Category Archives: Creativity

This is what you’ve waited for

Once is my favorite music.

The first time I saw it, it became responsible for kickstarting a creative transformation in my own life.

The story inspired me to finally publish my original music online. Which urged me to crawl out of music hibernation. Which compelled me to start performing in public again. Which gave me a platform to play weekly concerts in my neighborhood park. Which provided me with a source of power I did not have before. Which inspired me write music that was more muscular and soulful. Which inspired me to write, produce, direct and score in this documentary.

Which art inspires your art?

Don’t chase the high, follow the heart

During a recent podcast interview, I heard a hugely successful actor offer a great piece of advice to young performers.

Don’t be famous, be legendary. Fame is the industrial disease of creativity, he said. It’s a sludgy by product if making things.

What a bold statement. Considering we live in a world where attention trumps accomplishment, where a person’s fame tends to eclipse their actual contributions as a creator, his advice is sorely needed.

And yet, that doesn’t give us permission to hide from the world. If we insist on keeping our music locked up inside ourselves, we’ll always be winking in the dark.

The trick is finding the balance.

How time did you spend working on your legacy today?

Opportunity is subordinate to wherewithal

Obama famously said that opportunity is who we are.

That the defining project of our generation is to restore that promise, and that no one is better positioned to take advantage of those opportunities than us.

The challenge, though, is that opportunity isn’t the only variable. There’s a larger creative equation at work that centers around the idea of wherewithal, meaning everything needed to buttress opportunity, including knowledge, resources and courage.

Because even though creating art is work, creating the opportunity to make art is work too. It’s a much more strategic, measured and entrepreneurial type of work. But it’s work nonetheless.

When I first moved to a major metropolitan city, I started busking in the park with my guitar. Not an activity I ever anticipated doing, but it created an opportunity make art, from songs to performances to a documentary film.

The point is, we get our start by giving ourselves a start.

That’s where opportunity grows.

What is the opportunity is going to pass you buy if you don’t act on it?

Inspiration is incidental, not intentional

Artists make things because they want to move people. To inspire them to become better.

But the creator can’t jumpstart other people unless her battery is charged first. There has to be a source current. A substratum of energy from which to supply power. Johnny has his own version of this.

And so, we all have to repower our own source current. We have to inspire ourselves, first and foremost. Because our job as creators isn’t to inspire people, but to keep doing what we love, that way people can discover the same about themselves through that work.

If we want to move people, we have to remember that inspiration isn’t the target, inspiration is the reward our audience receives when we hit the target.

When was the last time you made the choice to be inspired?

Develop second order imagination

The prolific creator has a profound opportunity agenda, which is an inherent enterprise to notice creative opportunities, apply force and propel them into interesting directions.

He is obliged to carve his own path. To build his own leverage. To penetrate his boredom with himself and engage his own interest, lest the first whiff of meaninglessness derails him as he stands in the void between projects.

I remember the first time I strolled through the tunnel under the historic arch in my neighborhood park. The aesthetics were inspiring, the architecture was stunning and the acoustics were shattering. There was no way I wasn’t coming back with my guitar.

Three years later, I’ve not only become a weekly performer in that space, but I also wrote, produced, directed and starred in a concert documentary about that place. The point is, making art is work, but so is creating the opportunity to make it.

Because I never had that little voice inside of me that says not you. I was not waiting around for somebody to greenlight my creativity. I wasn’t about to ask permission to innovate.

How could you manufacture your own creative opportunities?