In “Happy Feet,” every penguin has a heart song that he or she uses to find a mate. If the songs work together, the penguins marry and have eggs. The heart song is so important that a penguin isn’t a penguin without it. When Mumble is hatched with feet that compel him to dance, his father is worried and upset. He admonishes his son to keep his feet still; he knows other penguins wouldn’t understand.
Time proves his father right. His dancing is seen as an
afront to the Great ‘Guin, and Mumble gets blamed for the lack of fish. Mumble
doesn’t think that the accusation makes any sense. Mumble is ultimately
banished from the penguin community. He goes to find the real culprit responsible
for the missing fish – people. In the end, it’s Mumble’s happy feet that save
the penguin community from starving as humans take an interest in the him, and
after he teaches his penguin community to dance, the penguin colony on the ice.
Singing and dancing are creative acts, but if a person or
penguin keep singing the same song, the act loses its creativity. Creativity
must be something new. In the case of “Happy Feet,” it’s the dancing that is
creative, and because it’s new, it threatens the status quo. Mumble, its initiator,
gets punished for his creativity. When he returns to the community, his new
creative act saves the penguins.
People rely on creativity to continue to adapt and grow, as
a species and as individuals; people are also threatened by anything that’s
new. It’s the paradox of creativity: human beings need it to survive and
embrace it in words, but fear the change that comes with it and reject it out
of hand. Creativity can be great and terrible. It’s up to us to embrace the innovations
that will solve current problems and to encourage those creative acts that
bring more beauty and true enjoyment, like dancing and singing, to life.
We are confronted with ugly every day, and I don’t want to
give it more space here. Bringing beauty into the world is hard. It’s much
easier to give in to our baser natures and create from that. Turn away from
your normal reaction and do something different. Do something beautiful; create
something beautiful.
Create Something Peaceful
Even if your insides are in turmoil and your brain is
spinning, take a deep breath and exhale deeply. Grab hold of the emotions and
find the peace within. Bring that peace to your creation process. You may
consider doing something to release your frustration, and that’s okay. Then dig
deeper and create something that will bring others peace.
Create Something Fun
Haven’t we’ve been entertained to death? Consider the number
of shows that thrive on the horrors of mankind. We need to counteract that. It’s
time to create something fun. Bring to life something that will bring a smile
to people’s faces. Don’t go for easy. Creation shouldn’t be easy. Instead, go
for the funny that is difficult and transcendent. Create something that your neighbors’
children, your significant other’s grandparents, and you find funny. Maybe it’s
a cat video. Whatever it is, choose something that’s funny without giving in to
the easy jokes.
Create Something with Love
Show your love through your creative work. Baked goods are
nice, too.
Create Something Inspirational
Beautiful landscapes and inspirational quotes are nice, but
it’s time for you to become the inspiration. Do something truly inspirational.
Create something that inspires you. Put your heart and soul into something that
will lift humanity to greater heights. It’s time to shine your light. Bring it
on. #penguinate
Most people find excuses to not exercise. We need to find
excuses to exercise. Since we’re creative, we can do it. Put your creativity to
work for you and get your health in the right place so you can create more,
create longer, and create better.
Make Time
Like your creative activities, you have to make time to
exercise. If you think you don’t have time, you will never have time. There are
so many responsibilities pulling you in so many directions; it’s easy to ignore
exercise even as your health deteriorates. Set aside 30 minutes every day to do
something good for you, your life, and your craft.
Find a Partner
One of the best things you can do is find a partner who is
able to motivate you to exercise. External motivation may not be the best
motivation, but if it gets you started and drags you through those times when
you’d rather be working on the computer, then take it. We all have family
members or friends we need to spend time with. If it’s your children, find
activities that encourage movement together. Your significant other could also
be motivating. A good friend might do the trick to. If you know you need to
spend time with someone choose events and activities that will encourage both
of you to be healthy.
