Have You Mastered These Twenty Tools For Becoming Prolific?

September 03, 2014 12:48 PM

A key part of the Prolific Framework is learning and employing a robust vocabulary of creativity. It’s a language that permits you to communicate with yourself and others about the creative process, helps you make sense of the otherwise ambiguous world of creativity, empowers you to speak a language that supports your intentions, and allows you to conceptualize and describe your experience of creating.

Today we’re going continue building a working vocabulary of being prolific. Each definition comes with a link to a specific case study that shows the tool in action. Enjoy!

1.
Content
detachment. The
creator’s obligation to empty himself
of any expectations, perceptions, hierarchies and value chains attached to his
ideas.

2.
Creative
kindling. A source
of inspiration that reignites your
original enthusiasm and the impulse that initially fueled your
artistic energy reserve.

3.
Creative
limbo. A lack of excitement around
not having discovering something worth doing, an inability to turn yourself over
to a new creative project.

4.
Digging
your creative well. Accumulating
ongoing reference files
for your brain to work on through a passive, unconscious process.

5.
Early
warning system. A
personal seismograph that
helps us take preemptive action against impending inner turmoil and anxiety.

6.
Identity
based creation. Tapping
into your native endowments
and limitations of creativity, motivation, inspiration and intelligence and
channeling them in the service of making your ideas happen.

7.
Incrementalism. Building a body of work based on a
practice of patience,
delayed gratification and continuity.

8.
Industrious
revolution. The initial
calorie burning experience of unpleasant and
inconspicuous production that fortifies an artist’s appreciation delayed
gratification.

9.
Integration. Employing the whole of
your personality, talents, gifts and experiences to contribute the highest
amount of value and firepower those around you.

10. Internal revolution. Updating the identity
story you tell yourself after spontaneously doing something you
didn’t realize you could do.

11. Mini sabbatical. The opposite of ambition, the antitheses
of labor, in which you leave the
creative land alone for a given period of time.

12. Pause buttons. A personal, portable toolbox of
strategies for reducing the experience of anxiety on a moment’s notice.

13. Peripheral creation. The secondary activities
of your creative process that involve more speed and less skill, i.e., editing
and formatting or networking and billing.

14. Permissionless platform. An honest canvas where
you can be completely free, expressing whatever you want, as loud you want, as
much as you want, in the way that you want

15. Ritual of leave taking. Microstructures that
celebrate the completion of a period of work, slow down the creative process
and set healthy boundaries to demarcate the line between work and nonwork.

16. Selective indifference. Being discerning enough
not to dwell on meaningless matters, conserving your best energies for your
creative efforts.

17. Self organization. Some form of global
order or coordination arises out of the local interactions
between the components of an initially disordered system.

18. Stiletto moment. Concentrating our portfolio of
talents into a tight little package that demonstrates the full firepower
of our creative arsenal.

19. The shove. The decisive interaction in which a
trusted friend eventufully
compels and artist to make a key change or take a massive risk in their
creative life.

20. Thievery muscles. Respectfully and ethically other
people’s ideas as sparks to superimpose your
own meaning and take the idea somewhere else, somewhere different, somewhere
better, until the original idea can no longer be identified.

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.

[email protected]