book

There are 8 posts tagged book (this is page 2 of 2).

I will dare you not to read (after you've read this post)

At noon on 17 Feb 2010, I completed a major exercise for Week 4 of the Artist’s Way: reading deprivation. This exercise is about monitoring the incoming information that you take by reading and keeping it to bare essentials. In short, no reading except for what you must absolutely read.

What you must absolutely read depends on what you do. If you are an editor, for example, you would have to be extremely creative about getting things done without reading documents to be edited. How about e-mail? E-mail seems to be an important tool for a number of people. But, given that people like Tim Ferriss and Leo Babauta have been managing their business with almost no e-mail checking, there’s no excuse for most of us who wouldn’t get thousands of e-mail a day not to cut e-mail off for a week.

I set some filters to forward potentially important e-mails to my iPhone. I had to log in to my gmail account just once, in order to read an e-mail I had to check. But that was all. I didn’t even give a glance at other e-mails and after checking that particular one, I closed it as soon as possible. Hurray for me.

What I included in my “OK list” is the following:

  • Course materials on $100 Business Forum
  • What I have written during the week
  • Text messages, which I hardly get anyway
  • Some web sites, including YouTube and TED talks (You might be surprised to hear that these sites are included in my OK list, but I’m not that addicted to them and watching videos is not reading!)

I was particularly wary of Twitter and Facebook. Although I tend to spend some time using these sites, I’m not that addicted to them. Or maybe I am, and this is exactly like drunk people say when asked if they are drunk.

Anyway, while I didn’t miss using these sites, I did have some moments I felt like sharing things with my people through Twitter and Facebook. For sharing such moments, I think these social media are highly useful. Perhaps this is a lesson I learned… or perhaps I got reminded of through this exercise: use social media wisely. Simple, but true.

If I could share with my people only one thing per week, what would I choose? That’s a good question to ask myself in order to eliminate low-quality information and to get straight to the point.

(By the way, while I would like to recommend all the TED talks I’ve watched during the last 7 days, if I had to choose one, I’d recommend Seth Godin’s 2009 talk. I’m fascinated by the notion of tribes.)

The highlight of this reading deprivation week was when I dropped by Kinokuniya Bookshop in Shinjuku, Tokyo. It’s a bookstore with 6 floors full of books. I was near that bookstore and dared to go in. It’s somewhat suicidal, but I managed to walk around the store without even taking a book in my hand. Victory was mine.

If you asked me about what I learned from this week of reading deprivation, I would say… 1) I can live without checking e-mails and 2) singing and dancing can be very good substitutes for reading. I hardly watch movies, but I did during this week. So, rediscovering movies can be another thing I got from this experience.

Would you dare to deprive yourself of reading for a week? What would you do instead of reading?

Tetris of the creativity kind

We may all have different conceptions of creativity, but I hope you agree that creativity isn’t just for artistic activities like drawing or writing. It is relevant to other areas of life. Philosophy, martial arts and cooking alike require one to see hidden connections; finding such connections is a creative act, I believe.

I  worry that I might have lost my creative self, as I grew older. I must say this worry isn’t a huge worry, though. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is another issue. The fact that I don’t worry too much about it may indicate that the situation is quite fatal.

I used to draw a lot as a kid. I could spend hours and hours just drawing. As I grew older, I started to draw less frequently. Now I hardly draw. I can say I’m more playful and less mentally-constrained than the average 26 year old Japanese man, but if I compare myself with my 5 year old self, perhaps I might look like a dork who doesn’t know how to play in the eyes of my 5 year old self. But how can I compare myself with him when it seems I left him behind somewhere along the way. But I believe this: he’s not dead yet.

Now I’m playing Tetris of the creativity kind. I see there is a pile of blocks accumulated over years and years. New blocks keep coming and perhaps they will keep coming. But now I’m on my way to learn how to handle them as well as how to get rid of the old ones that I can recognize. There might be some more buried under what seems to be the bottom row, but that doesn’t worry me, because I will get rid of them. What I’m after is to rescue my creative self buried alive under these blocks.

Towards the end of 2009, I stumbled upon Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. It is a 12 week “course in discovering and recovering your creative self”. Someone on my Twitter time line mentioned this book and it caught my attention. I checked reviews on Amazon and those reviews convinced me to get a copy for myself.

A few weeks ago, again on Twitter, someone else was talking about an event at a cafe in Tokyo. I got curious about this cafe. So, I checked the cafe’s website. In addition to the information I was initially looking for, there was something unexpected and delightful. There was a link to a Facebook group dedicated to the Artist’s Way. The group was to have its first meeting at this cafe in a week or so. Without hesitation, I decided to go to the first meeting and to go through the 12 week course with people from the group. As it turned out, it was not just a group of people, but a group of amazing and interesting people. How can I not enjoy working on the book with them, really.

One obvious advantage of going through this book with others is that you are more likely to finish the course with support and encouragement (and social pressure) from them. If you want to pick up a copy of the book and do the course, I recommend you to form a group and do it together, especially if you tend to ‘get busy’ and to forget eventually about what you’ve started as I sometimes do.

Since all I have done so far is the first week of the course, I am not qualified to write a review of the book. You can read various reviews on its Amazon page if you are interested.

By the way, in the book there are some references to God and whatnot, which might put off some people. But, let me assure you that from the pages I’ve read so far, the content is good. Don’t let those references disturb you.

The book has a contract page and here’s mine…

I, Masafumi Matsumoto, understand that I am undertaking in an intensive, guided encounter with my own creativity. I commit myself to the twelve-week duration of the course. I, Masafumi Matsumoto, commit to weekly reading, daily morning pages, a weekly artist date, and the fulfillment of each week’s tasks.

I, Masafumi Matsumoto, further understand that this course will raise issues and emotions for me to deal with. I, Masafumi Matsumoto, commit myself to excellent self-care—adequate sleep, diet, exercise, and pampering—for the duration of the course.

Masafumi Matsumoto

20 January 2010