Find a Reason
Use your creative works to help improve your mindset toward
exercise. If you’re a writer, this can be as easy as really wanting to know
what basic training is like, or trying to describe fighting styles, or just harnessing
the feelings involved in a certain activity that corresponds to your writing’s
settings. It’s hard to write about the woods if you’ve never been in them.
Find an Exercise You
Like
You can choose any exercise in the world. There will be
people in your area that engage in the activity, and they are probably looking
for others to join them.
Kickball: Adult kickball leagues range from competitive to beer. This was one of the most fun activities I engaged in when I lived in Alaska.
Basketball: I started playing basketball in Germany and continued through college and into my mid-thirties. At 5’ 4” with a bad knee, I’m not your typical player, but I enjoyed it.
Disc Golf or Frisbee Golf: Frisbee golf is easy. You just need to get a frisbee and find something to throw it at. In college, we used light posts and trees as our goals. Disc golf is a little more serious with courses and specialized throwing discs.
Fencing: Swords? Yes, please.
Geocaching: Hiking with a destination. High-tech treasure hunting. Get your GPS and get out to find something or just sign your name.
Tai Chi: It’s a martial art. It’s slow. It’s easy to motivate me to do Tai Chi.
Instinctive Archery: Breathing, stance, and getting in touch with your inner self are all part of the experience. Plus, over the course of an hour, you’ll pull a lot of weight, even with a light bow.
Yoga: For me, yoga isn’t that exciting, but it’s something my wife loves. Then I found Cosmic Kids Yoga: storytelling inspired by Disney, Star Wars and more with yoga moves. They make yoga fun.
Ballroom and Swing Dancing: Find a group and go. If you’re alone and you’re a guy, don’t worry; there are usually a lot of women willing to dance with a partner they don’t know. Of course, women also dance with each other when no guys are present. Either way, dancing is a good way to work up a sweat. Swing and ballroom dancing just help you look cool doing it.
Children’s games: Just because you’re grown up doesn’t mean you can’t play like children do.
When you choose an activity, give it two or three weeks and
go at least three times each week. You won’t be good the first couple of times.
That’s okay. You’re not supposed to be good at anything the first time. Don’t
just do exercise on the weekends. That’s a good way to get injured more easily.
Of course, you can always choose more than one activity and you might have your
own. It took a couple of weeks before I came up with the idea for looking for
videos on Disney Yoga. If you have suggestions for motivating and fun
exercises, put them in the comments.
Realize the Benefits
If you know the benefits of exercise and keep them in the forefront
of your mind, you’re less likely to skip them. If you want to live longer,
better and be healthier, so you can create more and create better while being a
part of your friends’ and family’s lives, exercise should be on your list of daily
activities.
Have Health Insurance
My lack of health insurance stopped me from playing
basketball. I can’t afford to break a leg, blow out a knee or rupture an Achille’s
tendon. Having health insurance removes that excuse. It allows you to continue
to get the long-term benefits of exercising while mitigating the fear of what
could happen if something were to go wrong. I could get hurt walking down the
street or going down the stairs, but removing basketball from my exercise
regime also limited the possibility of experiencing a catastrophic injury. (And
removed one of the places where I was able to socialize.)
Get a Dog
If you’re lucky enough to have space for a pet and live somewhere
you can have one, get a medium sized or larger dog, even if you’re more of a
cat person. Dogs require you to walk them and play with them. If you take care
of your dog in the right way, you’ll also be taking care of yourself. Just be
sure that you understand what kind of commitment your making, then go for a
walk with your dog for your health.
No matter how many benefits there are or how many good
things come from exercise – longer life, better quality of life, stress relief,
better health, improved ability to move, less heart disease, better breathing,
more energy, and better thinking are just some of them – people are still
unable to make the time for even a small amount of exercise every day. It’s
gotten so bad that someone recommended losing the remote to the TV, so you
would have to get up to change the channel. (Of course, television manufacturers
responded by making televisions that won’t work without a remote.)
Not only does exercise give you all of the above-mentioned
benefits, it also makes you a better creator. Living longer means you’ll get to
create longer as you age. Better thinking means you’ll also be able to think
creatively better because they are, in essence the same thing. More energy
allows you to create longer during a specific day. Better health means you’ll
be able to create during days when you may have otherwise been ill.
