I’ve always wanted to learn how to skateboard, but never had the gusto and dedication to go through with it. When you’re older, it’s pretty embarrassing to try and learn a new sport. Especially if that sport prides itself on being cool. It’s like someone trying to learn how to be cool at the age of 30. It’s just uncomfortable.

And then in a conversation with my friend Gabe (who is over 30 – don’t tell him I said that) and I found out that he was learning to skate. I thought that it was really cool. He didn’t have the same predilections as me. He didn’t give a fuck if people saw him trying to learn. He didn’t care if he looked like an ageing hipster. He didn’t care if he fell. All he cares about is learning and getting better. He’s a teenage boy living in a 30 year old’s body.

Skateboarding is the perfect paradigm for creativity. It’s self taught. It’s monkey see, monkey do. You learn from seeing someone do something and then trying it yourself. Throwing your own swagger and style at it. You learn from your mistakes. You practice. You improve your skill. And the better you get, the more and more everything you see starts looking like a skate park.

The same thing happens with creativity and art. The more that you use your creative muscles, the more that you start seeing creative opportunities all around you. And you want to capture them. Paint them. Write about them. Bring them to the world. And just like skateboarding, you can start developing your creativity at any age.

But the thing that I like best about skate culture is the do-it-yourself mentality that comes from teaching yourself the sport. They don’t wait for a director to find the best skaters and make a video about them. They film it themselves. And edit it. And design the cover art. And post it online. There’s a blue collar mentality of doing what’s necessary to get it done. So, part of you is a skater. But part of you is also a producer. A designer. A director. A salesperson. Maybe even a seamstress.

What drives this do-it-yourself frame of mind? Easy. Skateboarding is fun. It’s relaxing. It’s scary. It’s thrilling. And when you’re having fun, you don’t mind doing the extra stuff. It’s rewarding. The first time that you’re able to see yourself pulling a trick on film, you feel like a bad ass. All of that extra work learning how to use a camera, figuring out iMovie, learning about lighting  is worth it. It’s all about creating a product that you’re proud of and showing it tot he world.

And sometimes we forget that about being creative – especially if it’s part of our job. But you’ve got to take the time to find the fun again. To be a bad ass. To get inspired. To be excited about your work.

- Christian

A desk jockey sits and waits for opportunities. They don’t see opportunities. They see instructions. They’ll happily progress through their day doing exactly what was defined in the confines of their job description. They sit around waiting for their sergeant to tell them what to do. How to do it. When to do it by. They’re looking for orders. When they deliver on those orders, they know that their job is done.

Entrepreneurs write their own briefs. They don’t sit around waiting for someone to give them permission to start a project. They just do it. Entrepreneurs recognize and create opportunities for themselves, regardless of process, budgets or expectations. Entrepreneurs fuck shit up. They do whatever is necessary to take their project from an idea on a napkin to a product in the real world.

So, my question to you is this: on your down time, are you an entrepreneur or a desk jockey?

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re willing to take risks. You’re passionate. You’re exited to push a tough project through. You’re willing to risk failure.

Or maybe you’d rather be a desk jockey. You value stability. With free moments, you organize your emails. You clean your desk. You gossip at the water cooler.

Here’s the thing – you make great work by chasing opportunities and turning ideas into products. You don’t make work by having the cleanest desk. It doesn’t matter where you are in the organization. You could be the CEO. The receptionist. A cog in the machine. The guy in the mail room. Use your free time to THINK. To innovate. To inspire greatness. To take risks. Come up with ideas, pitch them and try to get them made.

I understand that it’s intimidating. There is a fear of failure. What if you come up with a stupid idea that flops? Let me help you out with that one – it’s going to happen. You will fail. And then fail again. And then you’ll learn bit by bit from your failures and you’ll start succeeding. Don’t get me wrong, it’s going to be hard. You’ll be going up against roadblocks. You have to put in effort. You have to sweat. You have to chase people. You have to bully your way through. But it will be worth it.

Staying within your box is definitely the easy way. Just hide behind your job description. You won’t get fired. You’ll maintain your current reputation. You’ll be a good employee. You won’t rock the boat. You’ll be safe. But then remember this – well behaved bitches seldom make history. So write get out there and your own briefs. It’s when you stop playing it safe that you start to have fun.

