Experiment with Digital Storytelling.
Story is an ancient art—but like all art, it can be enhanced with modern tools. Digital cameras, inexpensive audio and video editing programs, Photoshop, and CD burners are allowing anyone with a story in their hearts to tell it with pictures and sound. A good place to learn these new techniques is at the Storytelling Bootcamp at the annual Digital Storytelling Festival (see page 122). (I’ve gone through the boot camp myself—and it was worth the time and money.) The Center for Digital Storytelling also has classes and lots of background material (more info: www.storycenter.org.) For other ways that technology is turbocharging stories, check out the online storytelling community, the Fray (more info: www.fray.com,) as well as the City Stories Project (more info: www.citystories.com) and I Used to Believe (more info: www.iusedtobelieve.com,) a fascinating collection of childhood beliefs.
Ask Yourself: “Who Are These People?”
Do you ever find yourself in large public places (airports, shopping malls, movie theaters, or sports stadiums) looking around and wondering who all these people are? Next time you’re in this situation, don’t just ask the question. Answer it. Make up a story about two of the people in your proximity. Who are they? What are their names? Are they coworkers? Lovers? Siblings? Enemies? Why are they here? Where are they going next? If you’re out with friends, together select a few people, craft your own stories, and then compare the results. What do you ignore that your friend emphasizes? Which details do you focus on that they might not even see? People often interpret the same clues very differently based on their own life experiences. This exercise can help you challenge assumptions, bypass stereotypes, and broaden the stories you create in your interactions with family, friends, and colleagues. If nothing else, it can make waiting for a bus a bit more entertaining.
Read These Books.
The best method for heightening your aptitude for Story is just to read great stories—particularly the archetypal stories found in Aesop’s fables; Greek, Nordic, Native American, South Asian, and Japanese myths; the Bible; and Shakespeare’s plays. But if you’re looking for a broader view of Story itself, the following five books are must-reads.
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee— Even if you don’t plan to write the next great screenplay, McKee’s book is valuable reading. It explains the basic structure of the cinematic story—from how characters drive narrative to the twenty-six different types of story genres. This book will also change the way you watch movies.
Stealing Fire from the Gods: A Dynamic New Story Model for Writers and Filmmakers by James Bonnet— Drawing on the work of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and others, Bonnet demonstrates how to use story archetypes and the “natural storymaking process” to create modern narratives of any kind.
Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire by Cliff Atkinson— PowerPoint. Just the word makes my eyelids droop. But since this slide program has infiltrated every organization in every part of the world, we might as well make the best of it. Throw away those room-emptying left-brain slides and use Atkinson’s book to turn your PowerPoint presentation into an epic.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud — People laugh at me when I say this is one of the best books I’ve ever read, but they just don’t get it. Scott McCloud’s masterpiece (yeah, it is) explains how comics work—how the stories unfold, how the pictures and words work together, and how the readers supply much of the meaning. And get this: McCloud wrote it in the form of a book-length comic. Amazing.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell— Campbell’s book introduces the idea of the “hero’s journey,” something that every aspiring writer—not to mention, any self-actualizing human—ought to understand. For another avenue into Campbell’s mind, look for his famous late-1980s interviews with Bill Moyers, which are available on CD, DVD, and video. A collection of Campbell lectures and writings is also available from the foundation established in his name.
(More info: www.jcf.org/works.php)
Six
SYMPHONY
This is me.
Actually, it’s not me
precisely. It’s a drawing
of me, in which I’m both
the subject and the artist.
A self-portrait. Pretty awful,
isn’t it? (And those nostrils?
Don’t even ask.)
I was never very good at
drawing, so one week I
decided to learn. But instead
of enrolling in a conventional art class, I opted for an approach closer to the heart of this book: drawing on the right side of the brain, the method pioneered by Betty Edwards and described in her similarly titled book. The self-portrait above is like those “before” pictures in weight-loss ads. I drew it on the first day of class—before the instruction began. Five days later, as you’ll see later in this chapter, my artwork came out different. And in the process, I learned a lot about our next high-concept aptitude.
Symphony, as I call this aptitude, is the ability to put together the pieces. It is the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair. Symphony is also an attribute of the brain’s right hemisphere in the literal, as well as the metaphorical, sense. As I explained in Chapter 2, the neuroscience research conducted with functional MRIs has shown that the right hemisphere operates in a simultaneous, contextual, and symphonic manner. It concerns itself not with a particular spruce but with the whole forest—not with the bassoon player or the first violinist but with the entire orchestra.
