Back in August, I blogged about Hugh Macleod’s “How to Be Creative” project. Hugh draws cartoons on the backs of business cards and works in advertising; his How to Be Creative is a meditation on creativity, individualism and commercialism, and it’s full of pithy, clear, no-nonsense advice.\
Now Hugh has expanded the piece into a short book, which is online in its entirety. He’s found an agent and the agent is shopping the book — I’d certainly buy a copy!
Chaos can be a positive thing. Chaos is inherently part of the creative act. To embrace creativity means you must also embrace chaos. Things don’t happen when everything is neat and “just so”. Creativity is all about distruption. The people who tell you that creativity is pain-free are liars. The people who tell you they’ve got a plan are liars. There is no plan. There’s just you, God and the need to invent. And this uncertain world is what most of us now find ourselves entering, willingly or otherwise.
Creativity equals chaos. Chaos equals creativity. Embrace it or die. I’ve already done so. I know all about it. It almost cost me my liver but like I said, education is expensive.
The Creative Age is upon us. The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.
We live in amazing and interesting times. If we’re lucky, while on this earth we can do a damn good job proving i