Creative Rebellion Essays: Trust, friendship and kindness
My wife suggested I write about friendship for this essay. Probably because I don’t make close friends easily. I, like most people, have many acquaintances but friends, true friends, are the next level. I look at relationships with others as concentric rings. On the outside ring are the day-to-day interactions I have with strangers and working inwards, there are the civil interactions and relationships I have with co-workers and acquaintances and beyond that is the circle of friendship, some family members, and at core is the innermost trust-based relationship with my wife and daughter.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Staying inspired in spite of it all
I am often asked about what inspires me and how do I stay inspired, in spite of the daily grind that permeates everyone’s lives: work demands, family demands, traffic, the weather, corporate politics, the national political environment, and the coronavirus (now officially given a somewhat dystopian moniker, COVID-19).
There’s no easy way to stay in high spirits in spite of it all but I’ve found that focusing on solutions, rather than ranting at the problem helps: condemning the problem does nothing to actually address the core issues.
When things seem dire, take action.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Expanding during conflict
Communication is key. In the workplace, lack of communication causes the parties to fill in the gaps with a story of their own, based on assumptions sometimes along the lines of “They must hate me and are trying to sabotage my career.” Being ghosted (an apropos term derived from staring at the three dots on your mobile phone as you await a text answer) is the digital trend of our times. It used to be harder to avoid dealing with someone but with everything from Instagram to Slack to email to texting to the good old phone call, there are multiple varieties of ghosting available to us now. Lack of communication probably induces the highest state of paranoia. We are always afraid of the unknown.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Dealing with Grief
It’s been a week since a helicopter went down in Calabasas, taking the lives of 9 passengers, along with Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gianna. The world felt this one, as Kobe was one of those mythical figures, like Prince or John Lennon, whose contributions and excellence in their respective fields meant so much to so many. And when shooting stars die young, we feel the additional loss of their unfulfilled and unexpressed potential; there was so much they were going to do to make this world a more beautiful and wondrous place.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Embracing Discomfort
When I lived in San Francisco, a couple decades ago, I would draw every Sunday morning at a studio a few blocks away from my home in Noe Valley. I would carry my box of charcoal, pencils, erasers and drawing board down to a studio that focused on life studies. Sunday morning was an open, non-instructional, time and I paid for the opportunity to draw from a live model.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Creativity = Why write a book?
When I walk into a bookstore or library, I’m often overwhelmed by the sheer number of books that are available. Thousands upon thousands. And these are only the books that actually made it through the process of publishing, marketing and press and actually got placed into a bookstore or online distribution. For every book published, there are thousands more, half-written, languishing in laptops or in dusty desk drawers.
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Tips to help you survive the corporate world without losing your creative soul
Are you worried about losing your integrity as a creative in the corporate world? Designer and artist John S. Couch has launched a new book that might help.
In The Art of Creative Rebellion: How to Champion Creativity, Change Culture and Save Your Soul, he shares 28 straightforward principles he's identified to help you build confidence and live a creatively fulfilling life at the office.
John knows firsthand how tough it is to keep the creative juices flowing when faced with societal pressures to conform and bills to pay. With a career that has taken him from Wired magazine and CBS to Hulu, where he is currently vice president of Product Design, John is undoubtedly successful. Yet, as a young designer, he encountered his fair share of setbacks and periods of disillusionment – difficult experiences that a guiding hand may have helped him avoid or overcome more easily.
You can pre-order a copy of The Art of Creative Rebellion. In the meantime, we asked John if he could share a few tips with Creative Boom, so you can learn how to survive the corporate world without losing your soul.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Creativity = Freedom
I was interviewed over the weekend by Dov Baron for his video-podcast called Curiosity Bites (my episode comes out in a couple of months -- stay tuned). Dov is a charismatic man whose resume runs from being a leadership coach to author to speaker to podcaster just to name a few arenas. Our discussion was very far-reaching and varied to say the least, running the gamut from design to art to business to languages and culture to being a parent. Underlying the whole discussion was the theme of creativity.
At one point I blurted out that, to me, creativity equates to freedom.
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Hulu’s John S. Couch thinks creative adults need to relearn how to rebel—here’s why
After speaking on a panel in 2018 about the creative courage, vision, and raw determination it takes for designers to “break the internet,” John S. Couch, VP of Product Design at Hulu, had numerous designers, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople ask him if he could recommend any books that would help them navigate the unforgiving environments of contemporary design without compromising themselves. He didn’t, but on his wife’s recommendation, he ended up writing one himself. Part-Letters to a Young Poet, part-Kitchen Confidential, Couch’s The Art of Creative Rebellion: How to champion creativity, change culture and save your soul (in bookstores January 21, 2020) serves up anecdotes of lurching your way forward in a career through screw ups and blunders to ultimately finding the lesson in the wonderful mess of life. A necessary read for everyone from beginning designers to experienced corporate executives, Couch’s book delves into what it takes to successfully create something for people at scale.
To celebrate the book’s release, here is an excerpt from the first chapter:
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Creative Rebellion Essays: No complaining, no anger
Recently, I decided to do a thought experiment. I made an attempt to go through each day without complaining and also not allowing myself to either become angry or react to another person’s anger.
