to be creative, make more money at a second job or whatever you want to do. But don't just deprive yourself of sleep - get smarter about it.

When I was going to Alexander Technique teacher training school and had to pay for it myself AND live an hour commute away, I came up with the brilliant idea of a split sleeping schedule. Went from nine hours a night sleep to a daily total of five hours with no ill effects. After around three weeks to get used to the schedule, it worked beautifully. I had no trouble keeping it up for over a year - so my experiment stood the test of time! Now whenever I want to stay up late for music or dancing, I can switch into that schedule without having to "get used to it."

I've become a "happy napper"! To my mind, the ability to nap is one of life's secrets.

The best schedule was a split sleeping time. Heard this hint from learning about a study with college students where the minimized sleeping schedule of 12 hours apart was the most common cycle tolerated by the most people. Decided to be sleeping 12 hours apart. For most people, how long to sleep two hours apart would be determined by the timing of their own sleep cycle. After experimenting with how awake I felt after sleeping certain amounts of time, I observed that the best sleep cycle for me turned out to be 1 1/2 hour plus a little time to get deep into falling asleep. So two hours was a good minimum cycle for me that gave me much more sustaining energy than a random "nap."

Rather deliberately because it worked into my schedule, I chose the actual times from 4am-7:30 twelve hours apart, which gave me two cycles each. It turned out that I could get by with the afternoon cycle being only two hours; from 4pm-6pm. It worked elegantly in practice. I would go to sleep at the end of the day and wake up, having all night to be awake...then go to sleep at the end of the night and be awake to have all day.

The only thing I missed is that I never got to see the sunset during the winter.

The trick to start the routine is to pick a time when you want to take a nap anyway. Turn off the phone, lock the door, make the room dark if possible - and it also helps to go through your nightly "routine of going to bed" rather than just treating it as a nap.

With this schedule, you could have two jobs, have more time for the internet or for doing your creative projects, have time for yourself while the kids are sleeping, etc.

Warning: don't let friends who show up from out of town talk you into skipping your sleeping times. You can't "catch up" later once you establish these times. You'll have to sleep ten hours if you get knocked off your routine; or at least I did the two times this happened to me.

Discerning

By nature, I'm a very discerning person. Meaning, I perceive subtle factors by nature, as a talent/obsession. Without even using much effort, I am talented at catching the subtle differences that may be making a difference. I zero in on them.

When I was younger, these were usually things I would spot that "stuck out". They seemed to need attention or fixing or were "wrong" in some way. I realized that I was attracted to things that I could influence, and that I gained a nice feeling from fixing stuff that could go wrong, or preventing calamity, as well as mitigating and sweeping up after others who were so directed at doing something important that they didn't have the concentration to deal with details...and the devil was in the details. I so enjoyed being there to put out fires when chaos hit the fan.

But as I learned some wisdom, I began to seek the things that could make a big difference that were not present anywhere or were not obvious at all. I suspected my means, which was to zero in on something, was not the means that would really bring me the benefits I wanted. So I decided to change my actions that I was using to bring about my desires. I decided to change my focus. Instead of "zeroing in" I decided to expand the focal length and regard the bigger picture.

I realized that it was a much more challenging possibility (and a much better use of my observational abilities and intelligence) to imagine what could be done to improve a situation by considering the whole situation. It took relationship skills to reassure and question people who were involved to craft solutions acceptable to everyone involved.

Pretty much anyone could just point out what was wrong with something or someone. It seemed that such judgments about supposed evil motives were so very often wrong. Think about it. People naturally gravitate toward the worst possible motive if they are confronting some event or some person they do not understand. Why is that so common? Because of the commonness of self-preservation.

It's a very interesting discipline, when you find yourself passing a judgment, to realize it is coming from a sense of fear or self-preservation in yourself - or others. It gets to be a very interesting challenge to imagine a reasonable explanation for the motives of the person you have judged to be suspicious. Or to find ways to reassure others that there is no need for their suspicions or fearful concerns.

Turns out it's a very handy and valuable skill too. Fascinating to come up with a reasonable and compassionate explanation when someone does do something in a mean-spirited way to their face. It makes mean people behave, even while they're thinking you're the most inane Pollyanna they've ever met.

The Curse and Blessings of Being Eclectic

I am very confused...I have my whole live problems, that I have a lot of ideas, creative writing, being a yoga teacher, playing a music instrument, painting, drawing and have business careers. But unfortunately, I have started a lot, like flamenco dancing, tai chi, yoga, meditation, painting but I don't do something to an and, I haven't goals for my life, what is very frustrating for me, but I don't know, if I am a scanner, or I have depressions, or fear not to be good in the things I do. I am am perfectionist. Do you think I am scanner? What could help me to cope, deal with it? Can I find one goal, what I can reach, go on?

