All creativity begins with the moment of conception.

That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here.

And so, in this new blog series, I’m going to be deconstructing my favorite moments of conception from popular movies. Each post will contain a video clip from a different film, along with a series of lessons we can learn from the characters.

Today’s clip comes from the shanks scene scene in Tin Cup:

What can we learn?

Avoid the cold start. Your brain is a machine. And like any mechanical device, you need to bring it up to operating temperature in order to run properly. Without that crucial warm up cycle, the motor is vulnerable to errors, misfires, wasted energy, toxic emissions, even full blown system failures. And so, when you sit down work each day, consider using a centering sequencebefore pulling out of the creative driveway. A ritual that keeps you from doing things that you regret, things that come from the shadowy parts of your personality. For many years, I’ve been using a tool from a program called Ten Zen Seconds, which is an approach to mindfulness and an invitation to live a more centered, grounded, and meaningful life. The way it works is, you use a single deep breath as a ten second container for a specific thought, matching the rhythm of your respiration to the symmetry of your words. Every morning when I sit down to write, this centering sequence brings my brain up to operating temperature. It’s how I avoid the shanks. How are you warming up your mental system?
My brain burns with their color. Roy was so in awe of the golf legends lined up on the driving range, hitting beautiful shot after beautiful shot with graceful ease, his brain got in the way. But once he got out of his head and into the present moment, once he reconnected with his body and accessed his authentic swing, he hit a perfect seven iron into the trees. Creators could learn from this experience. We’re a group of people with notoriously racing brains, and we have to be careful not to do too much work in our heads. The goal, after all, is to relieve ourselves of the necessity of remembering, not to add more mental bricks. To help our minds peacefully return to their natural state, not strain the brain. That’s why the tradition of making mental notes is a terribly unhealthy, unwise approach for organizing ideas. The mind is a terrible office. We don’t need to make mental notes, we need to make notes. Writing everything down relieves us of the necessity of remembering and opens our mind to receive new ideas. Writing everything down directs the traffic flow of our overcrowded minds. Without adopting this habit, our brain will be too overwhelmed to keep the ball in the fairway. Are you prepared to kill the virus in your brain?
Getting ready for the job of creating. Golfers go to the driving range to work out the shanks. To loosen the lid on the pickle jar of peak performance. To flush the bad shots out of their system before hitting the lynx. It’s a practice that takes discipline, but one that also takes humility. Notice the golfers at the range are daring to do their work poorly in the beginning. They’re allowing themselves to be bad. And they’re accepting failure as a necessary part of growth. Artists should be no different. Even if our first ideas impress us so little that we see no good reason to continue, we should never stop ourselves from hitting those shots. When we practice forced vomiting, for example, we release our thoughts without committing to keeping them. We create off the record, making things without the burden of evidence, following our most impractical curiosities. It’s the work before the work. The driving range of creativity. And we find our rhythm, our groove, the tempo of our creative nature, by hitting enough balls until meaning and truth finally manifest. Do you have a daily psychological holding environment?

What did you learn?
* * * *Scott GinsbergThat Guy with the NametagAuthor. Speaker. Strategist. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter. 
[email protected]
Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2014-2015.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

We all get trapped on the creative treadmill eventually.
Running but never getting anywhere new. Executing but never elevating the work.
And when we do, there will always be a ceiling on what we can accomplish. Success will remain asymptotic, always approaching infinity, but never actually getting there. And unless we break the pattern, unless we change the user interface of our realities, we will fail to develop as creators.
In the first ten years of my career, I achieved moderate success writing books and giving speeches. The only problem was, I still wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I still hadn’t found a place that drew out my full ingenuity. Too many assets were going unharvested, and it was eating away at me.
And I remember thinking to myself, if it’s true that there are skills and talents that I have not yet tapped into to create value, then there must be useful strategies for influencing the environment that I have not yet taken advantage of.
Of course.
That’s the first step to finding a better approach to success. Recognizing the limitations of our current one. Shedding the popular view of reality.
And that’s exactly why I started writing, producing, directing and scoring a documentary called Tunnel of Love.
Because it broke the pattern.
It allowed me imagine a different world. To create an alternate reality. To gain a new understanding of the universe. To give my hidden talents a more prominent place in my work. To create a new context from which to relate to the world, one that afforded me the freedom to try other approaches to success.  
And what I discovered was, once I engaged with that phenomenon of context––meaning, the environment that determined the limitations of my actions and the scope of the results those actions could produce––it literally altered my being. The experience of making a documentary changed the way I walked through the world.
That’s what happens when we create a new context. We create a new realm of possibility. One that did not previously exist before. One that provides us with a source of power that we did not have before.
One that gets us off that goddamn treadmill once and for all.

Like the movie poster? Download it here and share it here!
Original motion picture soundtrack coming next.
Official theatrical trailer coming soon.

