Mindset Mondays with DTK – Ep #178 — The Purge
I watched a workshop Stefan Mumaw delivered for a room full of creatives. He’s the Creative Director and Director of Narrative Strategy for First Person and the topic of one of the exercises was innovation.
When asked to create the “ultimate desk,’ each team created an epic version of what that creation might be: encircling, integrated water or coffee dispenser, an on-call masseuse, a toilet, multiple screens, and so many more creative ideas. Yet every single one has a massive flat surface. All the other ideas we additive. they all started with what a desk is NOW and merely added to it to improve upon it.
In order to truly innovate (rather than merely improve), we need to abandon what we know something to be and start free of those constraints so we can reimagine a new future.
We tend to see our own transformation as an additive process, as well. How wrong that is …
“Transformation comes not by adding things on but by removing what didn’t belong in the first place.”
— Baron Baptiste
I’ve talked for years about Michelangelo’s approach to sculpture. Here’s how he described it to his students: “a process whereby the artist releases a hidden figure from the block of stone in which it slumbered.”
So much of what slows us down or stands in our way or covers up our true, elegantly simple selves is merely waiting to be cleaved off.
There is so much freedom on the other side of that ‘cleaving-off.’
What are you ready to remove?
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