If this were all that exercise did, there would be plenty of motivation to get moving. However, Wendy Suzuki in “Quartz” magazine suggests that there is evidence that exercise improves people’s abilities to imagine new situations. Scientific evidence shows that walking and other exercise is good for becoming more creative. Henry David Thoreau is one creator who used exercise to overcome blocks. So, get out, get moving and enjoy your new-found vigor and creativity.
For more about a great exercise secret, become a Penguinator on Patreon and read about how my wife and I found a great yoga program that we both like. Get discounts at our tables at Lilac City Comicon, City Cakes and Café, Ogden UnCon and Amazing Las Vegas Comic Con.
The ability to conjure of visions of the future or past is essential to
the work of imagination, which forms the basis of creativity. With imagination,
you can envision anything. Whether it’s a better life, a job with more money,
or a purple cat who disappears, your imagination is what you use to think about
the future. Imagination can also be used to think about what could happen in the
future that isn’t good. So, even if you only think about the worst things that
could happen, you’re still using your imagination. The trick in creativity and
learning to live a better life is to get the imagination to work for you.
“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it” – William Arthur Ward.
If you want to improve your life or the world, you have to know what
that means. By imagining a better life, you can plan the steps it takes to get
there. By imagining a better world, you can describe it to others, so everyone
knows what it will look like and they’ll want to get there. How do you use your
imagination better?
Write Down Your Dreams: Keeping a dream journal will allow you to harness the imagination that flows when you’re asleep. Keep the journal and a pencil near your bed; write down your dreams before you do anything else.
Make a Wish: In “Pure Imagination,” Gene Wilder sings about the world he created. He starts with making a wish. You can do the same. Make a wish, see yourself with the wish, now imagine how you got there.
Find a Mentor: Wilder invites the group to come with him and view what he’s created. It’s a jumping off point for a group of arguably unimaginative kids and adults to begin to explore their own imaginations.
Track Happy Accidents: Sometimes, you’ll misread or misspeak. Use that to jump into your imagination. Keep it written down.
Of course, imagination isn’t the only thing you need to achieve a better life. You’ll need to work to bring it to life through creativity, innovation, trial, error, and perseverance. For more on creativity, purchase “Disneyland Is Creativity: 25 Tips for Becoming More Creative.” Order “Penguinate! Essays and Short Stories: Improve Your Creativity for a Better Life and World.” Preorder “The Haunted Mansion Is Creativity.”
Pure Imagination lyrics Hold your breath. Make a wish. Count to three. [Sung] Come with me And you’ll be In a world of Pure imagination Take a look And you’ll see Into your imagination We’ll begin With a spin Traveling in The world of my creation What we’ll see Will defy Explanation If you want to view paradise Simply look around and view it Anything you want to, do it Want to change the world? There’s nothing To it There is no Life I know To compare with Pure imagination Living there You’ll be free If you truly wish to be If you want to view paradise Simply look around and view it Anything you want to, do it Want to change the world? There’s nothing To it There is no Life I know To compare with Pure imagination Living there You’ll be free If you truly Wish to be
Ignaz Semmelweis could be seen as a cautionary tale for creatives. In 1846, he advocated for washing hands before delivering babies, and Vienna General saw an increase in mother and new born survival rates in the clinic where he worked. However, because he didn’t know why handwashing worked, he was derided by the medical and scientific community. He lost his job and his life because the establishment didn’t accept what he saw as common sense. “My way saves lives; of course, everyone should adopt it, even if we don’t know why.”
He was dealing with saving people’s lives and the scientific
community. Rather than someone jumping in to test Semmelweis’ theories and find
out why it worked or if it was a fluke, Semmelweis’ doctors and colleagues continuously
found fault with his idea, even when they didn’t do any experimentation of
their own. Not only did Semmelweis end up losing his life, but thousands of
women and children died because he couldn’t defend his hypothesis and no one
else wanted to check it out to see what the hospital was doing differently. Semmelweis
isn’t the only cautionary tale that creatives should think about.