* * * *
Scott GinsbergThat Guy with the NametagAuthor. Speaker. Strategist. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter. 
[email protected]
Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2014-2015.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

All creativity begins with the moment of conception.

That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here.

And so, in this new blog series, I’m going to be deconstructing my favorite moments of conception from popular movies. Each post will contain a video clip from a different film, along with a series of lessons we can learn from the characters.

Today’s clip comes from the opening scene scene in The Flintstones:


What can we learn?

Create rituals of leave taking. Flintstone is crane operator at a construction company who moves rocks for a living. Every afternoon at quitting time, when he hears the coveted sound of the alarm, he slides down the dinosaur’s tail, punches the time clock and heads home. Standard operating procedure for the rock quarry. Of course, most creative professionals don’t have that luxury. We’re artists who work in nontraditional or home based environments that don’t contain natural boundaries. And so, it’s important that we create rituals of leave taking. Microstructures that celebrate the completion of a period of work, slow down the creative process and set healthy boundaries to demarcate the line between work and nonwork. For many years, I kept a classic hotel concierge call bell on my desk. And every day when I finished my mission piece, I slammed my hand bell as hard as I could. Initially, it was sort of a joke. But what I found was, the physical movement of hitting the bell combined with the piercing chime that echoed through the room was deeply satisfying. Are you adopting the right mindset when working at home by placing punctuation marks throughout your day?

The abrupt discontinuation of creativity. Flintstone doesn’t take his work home with him. Within minutes of leaving the jobsite, he’s already at the drive in, relaxing with his family and letting the distress of the day melt away. Must be nice. Artists don’t have this luxury. In fact, there’s a long withdrawal process after we’ve been working on something for a while, similar to that of a drug addict. We may not experience the headaches, insomnia and tremors of opiate users, for example, but depending on the extent of our reliance on the highly addictive substance known as creation, we may require a certain amount of psychological readjustment. In my own experience, artistic withdrawal manifests in the form of anxiety. For me, the pain of having not created anything trumps everything. More than rejection, more than mediocrity, more than loneliness, when I stop making things, I grow claustrophobic. Quickly. What can I say? I’m genetically wired for prolificacy. It’s simply my nature. I’m happier when I’m being productive. But the good news is, I know that about myself. And so, I can properly recognize, endure and domesticate my withdrawal symptoms. What tools do you have for negotiating the inevitable creative rapids?
Go pro or go home. Flintstone is the typical sixties blue collar worker, constantly scheming ways to improve his family’s working class lot in life. And what I love most about his character is, he literally represents grit. Thick skin. Hard work. A regular guy who endures the pure, unromantic slog of production, every day. Modern artists could learn a thing or two from his archetype. As people with romantic personalities, delicate skin and a hypersensitive relationship to the world, perhaps little rock dust on our boots might do us some good. Pressfield famously wrote that the muse favors working stiffs. Mercenaries. Guns for hire. Creators who implant the proper humility. And so, this scene is a reminder that we have a responsibility to treat our work as a daily practice. To professionalize our art. Despite our nonconformist values and anti-establishment reputation, every artist is a working man. A bronto crane operator. We punch in. We sit down and do our work. And we respect what we do. Or in this case, what we yabba dabba do. How are you using daily momentum to keep yourself from feeling detached from the creative process?

What did you learn?

* * * *Scott GinsbergThat Guy with the NametagAuthor. Speaker. Strategist. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter. 
[email protected]
Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2014-2015.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

All creativity begins with the moment of conception.

That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own actos drug. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here.

And so, in this new blog series, I’m going to be deconstructing my favorite moments of conception from popular movies. Each post will contain a video clip from a different film, along with a series of lessons we can learn from the characters.

Today’s clip comes from the rooftop scene scene in Peaceful Warrior:


What can we learn?