This is much tougher than it seems. The usual internal default mode for most humans is to find something annoying and then complain about it, ostensibly to relieve one’s internal stress about the issue and to spur on some kind of action. What I’ve found is that on a very basic level, complaining is simply a way for one to defer responsibility to another person or situation and essentially cry out for someone else to do something about said issue. The term “complaint” is nuanced and I’m not referring to important complaints about larger social issues (#metoo movement, climate change, et al) but rather the smaller complaints we launch out into the world from a position of feeling imposed on. I find that once complaints are vocalized some stress is released but in reality, at least for me, the concerning issue bounces around in my head and often gains steam. The negativity then becomes a flywheel that fans the embers of discontent and then anger arises.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Write it down
At the end of every year, my wife and I open a leather-bound book of our annual goals. First, we review what we wrote at the beginning of that year. It’s always disconcerting and inspiring to realize that we average around 75 to 80% success on what we envisioned for that year. Things that we were pretty sure would be beyond the pale of what we could accomplish. It also sets the bar for what we think we should accomplish in the new year.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Digital Wabi-Sabi and the Perfection of the Imperfect
For a couple of decades, I’ve had a beautiful little book called Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren. It’s really wonderfully printed and designed and I’ve given it out as a gift to my design team as well as friends over the years.
In case you’re wondering what wabi-sabi (侘寂) is, according to Koren:
“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.”
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Creative Rebellion Essays: True to Your Voice
One of the takeaways from the interview was a theme, which as obvious as it may seem, is to be true to your voice. Whatever that voice may be. This theme continued through the interviews with Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Dave LaChapelle, the photographer and even M. Knight Shyamalan, the film director. Shyamalan, famous in his 20’s for making The Sixth Sense, in 1999, found himself struggling for relevancy and studio interest in more recent years. The footage he shot a particular project was geared towards what he thought the studios would like and yet all the studios turned him down. He was in dire straits, as he’d actually mortgaged his house to pay for the shoot but he decided to revisit the footage and re-edit. Not trying to edit for an audience or a studio or a market but, rather, editing it the way he wanted it to be. This version of the project did sell. And it worked because he was true to his voice. They were all true to their individual voices.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Old Masters and Young Geniuses
A few years ago I read a really wonderful, albeit a little academic, book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David W. Galenson. Without going too deeply into it, the main thesis is that conceptual artists tend to peak early in their careers and experimental artists develop into prominence much later.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Centeredness and Flow
I spent the weekend recording my narration for the audiobook version of The Art of Creative Rebellion. Well, I spent around 10 hours in total getting the first two-thirds of the book recorded. It was a humbling process. We clearly underestimated the amount of time it would take. I’ve never liked hearing my recorded voice (I’m pretty sure this is a common issue) but I felt that it would be odd and inauthentic to have a professional voice actor read the book, as the stories were my personal stories; anecdotes of failure, heartbreak, and dogged perseverance.
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Stress and the modern age
I drive my daughter to school every morning. It’s convenient as her school is less than half a mile from work. It’s one of the highlights of my day – spending time with her as we drive down winding mountain roads and go south on Pacific Coast Highway. During these times we either listen to music or we discuss what’s going on in school. The other day, as we drove home from school (Friday afternoons I pick her up), we didn’t listen to music but we discussed the Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita that happened on November 14th. My daughter is 16 years old and the victims, and the shooter, were all around that age. It struck close to home, to say the least. She told me, “Daddy you have no idea what it’s like to have to worry that some kid could just come in with a gun and start to shoot kids in the school. I shouldn’t have to worry about this.”
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Creative Rebellion Essays: Vision & Creative Confidence
I would posit that the common thread between so-called creative types (artists, designers, musicians, writers, et al) and entrepreneurs is that they both require two things: Vision and Creative confidence. Both the artist and the entrepreneur are making things that are, hopefully, unique, and in the latter case, useful. But either way, something is literally being pulled out of the aether.
Which is no easy feat.
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Bauhaus, Gesamtkunstwerk and transcendence
Art transcends. If the human condition is one of isolation in our physical bodies, then music is a communion of spirit in a shared experience. If someone loves the same music as you, then for a moment you both can experience the sonic journies of flying over a moonlit forest at night followed by spiraling through galaxies as the music swells and then the plunge into the deep green sea as the notes descend yet again to clash upwards towards transcendence before the final chords fade out and everyone, as one, applauds the communal spectacle of the last vestige of the modern-day shaman: the rock star.
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Beyond the day job
I wrote about doing something beyond your day job in my book, The Art of Creative Rebellion, and how it is additive to your ability to bring value to your job. I caution my design team from associating too heavily with their title or company brand – yes, it’s important to have pride in your company and your role but it’s also important to be a fully realized human being, with friends, family and passionate interests that allow you to fill your creative battery.
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Telling Stories
I wrote about the fires in real-time last year for my upcoming book The Art of Creative Rebellion (publish date, January 21st, 2020) and how, at one point while we were packing, my wife and I had to look at each other and ask if we would be okay if we lost it all. And we agreed that as long as the three of us were unscathed, that we could rebuild our lives. I took (and continue to take) that as a lesson in being in the moment and being truly grateful for what we have, rather than always coveting what we don’t have and what we lack. The fires, for me, are metaphorically charged -- on one hand they herald the reality of climate change and our negligence to the veracity of scientific fact as we hew towards unthinking allegiance to political polemic and religious doctrine. This trend is unredeemable and destructive. On the other hand, what gives me hope, is that after the fire, mother nature has a spectacular ability to heal herself through regrowth. And humans are capable of the extraordinary if we allow ourselves to move beyond reactionary and fear-based motivations towards the strategic and passion-based mindset. Again, metaphorically speaking, if we burn down our own preconceptions and attachments, we can allow new growth to occur.
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