According to Kevin Ashton in “How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery,” Gaston Hervieu tested his parachute in 1909 by throwing a 160-pound dummy off the Eiffel Tower. The dummy floated down to safety. Franz Reichelt was not impressed. Reichelt was working on his own parachute and called Hervieu’s test a sham because he used a dummy. In 1912, Reichelt showed up at the Eiffel Tower, press in tow; he was ready to show off his own parachute, which he was going to test on himself.
Hervieu showed up at the Eiffel Tower to stop Reichelt.
Hervieu said the parachute wouldn’t work for technical reasons. Reichelt went
up the Eiffel Tower anyway. Experts at the Aero-Club de France had previously
told Reichelt his parachute wouldn’t work. Previous experiments that Reichelt
did with his parachute had ended in failure; he had broken his leg in one
failed attempt to deploy the parachute. Reichelt didn’t listen to his rejectors,
which are common when any new idea is presented, and he didn’t learn from his
failures. He stuck with the same design and jumped from the Eiffel Tower to
plummet to his death.
While Semmelweis would have been well-served if he could’ve
ignored the slings and arrows of the ignorant medical community experts of his
time and continued with his crusade to persuade them as to the efficacy of
handwashing, Reichelt would’ve been better off listening to the critics of his
invention and heeding his own failed experiments. Failure and rejection aren’t necessarily
bad if we can learn the right lessons from them.
In these cases, one lesson would be to persist in the face
of rejection, but learn from it. If Semmelweis had been able to get past his
belief that common sense would prevail and started conducting experiments, he
may have discovered the germ theory of illness before Pasteur. Another lesson
would be to pay attention to your failures. If Reichelt had accepted the
reality of failures, he may have been able to make a parachute that would’ve
been better than Hervieu’s. Instead, both creators’ deaths can be linked to
their innovations.
Being creative isn’t easy. You will be ridiculed. You will
be rejected. You just need to keep going and change with every lesson that is
dealt to you.
According to Kevin Ashton’s “How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery,” Ignaz Semmelweis was a doctor at Vienna General in 1846, and the medical community was mired in 2,000-year-old the belief that the body’s health was based on a balance of four fluids: Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. Vienna General had two maternity clinics. In one, women gave birth with the help of midwives, and both mother and child survived at normal rates for the time. In the other, women gave birth with the help of doctors, and women and children died in droves from puerperal fever. The maternity mortality rate was so high, women were better off giving birth in the street.
The doctors would often go from dissecting cadavers to delivering
babies. Semmelweis thought the fever might be transferred from the corpses to
the women. He convinced the other doctors to wash their hands, and the deaths
in the clinic dropped from 18 percent to two percent, the same percentage as in
the clinic with the midwives. In some months, the death rate was zero percent
during the two years that Semmelweis was practicing at Vienna General.
In spite of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence and the
approximately 500 women, and who knows how many children, whose lives Semmelweis
saved through handwashing, his views were rejected. His detractors questioned
his scientific method; Semmelweis didn’t run any experiments. They said he didn’t
put forth a clear theory; he didn’t know what was responsible for the transfer
of disease, he suggested it was some sort of organic material. One American doctor
claimed that “A gentleman’s hands are clean” (p. 73) and couldn’t carry
disease.
Semmelweis expected common sense to prevail, but at the cost
of thousands of women’s and children’s lives, the medical establishment refused
to implement handwashing as a standard procedure. The change that Semmelweis
proposed challenged the underlying beliefs of the establishment, and those
beliefs were too sacred to challenge by a demonstrably better way to do things.
Semmelweis ended up losing job, “being lured to an asylum”
and beaten. He died two weeks later, and Vienna General’s doctors stopped
washing their hands. Mother and child mortality rates rose by 600 percent.
