Cultivate Your Creative [Populist]

Are you willing to be the deviant?

I was happy to make Carl Nordgren’s lecture at my school yesterday.  The visiting professor of creative entrepreneurship at Duke University and self-proclaimed “Creative Populist” caught my attention.

Nordren encouraged “kaleidoscopic thinking” – being willing to look at problems from every angle and explore relationships between pieces from different points of view.  He said that being the deviant is a marker of the creative populist.  These creatives look at culture differently and aren’t focused on the status quo.

Want to cultivate your “creative populist”?

Employ these 4 Creatively Entrepreneurial Behaviors:

1.  Be generous:  We are to be generous with our ideas and support one another in our creativity.  He said that so often the earliest forms of the best ideas are the most fragile.  Be willing to help others nurture and grow their ideas.

2.  Be humble:  Worry less about being right and more about allowing truth to emerge.  (Love this one.)

3.  Be playful:  Play engages the imagination.  For kids, it gives them a places to imagine, explore, and engage with one another.  Open ended play is fertile ground for a budding creative entrepreneur.

4.  Enthusiastically pursue beauty:  Experiencing beauty is the most refreshing experience in the world to most people most of the time.

I agree!  Nordgren’s work reminded me of The Wayseer Manifesto.:

On his website, Nordgren writes: “I have concluded that the Creatively Entrepreneurial talent pool of this generation is so much deeper and broader than previous generations that it marks them out as different, not in kind but in degree, and that they have the potential to become the First Great Creative Generation.”

Here’s to the deviants – the creatives that elevate us all.

♥ 90 Days of Love: 19/90 loving choices.
Little choices + time =  wholehearted change.

Photo credit: http://pinterest.com/pin/54676582945532223/

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