Perspective | The Direction of Intention

Exit The Grey

Posted on January 10, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

The universe delivered a hammer-on-the-head-message to me this past year. It showed up in the books I read, the films I saw, and the conversations I had. It hammered me for months before I decided to pay attention. The message is simple: get out of the debate.

The debate ignites inside whenever there is a grey zone: the places where we ignore a decision or abdicate a responsibility. It’s the conversation inside when we’ve not made a choice and/or are waiting for circumstance to decide for us. The debate happens where we have yet to draw a boundary when we need to draw a boundary. It splits the inner monologue into two voices. “Stop. Go. No, stop. Go. Ahhhhhhh!!!”

Getting out of the debate means to be clear. It means to choose to be clear. Make a choice. Walk the path with eyes wide open. If you don’t like the current path of choice you can turn around or cut across the field. You can always choose to stomp through the tall grasses and make your own path or fake a crop circle. And, there is always available the choice to stand still and do nothing. Standing still never requires justification so no debate is necessary. Choose to stand still and see the stars. Feel your heart beating. Smell the hint of fireplace smoke in the air. Listen to your beating heart for a clue about your next choice. The choice to stand still will always lead to a yearning. It will inevitably lead to a step.

I’ve learned that clarity does not mean “being right.” In fact, “being right” is usually a sign of the absence of clarity. The need to “be right” is a blossom of fear. Inner clarity means to walk with your head up, eyes and heart open. It means to embrace the moment and the mess. It means to be available to learning.

You never lose time when you are clear; you gain perspective. You gain experiences. You embrace your moment. You no longer believe in illusions like “mistakes” or “failure.” You walk strong. You practice grace. You see.

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

Filed under: Perspective, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: clarity, perspective, seeing | Leave a comment »

Intend The Glitch

Posted on November 3, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

Watching a video on “Glitch Art” the other day I heard this phrase: you have to understand a system before you can break it. A glitch in computer code is an anomaly or mistake that creates a hiccup or break in the system. It is a mistake that can make some very interesting imagery. Glitch artists seek the mistakes. They seek the beauty that comes from what others might view as a problem. And my favorite artistic moment as expressed by the glitch artists: at some point they start creating problems in the code. They intend the glitch (which makes it no longer a glitch).

Penicillin is the result of a process glitch. Science is often the art of surfing for glitches, finding the anomaly within the pattern. The word “experiment” implies an orchard of happy mistakes that reveal new insights. The word “unique” means distinctive, exceptional, singular – something out of the ordinary. In other words, a glitch.

Art and Innovation (in the USA) are equated with the new. Artists and innovators try to help us see the world in a new way – or even better, they help us see the world anew. Seeing anew always requires pattern disruption. It requires a challenge to the assumption set, a smack to the status quo. It requires a glitch.

Consider this: learning – true learning (not the answer driven drivel currently running rampant in our education system) and seeing anew are fundamentally the same thing. To learn is to see the new or to see anew. At the heart of art and science – the reason for math and English, economics, politics, ethics, social science,…, is an orientation to the question (as opposed to the numbing notion of a right answer).

Like the glitch artists, no one simply finds the new. It is not something that can be sought or predetermined. It is something we bumble into. It happens when you one day ask, “Hey, I wonder why that happened?” Or, “I wonder if it would work better if…?” It begins with wonder. Wonder leads to experimentation and questions within questions within questions that lead to more experimentation and more questions. This is also a good definition for being vitally alive. Wonder and step toward it. Orient to the question, do an experiment, and tomorrow ask a better question. Do this everyday and someday, just like the glitch artists, you will find yourself doing what all artists know as life-giving: you will intend the glitch, play with the mistake, and learn to see the world anew again and again and again.

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, check out my new comic strip Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Filed under: Art, Creativity, Education, entrepreneur, Perspective, Play, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

Let’s Play

Posted on September 18, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

It is Monday morning and I am sitting in the lobby of a Lutheran church. How I got here is a very long story and isn’t that true of any moment of your life? Recently I spent a night in Helen, Georgia. Earlier that day I’d never even heard of Helen, Georgia and Helen, Georgia was not on the way to any place I was intending to go. As I drifted off to sleep that night in a motel in Helen, I asked myself, “What had to happen in the universe to get me to this place at this time?”