Semmelweis’ handwashing challenged ingrained and incorrect
ideas about the body and health. It challenged ingrained ideas of identity. It
challenged the status quo. Semmelweis wasn’t the only one who challenged the
establishment, but his story is illustrative of what can happen when people put
forth an idea that disturbs the everyday workings of an industry, government or
other established organization.
If you still don’t think it’s difficult to change people and culture, many men today don’t wash their hands after using the toilet or urinal in public places where peer pressure should be in effect. They spread disease because they don’t believe germs affect them (and some don’t believe germs are real).
New ideas aren’t readily accepted by anyone, including creators
themselves. People always say they want change, but they choose what’s
familiar. If you put forth a new idea, be prepared to fight for it and for
yourself. Creativity needs fortitude, strength and a healthy dose of wisdom.
Edward de Bono says that humor involves the same kind of thought process that creativity does. You’re going along one direction and suddenly the punchline moves you in another direction. The same is true of creativity. People think the thought process is in one direction when someone takes it in another. The move to a creative solution looks like a leap to people outside the process.
Humor improves the business environment by taking down a
person’s self-monitoring process. People build up walls to protect themselves
and their jobs. These walls are made of monitoring and judging what they do and
say. Humor takes down those walls and allows people to be more themselves. When
inhibitions and self-monitoring are reduced, creativity can flow.
When Marc Davis joined the Disneyland designed team, he worked on the Jungle Cruise. When the attraction opened in 1955, it was a straight attraction. The skippers would take people through the displays as if they were real. Davis added humorous scenes to the attraction and to the spiel. Davis’ humor is what makes the Jungle Cruise a continually popular, classic attraction. Without Davis’ creativity, the Jungle Cruise may have gone the way of other defunct Disneyland attractions.
The more humor you engage in, the more creative you become. Just be sure that the humor gets others to laugh with you and not at them. Joining an improv group can help guide you to greater humor and creative heights.
In “How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery,” Kevin Ashton questions the validity of brainstorming for creativity. His main objection stems from the fact that brainstorming doesn’t have a way to turn ideas into reality. For Ashton, having ideas is not being creative; the ideas must be realized in order for creativity to result.
Ashton is not the only creativity author to poke this
particular hole in brainstorming. Edward de Bono also believes that
brainstorming is inefficient and a bad way to come up with ideas. Having more
ideas doesn’t mean having better ideas, and businesses need better ideas.
Another failure of brainstorming is the exclusion of people
who are shy. Even with instructions involving no judgement and participating,
those who are afraid of failure, making mistakes, public speaking, or being
laughed at, may hold their ideas back. Instead, Ashton says the research
suggests that people working alone come up with as many ideas as people working
together, and the ideas will be better. Groups tend to fixate on one idea as
the brainstorming goes on.
Brainstorming was originally used in advertising to come up
with ideas. What makes it work is how you use it and what you do when done.
Brainstorming sessions have their place in creativity, but it needs someone to
guide the ideas from the whiteboard to reality. If you’re using it in a
business, the person implementing must have the power to do so.
by Cathy Cooke, BCHN, BBEC Founder and Creator of the Sleep Easy Method
When I was kid growing up in the ‘70s, I remember creating
elaborate stories in my head about far away lands I’d only heard of in
books. I remember playing in the woods
in our backyard and pretending to be a soldier in the army – more specifically,
being the first woman ever drafted into the army because my skills were so
imperative the Corps’ success. I had the
most amazing journeys to places like China, Africa, the deserts of Saudi Arabia,
all without leaving my backyard.
Fast forward to May of 2000, and I was still enjoying
adventures to exotic places. Four years
after graduating college, I was dreaming of joining the Peace Corps and
imagined myself living among the villages in places like Kenya or Angola. I could picture it in my head: the dirt
floors, the thatched roofs, the smells of Injera cooking on a wood stove. I don’t know if that’s how it really was, but it was fun to pretend. Maybe it was demeaning or naïve, I don’t
know, but my imagination was strong and the creative urge inside me was
fulfilled.
