After completing the podcast interview with Christie Bishop I started thinking about how important it is to stay focused when creating. We talked about how people, a long time ago, in a much simpler era, use to lay on the floor and listen to records for long periods of time. Today, we live in a world where innovations and entertainment that require our time are emerging at a constantly accelerating rate. We dabble at a lot of things. It’s easy to be curious about these innovations or pieces of entertainment. Before you know it, we start absorbing them into our schedules without dropping other things. Maybe we sleep a little less or spend a little less quiet time instead. There are lots of people to follow, things to learn about and things to have to fix when they break. I just started an account at You Break, We Fix. Sound familiar?
Suddenly I found myself learning new tech related words. This “new speak” about innovations and entertainment starts leaking into our conversations with our friends. We share our experiences with them, of knowing about the latest tv shows, sleep apps, new tech, new features, new newness. There’s some incredible life changing stuff out there. Some of it can be life changing for the better and even save lives. It’s really a great time to be alive in the history of mankind…but how much input do we need to be creative ourselves.
What I mean by all this, is that we all need to regularly “check in” with ourselves to make sure that when we add a new thing, we let go of something else to make room for it. New things can be deceiving by sometimes concealing how much of our time they’ll require. I’ve been noticing that I have less time to be creative with the new tech tools that I just purchased for the purpose of being more creative. That’s kinda dumb. I think it’s because many new tools take too much time for me to learn. I should have known better. I find that all these new innovations and entertainment can be initially inspiring, but they become distractions when allowed too deep into the creative process. It becomes too easy to call on them and sometimes not be so original.
My discussion with Christie reminded me that we need to make an active choice to stay focused when creating something. We can regulate our level of engagement in this fast moving world as needed. For periods of time, we can pretend like we’re living in a much simpler less distracted era… maybe disconnect and tune in with ourselves. It may even be wise to fill more time with emptiness and make room for something new to emerge.
Part I of the interview is also available on iTunes and Goolge Play.
Christie Bishop’s podcast is called Commercial Grade and she hosts a segment on the Adam Carolla Show.