- Christian

Thanks to all of the people who make the free shit. To the artists that write, draw, compose, publish or just plain make great stuff. Thanks to those who do amazing work and then release it on the internet for free.

Free art is an interesting concept. Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it’s good. In fact, to many people, it could mean the opposite But free makes things accessible. It’s a low barrier that allows for people to have an introduction to you and what you do. If it’s good, we pay attention. If it’s not, we won’t remember you in five minutes.

But thank you. Thank you for putting yourself out there. For trying to create something.

And artists like to create art that’s free as well. In the words of Bill Cunningham, “If you never take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.” By shipping art for free, you retain control. You can experiment. You can try new styles, new rhymes, new hooks. You can walk the grey line of stealing stuff that would normally get sued for if you were making money off of it.

Like the mixtape scene in hip hop. Artists – big or small – drop free albums for their fans to download. If you’re small, you have the potential to blow up. Kid Cudi and Mike Posner both broke out into the mainstream through the success of their mixtapes. If you’re already big, like Eminem or Ludacris, it gives you a creative outlet to try new material. To continue to create art. To keep your shit sharp.

You don’t stay creative by keeping all of your good ideas inside. You get creative by letting them all out. By releasing all of them into the world, so that you have to come up with more. You develop your creativity by producing.

- Christian

One man’s string is another man’s fang floss. Or perhaps put a more correctly, another monster’s fang floss. It’s simple but intelligent. All it took was a different perspective and a quick repackaging to breath new life into a boring product.

Your desk, your office, your home, and your computer … they are all filled with products that can inspire creativity and reinvention. All you need to exploit them is a different perspective. And then all of a sudden:

- You can fry an egg with a piece of paper and a binder clip
- Your note taking program can start organizing your whole life
- Your scripts from your beer client get sold in as a concept for a new bodywash.

Lifehacker has made it’s bread and butter on thinking of innovative solutions to problems using ordinary tools.

The next time that you’re stumped with a problem, look at what you have in front of you. Cultivate your inner Maguyver. What tools do you have at your disposal that can solve your problems? A different perspective can open a whole new realm of creative solutions.

- Christian

Creativity is …
Wearing a snapback hat with a bowtie.
A hand dryer without hot air that uses 80% less energy.
Beer aged in scotch barrels.
Blending two genres of music together to create musical poetry.
Lighting a home with a plastic soda bottle and bleach.

Creativity is …
Breaking the conventions.
Questioning the norm.
Trying something different.
Putting your thoughts into action.

Creativity is a fairy tale where the princess tells the prince to fuck off.

- Christian

You consume something. Your body digests it. Then your body uses the energy from what you put in it to produce. This is true for food. And it’s true for ideas.

What you put into your body impacts what you get out of it.

If you put in food that your body is able to easily process and digest, you’ll get a lot out of it. If you put in junk, your system gets overloaded and you feel like shit.

HACKING YOUR DIET 
I’m fortunate to be a genetic freak. My body seems to have a metabolism that runs high and is able to process most things. Wendy’s Baconator? No problem. Raw fish? Hell’s yeah! Salad? Sure. It all seems to go through the same.

But recently, I began to learn how to hack my body. There are certain things that I can put in my body that jump starts the system if I’m feeling tired. There’s meals that I can eat to give me sustained energy before a big tournament. There are shakes I can consume to speed up recovery after workouts.

The same applies to creativity and ideas. What you put into your mind impacts what you get out of it. If you consume inspirational stories, interesting knowledge and actual learning, you produce great ideas and insights. If you’re reading gossip sites and watching Jersey Shore, you liable to end up producing the standard entitled teenager bullshit.

And when you’re in a crunch, you can hack your brain. You can consciously control the inputs to maximize creativity. Consume information that inspires. Learn things that provoke. Observe insights that spark ideas.

YOUR CREATIVE DIET
Consider your creative diet. What is it that you’re putting into your brain? Is it fine tuned to generate the creative output that you’re looking for?

Sometimes, simple awareness makes a big difference. By being conscious of what the type and quality of content that you’re consuming, you’ll become much more in tune to what your habits are. That awareness allows you to tweak them to your specific needs.

