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Creative Experience

‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences than other people. well maybe not......some say Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity, surely, have you ever seen a stupid creative?and finaly ‘The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it so who judges the thing who judges the utmost noble sensation.....

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare; my business is to create

(Submitted by TRICKY)

An awesome speech...by Steve Jobs

(Courtesy: Paro, Vivacity - To know more about Paro, visit www.shajizone.blogspot.com)

Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.






I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Mobile ART

1. Art is his calling (GN Tabloid - pg11, 24july2007)
Bassam Lahoud takes extraordinary photographs - on his mobile phone.
His photograpss are exquisite works o art. Through the eye of his camera Bassam Lahoud provides a fresh and unusual perspective of people, landscapes and everyday objectives such as a pair of spectacles,a spiral staicase or a window.
His pictures have a spiritual quality and a delightful sense of movement. And the play of light is just perfect. But the most amazing thing about these artworks is that they have all been created with the camera on his cell phone.
Lahoud calls it "Mobile Art". The name is apt because I have taken these pictures with my mobile phone and also because the special effects have ben creatd by my movements while taking the pitures.
Bassam Lahoud's Mobile Art is on display in the Egypt Court of Ibn Battuta Mall till tomorrow.

EIGHTSTORM-Written by an ADman based in Dubai

Courtesy: GulfNews Weekend Review http://www.gulfnews.com/, dated 06.07.2007
Article: Krishna Kumar, Dep WEb Editor, Gulf News

A Dubai-based advertising professional demystifies creative thinking.
Dubai, the city of innovation, has inspired a book on innovative thinking. Eightstorm: Eight Step Brainstorming for Innovative Managers, by Dubai-based Kishore Dharmarajan, introduces brainstorming techniques which can improve creative thinking in business. "In today's hyper-competitive world, businesses need ideas to get ahead. And they need them fast. Eightstorm's creative thinking methods can provide new answers," says Dharmarajan, who runs his own advertising agency in Dubai.
"While conventional brainstorming is a random activity of ping-ponging ideas with one another, Eightstorm is the first book which gives a method for it and a framework for idea generation."

Thought revolution
"One of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today is the creation of a highly innovative workforce," he says. "If you can't turn your people into what business guru Tom Peters refers to as ‘innovative machines', you could be severely limiting yourself.
"Eightstorm puts forth a new way of thinking things through that can change the workplace. However, its effectiveness depends on how quickly businesses can adapt to this new approach."
Dharmarajan did his schooling in Dubai in the early 1980s and went to India for his university education. With a post-graduate degree in English literature in hand, he cleared the University Grants Commission exam, which could have given him an easy passage into teaching and academia. Instead, he came back to Dubai in 1996 to try his hand at advertising. Dharmarajan read various books on advertising and marketing "in order to bridge the gap between academics and market practice".
He got his big break with M&C Saatchi where he practiced the concepts he had assiduously mastered by then. "Creating copy... was fun, but after a couple of years it became boring," he says.
For Dharmarajan it was time to move on and he launched his own advertising agency, Eureka, in 2004. Once the agency was running on its own steam, Dharmarajan turned to the ideas that comprise Eightstorm. Writing the book took him a year and a half, he says. The impetus behind writing the book was his realisation that much of the corporate world was struggling for ideas. But there was a definite method which could be used to generate ideas, felt Dharmarajan. The tools they used everyday in advertising agencies, combined with a few other concepts resulted in "INNOVATE" — each letter representing the eight tools that Dharmarajan branded as "Eightstorm" — Dubai's contribution to innovative thinking.
Eightstorm is an easy way for institutions to develop innovative ideas. The eight tools are Innovate, Navigate, Nuptial, Overturn, Visualise, Accelerate, Transcend and Entertain.
Depending on personality traits, some of the tools may perhaps be used more than the others.

Avoiding assumptions
The book does a good job of dymystifying the process of creative thinking. Each toll is succinctly explained in the book that tells the story of a manager in search of an innovative thinking process to save his troubled company.
One of the plus points of the book is that it makes no pedantic assumptions and is an easy read.
"I am not comfortable with instructive writing. I am happier using dialogue and that is the format I have chosen, discarding fluffy and verbose prose. Instead of the 100-odd pages, I could have written an 800-page tome dwelling on the eight tools."
Dharmarajan's book puts him in the same category of innovative thinkers as Edward De Bono who pioneered "Lateral Thinking" and "Six Hats". He intends to market his book in the West, especially in the United States. To that end, he is planning a non-conventional method of marketing his book — using both online and offline media — to build up interest in his theory. He is also writing a series of tip sheets as a follow-up to the book along with putting up a website: http://www.eightstorm.com/.
Based on the response, corporate workshops, presentations and lectures will follow.
- Eightstorm: 8-Step Brainstorming for Innovative Managers, is published by Booksurge, amazon.com's publishing wing. The book is available at Magrudy's in Dubai.

Advertisment WAR - forwarded by Abraham Marret

Ratheesh Kesav, Chowannur

ഓരോ യാത്രയ്ക്കും ഒരു ലക്ഷ്യമുണ്ടായിരിക്കണം.
ഓരോ ജന്മത്തിനും ഒരു കര്‍മ്മമുണ്ടയിരിക്കണം.
ഓരോ വാക്കിനും വ്യക്തമായ ധാരണയുണ്ടായിരിക്കണം.
ഓരോ വരികള്‍ക്കും ശക്തമായ ഭാഷയുണ്ടായിരിക്കണം.
ഓരോ ജീവിതത്തിലും ഒത്തിരി നന്മയുണ്ടായിരിക്കണം.
ഓരോ മനസ്സിലും നിറച്ച്‌ സ്നേഹമുണ്ടായിരിക്കണം

About Ratheesh Kesav, http://www.orkut.com/Scrapbook.aspx?uid=6945844752128727725