Crucified thy ego, arise thy higher self. Danny stares down his treasured collection of trophies, awards and medals. They’re everything he’s ever worked for. And yet, despite his lifelong success as a scholar and an athlete, they’re just props. Superficial validations of immature ego needs. Plastic crutches symbolizing the attainment of a goal, rather than the enjoyment of the journey. That’s why he smashes them to the ground. Because it’s not who he wants to be anymore. And so, as he destroys the shelf, he destroys the self. Danny begins to let go of a persona he has come to identify with and call his own. It’s the initiation of existential severance, which is a process most artists undergo at one time or another. I remember my own experience with it, during which my mentor asked an interesting question. What if you started a new career today, he asked, letting go of everything you’ve tried and built and accomplished in the last ten years, except the person you’ve become? Danny is asking himself the same question. And he’s starting to realize, maybe he finally achieved enough to be okay with himself. Maybe he actually feels complete about this part of his journey. Maybe if lets go of who he was––quite literally––he’ll be able to become who he needs to be. Are you afraid of the only place that gives you real answers?
Get rid of all your best weapons first. Taoists scripture states that when we let go of what we have, we receive what we need. It’s the paradox of letting go. And that’s what makes this scene on the rooftop so powerful. Because in most cases, the thing we need to let go of, is a part of the self. Something that’s been good to us. Prolific comedians, for example, write a new act every year. They scrap all of their old material and start from scratch. Louie once said during an interview that he likes to open with last year’s closer, just to fuck himself. That’s letting go. And every artist has their own version of it. I’ve composed dozens of songs over the years––good ones, too­­––that I simply no longer play. And I miss them. They’re like creative brainchildren who don’t come to visit anymore. But the reality is, we can’t grow as artists by looking in the rear view mirror. We have to stay in motion. We have to create new work. And we have to accept that anything we made in the past only matters insofar as it brought us here. Have you confronted your built in reluctance to let go of what’s working?
Fear doesn’t go away, it just changes shape. Danny’s first love was gymnastics. It was the first thing he gave everything to, and the first thing that gave everything to him. But now that he’s watching it slip away, precariously balanced on his sanity ledge, the panic is starting to settle in. Have you ever found yourself standing out on that ledge? It’s a grim existential crisis. A death of sorts, rife with its own form of grieving. Because you have make peace with the psychological fallout that results from your new position in the world. When I worked a full time gig with a marketing agency, there were a host of new feelings that accompanied my transition. The constipation of not having an outlet to express my impulse to originate. The frustration of putting somebody else’s brand before my own. The distress of working significantly below my pay grade. And the inadequacy of telling people I wasn’t succeeding solely on my own steam. A different family of fears, no doubt; but fears nonetheless. Are you ready to give yourself a pep talk down off your ledge of anxiety?
* * * *Scott GinsbergThat Guy with the NametagAuthor. Speaker. Strategist. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter. 
[email protected]
Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2014-2015.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

All creativity begins with the moment of conception.

That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here.

And so, in this new blog series, I’m going to be deconstructing my favorite moments of conception from popular movies. Each post will contain a video clip from a different film, along with a series of lessons we can learn from the characters.

Today’s clip comes from the parking lot scene scene in Fight Club:

What can we learn?

Carve a path back to yourself. Jack initially pretends to be an impostor at support groups as an emotional release to relieve his insomnia. But then he creates fight club. And at first, it feels strange, but it’s a good strange. Flailing and gasping and bleeding and stumbling, his eyes glaze over with endorphins and serenity. And that’s when he realizes, they’ve crossed a threshold. To paraphrase from the original screenplay, at fight club, you weren’t alive anywhere like you were there. After fight club, everything else in your life got the volume turned down. You could deal with anything. The people who had power over you had less and less. We all started seeing things differently. Wherever we went. We should all be so lucky. Not to pick fights with strangers in parking lots. But from a creative standpoint, we all need our own version of fight club. A routine recreational activity makes us feel alive. A venue that inoculates us against the sterility of the world. A platform that offers a swift kick to the solar plexus. It’s an effective tool for recalibrating the soul and keep creativity flowing. Do you have a portable, purposeful and private sanctuary to reconnect with the self, the body and the spirit?
Happiness only real when shared. We’re not only watching two men fighting, we’re witnessing a conceptual beginning. As they sit on the hood of the car, there’s no doubt that something wants to be built here. The experience is simply too meaningful. But the key is the final line of the scene.We should do this again sometime. That’s precisely the right attitude to have in this experience. Because when we find something that has existential resonance for us, the essential next step is sharing that discovery with another person. It makes it more real. Otherwise we’re just living inside our own heads, winking in the dark, playing basketball without a backboard. I remember the first time I played music in the tunnel under the arch by my house. I came back home a changed man. And I told everybody. Because when you finally find the physical conditions that elicit your best work, you want to shout it from the rooftops. How often are you sharing what really matters to you?
Your body will never lie to you. This movie is dark, violent, nihilistic and sinister. But it’s also a beautiful example of the relationship between creativity and physicality. After all, the shortest distance to the brain is through the body. And if there’s something we want to achieve artistically, often times, we can back into that creation by changing our sheer physicality. One medium in which I’ve noticed this relationship play out is songwriting. I’ve been composing music for over twenty years, but only in the past three did I start playing standing up. That one decision changed everything for me. From the experience practicing, my music became more invigorating. To the experience of performing, my music became more effective. To the experience of listening, my music became more enthralling. Even the music itself reflects this new shift in energy and position, as my songs have become dramatically faster, louder and more muscular than any of my previous work. All because I got my ass out of the chair and let my body dictate. Are you creating the physical conditions that elicit your best work?

What did you learn?

