The Winding Path

John’s statement that “creativity isn’t creation at all, it’s reorganization” certainly rings true for me when I read most of the blog entries I come across. And more so when I read what I’ve written. There’s rarely anything new, it’s mostly re-combinations of similar pieces of information, sometimes repackaged to seem different. A little consideration reveals the reality, that you’ve heard it before (or, if you haven’t heard it before, you will hear it again soon). Like The Secret, for example.

But hey! Hearing things over and over isn’t a bad thing when the message is important and beneficial.

However, the real creativity comes from effective reorganisation. A combination of ideas that has a synergistic effect, leading you to a realisation which the separate ideas didn’t quite reveal.

That is exactly what I’m sure I would have experienced if I’d read Alister’s post about passion, goals, purpose, and productivity a little as two months ago. Two important realisations I recently came to are that, one:

If you’re passionate enough about what you want to do, setting goals is unnecessary.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you won’t benefit from setting goals, but from reading about and speaking to people who are truly passionate about what they do, carefully setting goals isn’t necessary. It seems they can make things happen without as much organisational effort as much of the productivity material says we need.

This has been my experience too. Last year I set myself the goal to return to university. I revised and refined that goal many times, but the core remained the same, to begin a course of study that would allow me to learn and contribute to our understanding of the universe.

Yet no matter how I tried to act on the plan, or how I tried to revise the plan to make it easier to act on, or to make it clearer, or to make it meaningful, not a lot happened.

Until last month. Since then the emotional content of my journey towards my goal has been so very different. And once I narrowed down my options, applying for the courses pretty much took care of itself.

This lead to the second realisation, that:

Finding your purpose requires emotional understanding

That means rational thought as well as understanding and embracing your emotions. Not in the sense of understanding the world through emotions, but of understanding your emotions themselves. And for many people this is summed up as spiritual revelation.

Books such as Dick Richards’ Is Your Genius At Work follow the worksheet approach Alister pointed out in Robert Allen’s book; an approach which relies on the mainly intellectual work of thinking about what you enjoy doing and are good at. Now, while asking what you enjoy does mean thinking about emotion, thinking about emotion, and feeling it, are completely different experiences.

Steve Pavlina’s method gets closer to what those books do mention, but none that I’ve come across focus on the very important point of emotional impact during an experience. Steve does deal with emotional impact, but I believe he focuses too heavily on one particular emotional response, crying, which alienates those of us who aren’t familiar with such powerful emotional responses to intellectual endeavours (like, who writes a sentence like that, and could be expected to cry as well? *wink*). It also guides people away from other strong emotional responses which are much clearer indicators, but which are ignored because we think we’re supposed to be looking for something else.

While it’s common sense that emotions are stronger during an experience, than they are when thinking back to an event, the worksheet methods of finding passion/purpose/meaning need to emphasise this crucial fact.

Since starting my blog and contributing to Steve’s forums I’ve gone from completely unsure about what I want to do with the next 10 years, to being fairly sure I wanted to enter the field of either astrophysics or nanotechnology, to being almost certain I would truly enjoy psychology, to being firmly convinced that behavioural neuroscience is where I would benefit the most, and provide the most benefit.

I tried Steve’s method of finding my purpose but that led me down the path to astrophysics and didn’t produce any emotional surge, either when I considered astrophysics as an option, or kept looking further.

Now I’m set on the path to behavioural neuroscience and I’m not looking back. I have no hesitation is moving forward, and I don’t care about what it means for my current situation. I know what I’ll be able to deal with changing jobs, moving house, or anything else that I need to do to make this happen. And that’s a good thing because from what I hear it’s not going to be easy, at all. I believe this is what Alister meant when he talked about clarity, courage and conviction.

If your purpose isn’t clear, and thinking and writing doesn’t help, or you follow Steve’s method but don’t end up crying, try paying attention to the things you think about as your go about your day. And most importantly, pay attention to how you feel. Notice those things you enjoy most, those which inspire strong positive emotions of any kind, and put more effort and focus into them.

And if you don’t experience a strong positive emotional response, go out and try something new.

Then watch as your enjoyment flourishes.

And then you can work on setting goals, if it helps you.

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The first thing I’m going to do is properly implement the practices outlined in David Allen’s Getting Things Done. After encountering a few references to the book I dug a little deeper and discovered that a large number of people had nothing but good to say about the book, and the common sense system. I purchased the book, read it, thought it made sense and would do wonders for my organisation, then promptly did nothing. However, since I’m on holiday for another week, now is the perfect time to Get This Thing Done.

The first step involves gathering *everything* that’s lying around which represents something that needs to be done. This includes obvious things like emails waiting to be replied to, or papers sitting on a desk which need to be read/filed/posted/burnt-to-ensure-it-is-never-read. It also includes everything sitting in my mind, all the projects I’d like to start one day, stories I’d like to write, people I’d like to call/email/visit, recipes I’d like to try, things I have to remember to do.

Basically, anything and everything which has to be done, or which I want to do, or which I need to do; all of it goes into one big pile. From there it’s actioned, or filed appropriately. I’ll give a summary after I actually get through it.

Once that is complete I’ll have list of personal development projects (amongst others) and action points, and I’ll take it from there.