Whoever said "Life is short, but it is wide." - they were an eclectic too.
Yes, you're obviously what Barbara Sher, career counselor, calls a Scanner. No, you don't have to choose between your interests, usually you can do them all.

The challenge (rather than to choose one interest) is to figure out how to accommodate your multi-interests into a lifestyle that works better for you. It's also a challenge of how to deal with the pressure from others designed to get you to specialize. You are not like them, you NEED to have multi-interests. They assume there is "something wrong" with you. You'll find out it is "something right" with you as you learn about Scanner-hood.

It is also a challenge to deal with the pressure you apply to yourself concerning this confusion. Most scanners buy into this idea there is something wrong. This pressure to specialize has been working at odds with who you really are.

You're a generalist, not a specialist. You're a swan growing up in a barnyard of chickens who tell you that you should act like them.

Did it help - or have you read "Refuse to Choose" by Barbara Sher? If you haven't read the book - it's available at your library, usually if you can't afford to buy it.

According to Sher, there are different types of scanners. For instance, there are the popularizers who jump from livelihood to livelihood. These types can learn to record their journey in some way to make what they naturally do useful to others, or another cool solution.
There are the virtual students, who keep learning.
There are the fast-motion scanners who can multi-task, (Barbara calls them "plate-spinners.")
There are scanners who cycle among their interests, or their multi-interests have a recognizable "theme" that's possible for them to make conscious.
There are also many more kinds of scanners, which are in the book.

In Refuse to Choose, Sher gives you templates about how other people who are scanners live their lives in meaningful ways that work to provide a living. If you want, you can use these examples to help you design a lifestyle that fits you personally.

The reason we haven't found these examples is that scanners are rare and unusual characters. Barbara Sher has a forum where Scanners can congregate together. It's a place where being multi-talented is common. There it seems as if EVERYONE is an eclectic!

What People See In Art

There are a number of motives about why an artist is making art. There are some factors in each case: to notice the artist's motives, to learn how difficult it is in factual terms for the artist to follow their apparent intention, and to come up with alternate intentions. The viewer's participation needs to be enough, in either case, to put together the content of what the participant is getting out of the art.

It seems that quite a few people seem to need to learn to understand how to be a participant of the art. My favorite book on this is a little-known book of the past called: Why Cats Paint
http://www.monpa.com/wcp/documentry.html

If an artist is making images to communicate, then they must release the content of the communication. Mostly because people are going to see whatever they see in the art! In a "really good" piece of art, a person will notice something different in it almost every time they look at it.

That difference may be reflected in what they believe the piece of art "is", it may be a detail, it may be a virtual question such as " is that figure coming or going?" which is something about what is apparently depicted. That is, every person may interpret the art to "mean something" a little differently.

This phenomena seems to work sometimes, even though the artist is self-referent. It depends on HOW the personal vision is displayed. This seems to boil down to - if the artist is an interesting enough person to start with, this will work for others. At best, the artist just displaying their "personal" building blocks is enough, so that the personal becomes the universal.

Snowboarding Santa Happily Merry

Guess Santa can surf too!

Tippy-toe Santas Delivering Soon

How fast does Santa have to go to do all that work on Christmas eve? Sounds like it will be a quantum Santa, but magic is magic, after all. Hope you're having fun being Santa this year, if that's your role.

Requests

Sometimes I get certain requests for specific subjects from my window painting jobs. Here was one. Dogs commonly would come to work with their people, so it was more than appropriate.

Flying Frosties

Blistering heat while I was painting this snow scene. Had to stop and get a glass of water...

What Santa Does On His Days Off

Many people spend time imagining what Santa must do on all those other days of the year he doesn't have to work. The answer is that Santa is a farmer, of sorts, who has lots of free labor to do all his assembly work. He gets the glory. Here, Santa is having a good time at the bowling alley in San Rafael.

Window Contest Missed by a Hair!

Today I did the outside of a classic car dealership that I've been decorating every year for the last thirty years. There was a windowpainting contest in the area, with prizes. Sadly, both the car dealer and myself didn't know that we had to register to win - and we would have won because we were the best!
The next one below is a detail of the one above. I did the lettering with three different colors of markers, outlining on both sides with shadowing.
Feeling festive yet?