* * * *Scott GinsbergThat Guy with the NametagAuthor. Speaker. Strategist. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter. 
[email protected]
Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2014-2015.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

The flow of creativity is the constant.
Only feelings of the creator are the variable.                                                 
And if you seek to consistently generate compelling messages and work on a prolific scale as a communicator, you need better constants.
Muscles to count on, places to return to, rituals to abide by, people to confide in, rocks to anchor to, practices to rely on, structures to lean against, these routines become the repertoire of faithful forces to keep your creative life stable and fruitful when circumstances get a little too overwhelming.
Take vomiting, for example.
Developing some kind of gasket where you can purge everything that happens to you. Creating a daily ritual of emotional release where you can metabolize your experiences and make serious mental headway into your ideas.
Because when things in your head and heart begin to make their voice known, louder and louder, insisting that you give them attention, you have to recognize that as the moment of conception, you have to train yourself to respond by thinking, oh man, something badly wants to be built here, and you have to open your heart to what wants to be born, follow that vibe and see where it takes you.
What are your constants?

What you’re creating isn’t as important as why you’re creating it.
That’s what drives prolificacy.
Motivation doesn’t happen to us, it happens in us.
And the secret is, once you identify the running imperative that drives your creative behavior, the nobility behind your work and the posture with which you approach your art, the what will make a habit of present itself.
Personally, I have a passion to mass communicate, to beguile people with words and images and ideas and stories and music that transfix and compel, and I want to use every possible form of media to circulate my views, extend my sentiments and make my thoughts and feelings and expressions accessible to as many people as possible, even if that means inventing new methods of communicating.
That’s my why.
What’s yours?

Yoga and creativity are parallel practices.
Both require patience, discipline, flexibility, focus and vulnerability. Both can be done individually or with a group. And both achieve the most meaningful results when I’m wearing as little clothing as possible.
Recently, I discovered another quality they have in common.
In yoga, it’s actually easier to do the posture than it is to sit out.
No matter how tired and sore and sweaty and frustrated I am, when I resort to squatting on the floor, slugging back water and staring at myself in the mirror, that only magnifies the pain. And I end up just sitting there, feeling sorry for myself, with nothing to focus on except my own suffering, while time ticks by like a winded toy.
And that’s when I say to myself, look, I didn’t come to class to not practice, so I may as well stand up and try again.
In creativity, it’s the same thing.
It’s actually easier to write than it is to not write.
No matter how lonely an uninspired and disillusioned and angry I am, when I resort to artfully creating constant distractions instead of working, jacking myself off on social media and pathetically waiting for that one email that changes everything, that only magnifies the pain. And again, I end up just sitting there, feeling sorry for myself, with nothing to focus on except my own suffering, while time ticks by like a winded toy.
And that’s when I say to myself, look, I didn’t come to the page not to write, so I may as well bear down and try again.
The point is, doing the work may be hard.

But it’s a hell of lot better than the alternative.

A few months ago, I posted my thinkmap, research and narrative arc about why Radio Shack is broken, and how we can use digital to fix it.

I’ve been fleshing out the details of my strategic execution, which you can preview in the slides below or on Slide Share.

Enjoy!

Sentences are my spiritual currency. 

Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and inhaling and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration.
Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower of things that are interesting, I figured, why not share them on a regular basis?
In the spirit of “learning in public,” I’ve decided to publish a weekly digest of my top findings, along with their respective links or reference points. Sentence junkies of the world unite!
Creativity, Innovation & Art 
“I want to build a solid house, but I want to leave all the doors and windows open so that varmints can come and go as needed and steal what they desire,” from American Songwriter.

Culture, Humanity & Society “Anthropologists estimate that hunter gatherers only had to spend around four hours a day searching for food, the rest of the time was leisure time,” from Working Our Lives Away.
Identity, Self & Soul “It pleases us to see ourselves burdened by the sorts of difficulties that only a warrior hero could meet,” from Eric Maisel.

Lyrics, Poetry & Passages 
“I know how crazy you are about all the things that I don’t care about,” from Neil Young’s Speech.

Meaning, Mystery & Being 
“Choose your obsessions rather than letting them choose you,” from Brainstorm.

Media, Technology & Design 
“Releasing people from their dependency on email will free up the time and mental space needed to move the species forward,” from The Next Big Thing.

Nature, Health & Science 
“Patients are very possessive about their conditions,” from Dr. Khoo.

People, Relationships & Love 
“The ones whose eyes meet ours when we wake in the morning,” from Hopeful World.

Psychology, Thinking & Feeling
“Don’t do what I did, but ask what I asked,” from Liz Gilbert.

Success, Life & Career“Whatever gets you down the hill faster,” from Steven Pressfield

Work, Business & Organizations“If you keep to a routine, there’s no limit to how much you can deliberately not achieve,” from The Onion.

See you next week!