In a world of high-intensity information barrage, the late author David Foster Wallace once said something simple yet valuable.  I want to share this with you today.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

Like Wallace, we are all rained upon by a continuous deluge of data that comes from both the physical and digital worlds.  It can be overwhelming, but it’s also ridiculous considering that we sometimes feel creatively blocked, like we have nothing to say or that the words just won’t come out the right way.  We say that we have no inspiration, no ideas, and we can’t get motivated to get to work.  We go to bed at night dreaming of great things which we haven’t started yet because we’re missing… something.

Wallace’s perspective clarifies the problem.  There’s a lot of information in the world but how do you learn how to recognize the really good stuff?

Is there gold – or usable creative material – in anything and everything?  Often, there is.  However, sometimes the gold is hidden or in such tiny doses that it’s easy to miss.

Gold prospectors, in the days before machines and processes for extracting gold, would find a promising spot on a stream or river and then use a pan to scoop soil from it.  Then they’d dump the pan’s contents onto a screen or filter and try to find gold by separating the sand from the rocks… and hopefully find gold nuggets within.  Lacking the screen or filter, they’d just have to sort through the contents of the pan with their fingers and hope they found something valuable.

Generating ideas and creating content is like prospecting for gold, isn’t it?

There’s one key difference, one that makes a huge difference, between prospecting for gold and looking for good creative ideas and material.  When prospecting for gold, you’re looking for that one thing, fully formed with certain characteristics like shape, size, color, and heft.

When looking for ideas, you’re looking for the unexpected.  You’re trying to find new stuff, stuff you haven’t seen before.  You’re searching for patterns and collisions of ideas that combine in new and unique ways.  You have a vague sense of what you’d like to find, but you don’t really know what it will look like.

You might go panning for creative gold, but instead you might find the equivalent of silver, iron, or diamonds.  Or a chocolate bar wrapper and an empty peanut butter jar with a bullet hole through it.  Or two different characters for a novel.  Or an old rubber boot with a 300 hundred year old fish living inside of it.

How do we get better at finding information, out of half a million pieces per day, and combining it to good use?  Maybe we need to get better at looking for both the obvious and the hidden.  Perhaps we need to combine things together more often, especially those things that seem like paradoxes or things that would just never happen.  Who knows, maybe there are neighborhoods were everyone isn’t left handed?  Maybe there’s a common ritual in your area that would seem innovative and clever elsewhere.  Maybe you use Twitter with your toes or your nose?  Who knows?

Just think:  maybe you are missing twenty five pieces of brilliance per day just because you aren’t looking for them:  you’re trying to find something else instead.  Maybe you are finding idea diamonds in your mental pan and you are throwing them away without understanding what you are tossing out.

What can you do differently to find the treasures in front of your eyes?  Are you looking widely enough?

EDIT:  this post has been revised on December 14, 2011

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Image by egenerica

I really don’t have a whole lot to say about the co-founder of Apple Computers, who passed away on October 5 after a long battle with illness.  But here’s something.

Most people are aware the influence of Steve Jobs influence on personal computers and other consumer electronics (Apple), entertainment (Pixar) and, indirectly, Western culture.  I think I have the same view on Apple products and Jobs himself as Mike Brown does, although I’m daily tempted to switch from the PC world enough to at least try an iPad.

But it would be completely remiss of me not to acknowledge the fact that under Jobs both Pixar and Apple made some really amazing and enjoyable stuff.   Great movies, fun products and a growing economic, techonological ecosystem – those are his legacy.

It’s staggering to think of the massive number of people that used Apple products to express their creativity and make wonderful things.  And how many animators, artists, and other technical professions were inspired by Pixar’s works?  And how many people have collectively enjoyed all of that?

Plus I really love my iPod.

In a parallel universe without a Steve Jobs this all might have happened, too.  But we’ll never know.

A sick man died yesterday,  probably one of thousands who also died of disease.  But at least he knew that he’d made an impact on the world and enabled a lot of great stuff.

So, rest in peace Steve Jobs.  Condolences to your family and friends.  May we all take your advice to “think different” and “ship” on our way towards our own creative achievements.

And let’s all take a moment to realize that while a particularly bright candle was extinguished yesterday, many more are still burning and still more great ones are waiting to be lit, too. The end isn’t here for the rest of us.  It’s not even the end of the beginning.  So let’s keep going.