Over the next few years, I found myself becoming more
involved with emails and looking up information online. If I really wanted to know what life was like
in Kenya, I just put it into a search engine, and wham, there it was. And no surprise, it wasn’t exactly how I’d
imagined. Instead of debating for hours
with friends about a particular topic, exercising my mind to see different
points of view, employing creativity to construct a new argument for
persuasion, or trying to use my brains flexibility to understand all sides,
we’d simply look it up online, and the conversation was over. No heated debates into the wee hours of the
morning that often left us with a better understanding of the other side and
agreed upon points of view.
It makes me sad really.
I want my brain to engage, to work, to be flexible and creative in these
conversations and daydreams. But it
doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t have to
imagine, or think, or create, because I can just Google it, and that ends the
experience.
I have found the same to be true for my artistic
abilities. I have always enjoyed doing
crafty and artsy things. In the early
2000s, I took up mosaics. I remember
walking outside for inspiration, looking into street-corner shops, in backyards
where children played, on the nearby trails or at the plethora of activity
happening in the trees and sky. Certain
colors and combinations of shapes would send my mind off to a place of wild
creativity… “what if I combined that purple color with a deep red for an
intense October sunset…” I made some
really unusual but pretty cool mosaics back then. But with the advent of Google, I found myself
looking online for ideas; it was easier than going outside. And do you know what happened? My mosaics looked flat, lifeless, or like I
was imitating someone else, mostly because I was. I was no longer exercising my creativity,
because it was just too easy to look online.
This also makes me very sad.
It makes me sad for myself that I turn to the easy way too often, and
thus, miss out on all the amazing things the natural world has to offer. And it makes me sad for all the youth that
never got the chance to imagine, create, or dream about what life is like in
the Amazon or the South Pole. They’ve
never had a chance because the answers have been in front of them the whole
time. What kind of art will these kids
create? What kind of stories will they
make up? Where will they get their
inspiration?
I have been known to say “If I could snap my fingers and the
Internet would have never existed I would do it without flinching.” I mean that with complete conviction. Not only do I have an issue with the health
impacts (EMF exposure, blue light, bad posture, poor social development), but
also because it killed my creativity. I
know I have the power to remedy this.
You’re right, I could just get off the computer and go outside and find
my inspiration again. The problem is
that in today’s high-tech world, we have come to rely on the Internet for the
large majority of our communication, personal and business transactions. I run a small business, and if I want that
business to be successful, I have to be online a good portion of the day. I don’t want it to be that way, but it’s the
unfortunate reality of living in 2019.
Of course, I do admit to the benefits of the web, increased
access to education and information, entertainment, social connections,
etc. But, is that worth what we have
lost? Not a chance. I am a human being with needs that go beyond
food and shelter. I don’t need to see pictures of what Angola
looks like. I don’t need to connect with all ten of my friends from the 1st
grade again. I don’t need to be able to watch a marathon of “Mad Men” on Netflix this
weekend. But what I do need is my
sanity, feeling fulfilled, and nourished.
The Internet does not provide this for me. My daydreams, imagination, friendly debates,
walks in nature and exercising my brain’s creativity, that’s what fulfills me
and nourishes me.
So yes, if I could, I would snap my fingers and the Internet
would disappear. And then I would have my exotic trips to far away lands,
conversations until the wee hours of the morning, and some fantastic mosaics
that are full of unique imagination. It
would give me back my creativity! And
that would be worth it.
Cathy Cooke, BCHN, BBEC
Cathy Cooke BCHN, BBEC, is the owner of Whole Home and Body Health where she helps people to realize their potential through health interventions related to diet, lifestyle, and environmental concerns including air quality and EMF mitigation. You can find out more about her services at wholehomeandbodyhealth.com, or by contacting her at cathy@wholehomeandobdyhealth.com
Editor’s Note: Cathy Cooke has released a Sleep Easy Class for people who have difficulties falling asleep. She is an amazing instructor who has spent years studying sleep and how to achieve a better night’s rest. Check out this introductory video to get rid of your insomnia for good on YouTube.
Penguinate! Positive Creativity 