Symphonic thinking is a signature ability of composers and conductors, whose jobs involve corralling a diverse group of notes, instruments, and performers and producing a unified and pleasing sound. Entrepreneurs and inventors have long relied on this ability. But today Symphony is becoming an essential aptitude for a much wider swath of the population. The reasons go back to the three forces propelling us out of the Information Age. Automation has taken over many of the routine analytic tasks that knowledge workers once performed. Many of those tasks are also heading to Asia, where they can be done equally well for much less. That is freeing (and in some cases forcing) professionals to do what computers and low-wage foreign technicians have a more difficult time replicating: recognizing patterns, crossing boundaries to uncover hidden connections, and making bold leaps of imagination. Meantime, a world teeming with information, individual choices, and just plain stuff is putting a premium on this aptitude in our personal lives as well. Modern life’s glut of options and stimuli can be so overwhelming that those with the ability to see the big picture—to sort out what really matters—have a decided advantage in their pursuit of personal well-being.
One of the best ways to understand and develop the aptitude of Symphony is to learn how to draw—a skill that, as that self-portrait demonstrates, wasn’t exactly my forte.
ON THE MORNING of the first day of drawing class, before we open our sketchbooks or sharpen our pencils, we learn the essence of our craft, distilled to a single sentence that will be repeated for the next five days. “Drawing,” says Brian Bomeisler, “is largely about relationships.”
Bomeisler is my instructor. He’ll be teaching me and six other students—a far-flung group that includes a lawyer from the Canary Islands and a pharmacist from New Zealand—the techniques developed by Betty Edwards in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Bomeisler comes to the job with considerable street cred. He’s an accomplished painter in New York. His works (and works-in-progress) adorn the walls of the sixth-floor SoHo loft that will be our classroom. He’s been teaching this course for twenty years. He’s also Betty Edwards’s son.
Like his mother, with whom he developed this five-day workshop, Bomeis
ler believes drawing is about seeing. “The naming of things is where you get into trouble,” he says. And to prove the point, as well as to benchmark our abilities, he gives us an hour to draw a self-portrait. We prop up our little mirrors, open our oversized sketchbooks, and begin to draw. I finish before the others—and Bomeisler immediately identifies me as the four-hundred-pound Cheez Doodle fiend making his inaugural visit to Weight Watchers: I’ve got a long way to go—but since things can’t get much worse, they’ll likely get a little better.
My problem, Bomeisler tells me as he squints at my artwork, is that I’m not drawing what I’m seeing. I’m drawing “remembered symbols from childhood.” To grasp what he means, turn back to page 129 and if you can bear it, look at that self-portrait again. My lips don’t really look like that. Nobody’s lips look like that. I’ve drawn a symbol for lips—a symbol, as a matter of fact, that comes from childhood. Those penciled lips look a lot like the Magikist sign that used to beckon from I-94 when, as a kid, my family drove to visit my grandparents in Chicago. In a sense, I’ve merely written “lips” in modern hieroglyphics instead of truly seeing my lips and recognizing how they relate to the totality of my face.
Later that first day, Bomeisler shows us a Picasso line drawing and asks us to copy it. But before we begin, he tells us to turn Picasso’s sketch upside down—so “you know nothing about what you’re drawing.” The goal is to trick the left hemisphere and clear the way for the right. When the left brain doesn’t know what the right brain is doing, the mind is free to see relationships and to integrate those relationships into a whole. In many ways, this is the core of learning how to draw—as well as the key to mastering the aptitude of Symphony. For example, one of the reasons my self-portrait looks so strange is that the relationships are skewed. In class, we seven students learn—and, more important, we see— that on a human face, the distance from the center line of the eyes to the bottom of the chin is equal to the distance from the center line of the eyes to the top of the head. I drew my eyes much higher on the head than they are in reality—and by botching that one relationship, I’ve distorted the entire picture.
Bomeisler is a sympathetic teacher with the gentle manner of Mr. Rogers had Mr. Rogers done time on Paris’s left bank. During each drawing exercise, he glides around the room offering encouragement. “I’m here to keep your left hemisphere quiet,” he murmurs. One day he teaches us about negative space—that is, the area between and around an image. He shows us the logo of FedEx, like the one below.
Look at the white space between the “E” and the “x” in “Ex.” See the arrow? That’s negative space. When we draw portraits of our classmates later in the week, we begin by lightly shading our large piece of paper—and then erasing the part that’s not the outline of our subject’s head in order to reveal it. “Negative space is a powerful drawing tool,” Bomeisler says. “It’s one of the secrets to learning how to draw.”