Image via Ballistik Coffee Boy at Flickr

This is a great little video that will take less than two minutes to watch.  Check it out! Click on the link below if you don’t see the video…

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

Thanks to Neatorama and Design.org for finding this gem!

Image by TheCreativePenn

Two words bore holes through your brain to the back of your skull as you read The Essential Don Murray.

The first word is writing – no great surprise.

The second word is draft. The late Don Murray revered the idea of developing a document through multiple versions or drafts. But the draft is dead, killed by the word processor and the Web. Is it worth mourning?

I admire the use of drafts that Murray evangelized. To him, the act of composing multiple drafts of a document is how you think outside of your brain.

You write, then rewrite until you create an acceptable version of your work. With each draft, better words organize themselves around your thesis while the bad ones are cut.

But this kind of writing is dying out. Drafts or versions are lost each time we save a document. Or, worse still, it seems like most writing is a first draft: flawed and hurried. I’ve written tens of thousands of words that way. Maybe you have, too.

I love the Internet and how it puts people in contact with each other. However, it’s contributing to a lot of shallow thinking and superficial communication. We never seem to have more than milliseconds to get someone’s attention and jab a virtual hypodermic of data in their digital arm because no one has time to read. Or edit.  And our technology makes it fast and easy.

We value simple concepts and short messages. Most written communication is now a first draft because it takes seconds to type and send it, so why do more than the minimum amount of effort, especially when there are a thousand other things that require your immediate attention? No one takes hours to compose a letter any more.

Very few people keep copies of their drafts to see what’s changed.

Is the term draft irrelevant now?  Electronic documents are never finished when they can change at any moment.  There’s rarely a previous version to go back to.

The draft comes from an era when few people could publish their writing beyond their immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. Today, anyone can publish their work to an audience. Most of it is “off the cuff” writing from people who might never write more than one draft even prior to the digital era… if they wrote anything at all. That writing is an extension of common speech into digital media. It’s the stuff of the virtual date, party, meeting and phone call without the need for physical proximity.

But I’m finding value in Don Murray’s ideas and other people do, too. The other night I started writing a section of my new project. I didn’t have an outline. I was thinking while writing. Many of the words were fumbling, superfluous and will never see the light of day. However, they directed my thoughts and they led me towards a breakthrough realization for my project. But it will take more drafts to realize.  That’s the price I’m willing to pay for this project.

This isn’t how I normally write blog posts or articles. Normally, a blog post starts with an idea and several supporting bullet points. Then I add the necessary words and force everything into shape. This time I used words to try to understand what I really thought about my topic, like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without a picture for reference. It’ll take multiple drafts to get it right, as Don Murray would have said. I’ll benefit from being able to see each stage of revision.

Many writers force words into certain shapes because they have clear directions of what they need to achieve.  A lot of the high level thinking is done for them ahead of time.  They become adept at following directions because that’s what pays the bills.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s just that there are other possibilities.

What most of us don’t do nearly enough is to work our ideas through multiple iterations so that the words lead us to truth and clarity. The false starts, mistakes and changes of direction are worth keeping, like sections of a map that we use go from origin to destination. Or, better still, like time-lapsed photos that show incremental progress in building something.

This history of progress disappears every time we save our document, obliterating the previous version. The next time you about to click on the Save icon, ask yourself this question: is it safe for me to obliterate the previous version of this work? Or should I save my drafts so I can find my way back to a logical place if I get stuck later on?

The draft isn’t really dead but I think we’ve forgotten how valuable it can be. Long live the draft.

N.B. This is not a first draft.  I could keep going and improving this piece, but I had to stop somewhere.

Image by One From FM

My two thoughtwrestling obsessions at the moment are willpower and the unconscious mind.  While I really didn’t learn a lot about them at SOBCon 2011 (which was wonderful and I’ll talk more about it tomorrow), the entire travel and conference experience has given me some ideas about what I can do with those two topics.

I firmly believe that the unconscious mind is the next frontier, the next area to be tamed and conquered.

Our hidden minds, if you will, are where the real creative magic happens and it’s a huge area of opportunity.

I’m making my map and setting “in” for the new frontier.