The simplest solution is to consume better content. Read a book. Avoid the standard internet distractions of Facebook, daily news and gossip websites. Look for intelligent content that will provide you with different perspectives. Look to uncover new information. Look for inspiration in the real world and online.

CONCLUSION
Content is brain food. The videos, books and articles that you consume impacts what your brain produces. You can hack your inputs to generates the results that you want. Be conscious of your creative diet. What are you consuming? How you could be putting in more of the right stuff to get the ideas you want?

- Christian

If you can’t view the video, click here.

My head is full of stupid ideas. A lot of them. And I found that as I get older (and more mature) it’s a lot easier to recognize which ones are stupid. Experience tells me when not to follow through just because something pops into my head.

So, I guess that makes me a “mature adult”. But the stupid ideas keep coming. They’re still in my head, taking up valuable real estate. It got me thinking.

What do you do with your stupid ideas? The ones that are ridiculous. They don’t make any sense. Not only are they impossible, but you’re pretty sure that they’d be stupid if they were possible.

What do you call them? Are they dreams? Or hallucinations?

And then I figured out what to do with stupid ideas.

LET THEM OUT!

Release them out into the world. Tell people about them. Stop keeping them cramped up in your skull taking up space.

Because once they’re out there in the real world, you never know what can happen. They can fall flat. They can die. But they can also spark something. They can act as inspiration. Or they can get recognized as not-so-stupid. Maybe even as good ideas.

Think about the person who invented the GoPro cameras. Every single other personal video camera on the market had one thing in common – there was a viewfinder so that you could see what you’re shooting. Why would you make a camera without one? That’s stupid.

But the people behind GoPro thought that people don’t care about seeing the world through a viewfinder – they want to see the world themselves.

So, don’t discount what’s inside your head until you’ve had a chance to test it in the real world. You never know. It may be that you think your idea is stupid because it bucks convention. Because it’s truly different.

Great ideas are just stupid ones realized.

- Christian

Downtime happens. You’re waiting for feedback on a project. A supplier hasn’t gotten back to you. The client needs approval on a budget. But what you do with it can make a big difference to yourself. Most people will waste downtime. They’ll do something like watch movies or troll the endless gossip websites for entertainment. But all you get accomplished is a temporary reprieve from boredom. You don’t actually get to take anything away from it. Where you are at the beginning of the downtime is the exactly the same as where will be at the end. Nothing has been accomplished.

But you don’t have to do that. You can do small things that will kill two birds with one stone: (1) keep you entertained, and (2) set you up for better creativity and productivity when the work comes back. Here are a couple of things that you can do in your downtime that will help you stay creative:

1. Get the boring shit done.
We all have shit that needs to get done, but is boring to do. Pay your bills. Do your timesheets. Sort out your expenses. When you’re busy, it’s easy to push this stuff to the bottom of the list. But then it lingers there. It sits there not getting done and all of a sudden your company owes your $350 from three months ago because avoided the 10 minutes require to fill out an expense report. Get the boring shit done. Handle your business and get paid. It’ll keep your mind at ease.

2. Read a book.
Television entertains you with pictures and sounds. A book entertains you with words and your imagination. Guess which one allows you to flex your creative muscles? Exactly.

3. Exercise.
If things are slow, drop out of work for an hour and go for a run. Or go to the gym. Or play a game of pick-up basketball. Just exercise. Get your body moving and start a sweat. A healthy body equals a healthy mind.

4. Declutter Your Life.
Clean up your desk. Organize your hard drive. Go through your closets and get rid of stuff that you don’t need. The goal is to get down to get rid of the clutter that inhibits your life, your creativity and your productivity.

5. Invest In A New Experience
Creativity is fueled by experiences. Things that you get to witness, participate in or do that open your mind to new perspectives. So go to a museum and check out a fashion exhibit. Or watch a folk band live on stage and jive with the rest of the crowd. Or go skydiving and see the world as you free fall at equivalent of an 18 story building each second. Exposing yourself to new experiences create new opportunities for your creative mind.

So that’s the list. Either way, doing any one of these things is better than doing what most people do to entertain themselves during downtime (shopping, watching movies and reading gossip websites). What are you favourite ways to stay creative during your downtime?

- Christian

Over a decade ago, I was a rower in high school. We were doing time trials on an erg and it was there that I learned one of my most important lessons. The pride of the crew was to push yourself so hard on the erg that you puked. It was a stupid adolescent way of proving that you could put mind over matter.

“Shut up body. You don’t know what your limits are.” It was a foolish sense of empowerment and control.

But the problem with pushing that hard your form goes to shit. You’re expending so much energy, but not going as fast as you should be for your output. So you’re inefficient. You’re slow. And then a coach told me something that changed everything – don’t forget to breathe.

It happens when we’re concentrating on something so much that we forget to breathe. We forget to relax and give our bodies what they need most – air. We allow our determination to deprive our muscles and brain of precious oxygen. And this is what prevents us from functioning at 100%.

So the next time that you’re facing a wall and stuck, don’t forget to breathe. It doesn’t matter if it’s on the field, in a race or in the boardroom. Don’t forget to let a little oxygen in your system with some deep breathes.

- Christian

And there are different types of profit – the most common is money. But profit can also take the form of more free time, less stress or even more creative opportunities. To an actor, profit may mean the opportunity to do a really great film for less money. For LeBron, Wade and Bosh, profit means the chance to play with their friends and win a championship.

TO BE CREATIVE – LIGHTEN THE LOAD
Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity, authors of Life’s A Pitch, recommend running your life like a business. Secure resources. Organize. Make strategic acquisitions. Although that’s all good advice, it may be a little intimating. Here’s my take – keep your overhead expenses down.

What does that mean? It means don’t spend over 50% of your paycheck on rent. Don’t pay $65 for cable if you watch 3 hours of television a week. Don’t drop thousands of dollars on a car that you drive only in the summer.

Keep your fixed costs of living low. Reduce your monthly expenses. That gives your more money for play. And I love that. It’s money that you can be flexible with. It’s money to take a vacation. Or to acquire a new skill. Or to gain inspiration.

A LIGHT LOAD MEANS THAT YOU HAVE THE POWER
Reducing the burden of expenses does something amazing. It gives you power. The power to do what you want with your creativity, with your career and with your life.

Power is a result of having options. By reducing your financial commitments, you increase your options. If you’re living well below your means, you don’t really need that next paycheck. You don’t really need to pull crazy overtime. You’re no longer tied to your job for the money. And that’s when the great thinking really happens.

At one of my old agencies, I remember talking to a senior planner and finding out that he hadn’t been paid in a couple of weeks. I asked if he was worried about it. Here’s what he said:

“Fuck no.I don’t need their fucking money. I don’t need this fucking job. I’m here because I’m trying to build a department.”

So that’s what happens. You can tell your boss to fuck off, because you don’t need the cash. You’re doing the job because you want to create good work. You want to be leading edge. You want to contribute great thinking, innovation and ideas. And you want to see them come to life in the real world.

A lighter load means that you can push the envelope. You can be bold. You don’t have to tip toe around fearful of putting your livelihood in jeopardy. It gives you the power to push back.

POWER EQUALS FREEDOM FOR CREATIVITY
In creative industries, the best work doesn’t happen when people are fearful for their livelihoods. It happens when they have the power to challenge the norms. When they have the power to make ideas happen. And when they have the power to walk away.

Because when you have the power of options, you can do what you believe is correct. You can stand up for your ideas because you don’t need a promotion. Or a raise.

Power gives you the opportunity to create. To do what you want. So even if you want to spend an afternoon writing for fun (instead of for money), you can.

IN CONCLUSION
In order to be creative, you need freedom. A big part of that can be the freedom from financial stress and worry. It empowers you to pick and chose the jobs that you want to take instead of doing them for the cash. By keeping your overhead down, you allow for that freedom. You give yourself options. Options to create what you want. Options to seize opportunities. Not to be bogged down and grounded with too much stuff. So if a great opportunity comes up in London, you can move there to take advantage of it. You don’t have any large expenses or heavy possessions holding you back.

And finally, the best thing about reducing your expenses is that it leads to boldness. Boldness leads to success. Ironically, success is often rewarded with respect and money. Just don’t spend that extra money on a bigger place. Go blow it on a vacation somewhere warm. Keep your fixed expenses low. Because it lets you keep the power of choice.

- Christian