Over the next four days, we learn to see several of these relationships—between space and negative space, between light and shadow, between angles and proportions—in ways that many of us never noticed. We draw stools propped on tables, the wrinkles on our hands, and the shadows that caress the corners of Bomeisler’s studio. Throughout Bomeisler repeats his mantra that “drawing is largely about relationships” that, when combined, create the whole. And so, in some sense, is this course. All of our exercises in relationships lead to the final afternoon, when we must integrate our newly acquired understanding into a big picture—a second attempt at a self-portrait.
Seeing Relationships
Like drawing, Symphony is largely about relationships. People who hope to thrive in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. And they must become adept at analogy—at seeing one thing in terms of another. There are ample opportunities, in other words, for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker.
THE BOUNDARY CROSSER
What’s the most prevalent, and perhaps most important, prefix of our times? Multi. Our jobs require multitasking. Our communities are multicultural. Our entertainment is multimedia. While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting and, nowadays, more effective.
Boundary crossers are people like Andy Tuck, a philosophy professor and pianist who applies the skills he honed in those fields to run his own management consulting firm. They include people such as Gloria White-Hammond, a pastor and pediatrician in Boston; Todd Machover, who composes operas and builds high-tech music equipment; and Jhane Barnes, whose expertise in mathematics informs her intricate clothing designs.1 Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist who wrote the classic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience as well as Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, has studied the lives of creative people and found that “creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains.”2 The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice. Such ability is at a premium in a world where specialized knowledge work can quickly become routinized work—and therefore be automated or outsourced away. Designer Clement Mok says, “The next 10 years will require people to think and work across boundaries into new zones that are totally different from their areas of expertise. They will not only have to cross those boundaries, but they will also have to identify opportunities and make connections between them.”3
“What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize the pattern before anyone else does.”
—CAYCE POLLARD,
protagonist of William
Gibson’s novel Pattern
Recognition
For example, the offshoring of computer jobs to India will create new demand for people who can manage the relationship between the coders in the East and the clients in the West. These whole-minded professionals must be literate in two cultures, comfortable in both the hard science of computing and the soft science of sales and marketing, and able to move between different, and sometimes antagonistic, groups with the ease of a diplomat. Such multifaceted people can often solve problems that flummox the experts. “Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all,” says Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. “This is because perspective is more important than IQ. The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas. Usually this ability resides in people with very wide backgrounds, multidisciplinary minds, and a broad spectrum of experiences.”4
Boundary crossers reject either/or choices and seek multiple options and blended solutions. They lead hyphenated lives filled with hyphenated jobs and enlivened by hyphenated identities. (Example: Omar Wasow, a Nairobi-born, African-American-Jewish entrepreneur– policy wonk–television analyst.) They help explain the growing ranks of college students with double majors—and the proliferation of academic departments that dub themselves “interdisciplinary.”
Csikszentmihalyi has also uncovered a related dimension of the boundary crosser’s talent: those who possess it often elude traditional gender role stereotyping. In his research, he found that “when tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.” This bestows unique advantages, according to Csikszentmihalyi. “A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses and can interact with the world in terms of a much richer and varied spectrum of opportunities.”5
In o
ther words, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said two hundred years ago and as boundary crossers remind us today, great minds are androgynous.
THE INVENTOR
In the 1970s, Hershey Food Corp. ran a series of goofy television commercials that inadvertently contained a crucial lesson in R-Directed Thinking. In the ads, a person walks along dreamily while munching a chocolate bar. Someone else, equally oblivious, strolls about while eating peanut butter. The two collide.
“Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate,” the first person complains.
“And you got chocolate on my peanut butter,” the other replies.
Each then samples the results. To their surprise, they discover they’ve created a masterpiece. “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” the announcer intones. “Two great tastes that taste great together.”
R-Directed thinkers understand the logic of this confectionary fender-bender. They have an intuitive sense of what I call the “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Theory of Innovation”: sometimes the most powerful ideas come from simply combining two existing ideas nobody else ever thought to unite. Take John Fabel, an avid cross-country skier. He loved the sport, but his backpack straps always bruised his shoulders. One day on a trip to New York, he passed by the Brooklyn Bridge—and saw the solution to his problem. In an act of what cognitive scientists Gilles Fouconnier and Mark Turner call “conceptual blending,” Fabel combined the structure of a suspension bridge with the components of a traditional backpack—and invented a new, easier-to-tote, and now popular pack called the Ecotrek.