Why These Are The Best Years The World Has Ever Seen

Garth Beyer

Not even a hundred years ago, everything was work. Food on the table. People relied on each other. You got what you made. Blood, sweat, and tears.

Then we hit the industrial revolution, and as a result, work became less of a worry. What took our attention is all the free time we had. What would we watch on television? What would we listen to on the radio? What activities and groups would we now participate in?

Then the post-industrial revolution happened. This revolution is lead by this current generation. This revolution can be summed up like this:

everything that had become free time, has now become design.

 

Interesting concept... - ImgurAnd if your mind goes to robots designing everything, I would argue that. Sure, robots can help us create things. But they can’t design them ahead of us. We crunched the numbers and wrote the program before a calculator could tell us the square root of 64. So it is with everything that is designed. And I’ll tell you, everything, and I mean everything is being designed.

Will you be a leader of it?

 

Stay Positive & Go On, Design

Garth E. Beyer

 

The Struggle

Garth Beyer

Ralph Steadman

Please tell me I’m not the only one that has had an incredible idea for a piece of art (painting, crochet, whatever) but when going to produce it, it turns out like garbage. And not the progressive kind of garbage where you do it enough times until it turns out the way you want, but the kind of garbage that not even a hobo would appreciate.

While you can read this article, and yes, it’s worth the read, look at the artwork first. It’s incredibly inventive, creative, and if you stare at it long enough, it seems like something we may be able to replicate..well, to some garbagy extent.

Enter: The Struggle

The Struggle is the place of frustrating emotions: between disappointment and geniusness; between euphoria and defeat. We feel The Struggle when we want, so passionately, to be creative, yet, can’t make the jump from our desire to our creation.

Something I’ve learned from Jobs and Pixar is that stories don’t really have a shelf life. Toy Story is as great as it was in 1995. Want to talk about artwork? Look at all the ancient art we still drool over. The fact is, we may not be able to replicate an image we have in our minds, but that doesn’t matter too much.

What matters is that we tell a story with whatever image we end up creating.

For those still worried, you can still create an art piece if you need to add a few lines to tell the story behind it.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Let Your Inabilities Stop You From Telling Stories

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit: Ralph Steadman

Creative Destruction And Getting Rid Of The Old

Garth Beyer

I read an article by Albert Sumell I don’t want to be mooc’d in the Chronicle Review and it got me tearing up. It made me re-realize how human everyone is and how those in the older generation resist change because the change effects them more than anyone else. Sumell says, “When I talk about creative destruction with my students now, I am not quite as dogmatic as I used to be. I tell them that there are exceptions to every theory. I don t tell them that I hope that I am one of them.”

Change is constant, but so is fear. While there are those who will benefit from change, there will also be those who are deathly afraid of it. While we can’t stop it, we can at least empathize.

 

Stay Positive & Hey, It Might Be Us One Day

Garth E. Beyer

If You Find Treasure

Garth Beyer

Some treasures were not meant to be found because, in finding them, we reveal secrets, we dig up answers to mysteries that have kept us enticed in literature, in common conversation , and in analogy. We take items that are rich in character and make them as organic as the bones that surround them – sort of contradicts the idea of what treasure is.

My suggestion: turn the treasure into something.

Finding treasure is just like stealing art, it’s not stealing if you mash it up with your own flare and the style of a thousand other artists to create something new, something equally as valuable and treasured.

 

Stay Positive & “X” Doesn’t Mark The Spot, You Do

Garth E. Beyer

This was an old post I wrote, finally publishing. Part of me feels like the idea needs to be credited to someone, but I don’t remember what inspired this post. To that person, sorry for not giving you credit. If this was all my own, self-high-five.

 

Another Reporter Down: Blog-Frigging-Tastic (rant)

Garth Beyer

If you haven’t caught it yet, Shea Allen, a reporter, has been fired.

While, sure, reporters get fired, Allen is added to the group who have been fired from posting on their personal blogs. Which, in turn, adds to the argumentative flame of where we draw the line between work writing and personal writing (and sharing).

Shouldn’t journalists be able to live a double life? One professional and one personal? If not, then why is it okay to have a fully professional life, but not a fully personal one in the world of reporting?

My response is this.

If anyone deeply cared, flat-out hated what she had to say on her personal blog, refusing to watch her professional reporting, are those people a news network really wants to have as part of their audience?

I sure don’t.

By the way, I eat almonds at work, I feel uncomfortable around disabled people, and I’ve had to do an interview without underwear because all of mine were dirty.

So what. Fire me.

Building Intuition

Garth Beyer

Sure, I won’t argue that intuition in some cases comes naturally. You can follow your intuition when lost in the woods or playing a game of chess. However, you can also build your intuition.

Go hiking enough, your intuition becomes a combination of gut feeling and a recognition of signs. A chess player stated, “If I notice a piece is out-of-place (recalling a similar position from my subconscious memory), I’ll adjust my thought process appropriately and evaluate my options. All of this behavior related to pattern recognition is collectively known as a chess player’s intuition.”

I don’t rely on intuition. I rely on building it. And when it fails me, that only means I haven’t experienced enough. Cool thing is, failure is experience.

 

Stay Positive & Check Mate, Intuition

Garth E. Beyer

Seven Billion Haystacks

Garth Beyer

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Italo Calvino notes in his collected insights on writing that, “Senior men and women have no monopoly on great ideas. Nor do Creative people. Some of the best ideas come from account executives, researchers, and others.”

In light of my recent posts about being creative and how straining it can be, it pours positivity in our fountains of youth to remember that great ideas can be had by anyone.

There’s over seven billion people on this planet, seven billion haystacks, all with at least, at least one needle in each of them, at least one great idea.

Anyone can come up with a great idea. Of course, to some, a great idea is only great if it’s put into play. Glenn Llopis has a thing or two or twelve to say about that.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Just Hold The Needle, Use It

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit