Change Your Life: [Pursue Your [Passion] will Move Men Beyond Themselves]

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, sold something more than computers and gadgets. He sold emotion and passion. When he first presented the iPad to the world, he repeatedly said, “It’s just so amazing to hold.” There was obviously a genuine love for the product, a real passion for what his company had created.

Once, Jobs was fired from the company he started, and he considered leaving Silicon Valley forever. However, he realized that, though he had been rejected, he still loved what he did, and he started over – this time with NeXT and Pixar, with the latter becoming a tremendous success.

Even if we have no aspiration to become the next high-tech megastar, we can all learn from the way Steve Jobs lived his life. In 2005, when he delivered the commencement speech at Stanford University, he shared some invaluable advice with the young graduates: “You time is limited, so don’t spend it living someone else’s life… have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

Pursuing your passions may or may not lead to material or public success; however, regardless of external success, life is short, and finding small ways to express your inner, authentic voice at work, at home, or with your friends is perhaps the most important thing you can do for yourself and the world.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

5 Words to Know that You're Creative

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, NIV)

Dorothy Sayers once said that if all we knew about God was the first five words in the Bible, all we would know is that God is creative. When in the first words of the Bible, we discover God’s identity as a creator, we get a glimpse of our own identity as humans who possess creative capacities.

Genesis (chapter 1) reveals the dimension of God’s creative process, which, not surprisingly, given our creation in God’s image, is replicated in human creativity. “In the beginning, God created.” God brings something out of nothing and order out of chaos. “The earth was a formless void.” God is a seer who can envision something others cannot and then imaginatively reveal the new reality as a unique, distinct entity. “God saw what He had made and it was good.” Like God, the good artist strives for excellence, not just expression, and the spiritual, intellectual, and imaginative quality of the work is the measurement by which we determine the worth of our art. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and the human artist seeks to relate and communicate through his or her art.

Our human creativity originates in God’s creative image, which is imprinted in our genetic code. Whereas God created out of nothing; humans create out of what exists. So Igor Stravinsky observes, “Only God can create. I make music from music.” Great artists will tell you that their imaginative inspiration comes from some unknown place. Filmmaker Ang Lee confesses that when things work, they come to him; they are not what he was willed. Mark Doty says that a good poem is something he finds, not something he makes. Imagination cannot be manufactured or willed into being, yet it is at the heart of the creative enterprise. God creates from a known place, Himself, and at God’s core, you find an imaginative being.

Imagination reflects originality, intuition, and the hitherto unseen, and so we evaluate our individual and cultural health by looking for evidence of our imaginative capacity to deliver the new and fresh, which elicits and illuminates deeper, transcendent meanings.

As image bearers, we are designed with a creative capacity.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

[Quote from The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture in an Age of Christianity-Lite by Dick Staub (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007) page 52-53]

Starbucks Experience and the Idea of Small Win

For those of you not wanting to add on additional calories, ask the barista to make your drink "skinny".
They will use nonfat milk, no whip, and sugar-free

“Many great ideas start small at the beginning” (Richard Angelus)

When Howard Schultz founded what would become Starbucks, the baristas wore bow ties, nonstop opera music played, and the store had no chairs. “We made a lot of mistakes,” Schultz regularly acknowledges. Schultz and his team learned from them as they did countless other experiments. Drawing upon his observations of Italian coffee houses, Schultz’s grand vision was to create a different kind of coffee experience that he called the “Starbucks experience”: where people experience great coffee in a communal place. As for the specifics, the Starbucks store and experience of today looks almost nothing like Schultz’s original concept.

The Starbucks we know emerged by carefully adapting to customer feedback through a series of small wins. In fact, Schultz described Starbuck’s mentality as: “the value of dogmatism and flexibility.” As long as ideas were in accordance with company principles, Schultz believed they should just say yes to customer requests.

So, for example, Schultz was initially determined to avoid using non-fat milk since he didn’t think it tasted as good as regular milk and because it was at odds with the Italian coffee experience. When customers kept requesting non-fat drinks, Schultz relented. The success of those drinks became an important small win and soon much more: non-fat milk would grow to account for almost half of Starbucks’s lattes and cappuccinos. “In hindsight, the decision looks like a no-brainer,” Schultz wrote in Pour Your Heart Into It, but that direction wasn’t obvious; it was the fast pace of sales that proved the point.

[Reference: Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims (Free Press, 2011), page 146-147]

Small wins, win.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Barriers to Creativity #2: "That's Not Logical"

Creativity, like common sense, is supposed to be common. Creativity is natural and spontaneous. Yet it is not exhibited as frequently as it should. Experts believe that there are several reasons for this. These reasons are called ‘Barriers to Creativity’. ‘Barriers’ are the thing that stop us from thinking creatively and the reason that make us not as creative as we should be.

Barrier #2: “That’s Not Logical”

            Logic commands that things must be consistent and non-contradictory. While this principle must be followed faithfully in science and certain fields, in creative thinking situations, this rule need not necessarily apply. Imagination is required in problem-solving. Overemphasis on logical thinking inhibits and stagnant our thinking. If everything must be practical and correct, we leave no room for ambiguity and imagination. Furthermore we also do not give room to intuitive hunches. Intuition may have no apparent logical reason but they do help in many problem-solving situations. Sometimes we have to listen to our sixth sense or gut feelings. Logic is good when we are evaluating ideas but during stage of searching for ideas it short circuits the creative process.

Do not depend on logic alone.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)