Play the game of tracking backwards and you’ll find that, “How did I get here?” is not an easy question to answer. The choice–dots on the map of life connect back before the moment that you started making choices. You might as well ask, “Why did I incarnate at this time in human history?” When I attempt to track backwards I find some choice points that are more relevant than others. I also see how much of my story is a happy accident, a collision with other people’s choices, almost all of it out of my control. Years ago I knew a woman who slept in and missed her flight. Had she used a more reliable alarm clock she would have died that day in a plane crash.

This has been the year that I learned about and let go my illusion of control. The words, ”control” and “choice” mean something vastly different to me now than they did this time last year. Last year I understood them as orientations to the world. I might have asked, “Are you trying to control your circumstance?” “Are you in choice?” It’s almost as if I understood “choice” as yet another form of “control.” They are Puritan words; both are vested with end-result expectations. Today I understand them as orientations to my Self. They are words of relationship. I understand “choice” as being conscious so that when I ask myself, “What are you choosing?” what I’m really asking myself is, “Are you present? Are you conscious of your actions and what you are engaging?”

When I ask myself, “What can I control?” my new answer is “nothing.” There are too many forces in play for me to believe that I have control over anything. I think the notion of control is a form of insanity. Go outside tonight and look into the night sky and see the vastness of this universe. Then ask yourself, “What do I control?” Instead of control, I can exercise presence. I can participate. Presence is a word of joining. Presence leads me to the center of the room. It pulls me with gentle hands from the safety of my witness perch and says, “Let’s play.”

[905. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine].

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, check out my new comic strip Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Filed under: Awakening, Language, Perspective, Play, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

Take One More Step

Posted on September 14, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

Horatio once told me that if I could write 10 posts I could write 1000. One day at a time, one step at a time, nothing is overwhelming when taken one step at a time. It turns out that he knew what he was talking about – even though I was highly skeptical on day number 1. The theory follows: if I can write 1000 posts, I can write 10,000. And, by then, I will be very old, indeed and perhaps further out of my mind so hopefully I’ll be more entertaining. I intend to wear bright mismatching colors and cuss a lot.

Seaton Gras from Surf Incubator told the story today of a start up company that had been “flat-lined” for more than three years. They’d been trying to get funding or some form of significant traction for a long, long time. Through a series of events that I can only assume were random, a boatload of funding came and the company is now on a rocket trajectory to viability. This is not a story of success as much as a story of perseverance. They kept walking. Three years is a long time when measured in single steps. The funding organization asked, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you!” The three-year old hearty start-up responded, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you!” You never know what slow walker might be looking for what you bring.

I imagined that if you asked the hearty start-up a year ago if all the seeking was worthwhile, they might have shrugged. Ask them today and I know they’d enthusiastically say, “Yes!” The difference is a single step.

Recently, Rand Fishkin of Moz gave a great speech at the 9 Mile Labs Accelerator. He talked about how too many people give up their dreams a moment too soon. He said that most folks get 80% of the way to their fulfillment and then give up. They can’t see that they are one blind corner away from success. And that’s the point. We can’t see what’s coming. Ever. We never know. Regardless of what we pretend, each step is a step into the unknown, so why pretend otherwise. Why not just keep on walking toward your ideal?

[901. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine].

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, check out my new comic strip Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Filed under: Perspective, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Learn To Laugh

Posted on September 10, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

Comedy is about other people’s pain. Wiley Coyote going off the cliff one more time is funny. The guy slipping on the banana peel is hysterical as long as you are not that guy. Humor is mostly a status drop for someone.

I’ve been writing and drawing a cartoon called FL!P for almost half a year now so I’m inadvertently making a study of what’s funny and what is not. Recently some acquaintances that know me from my coaching life took me to task because my comic strip seemed out of character. “It’s mean,” they said. “Yes.” I said. That is precisely why it is funny.

The strip is aimed at entrepreneurs and there is a need for a bit of levity in a world so steeped in self-interest and confusing agendas. In many traditions around the world the trickster is an integral part of worship. We are not meant to take our gods so seriously. The reverence is always found in the relationship and the realization that the godhead is in all of us. It is our flaws that take us closer to the creative. Worship is a relationship and a full relationship includes laughter, joy, play, as well as inner quiet and awe. Tricksters break rules and pull the blanket off of societies inequities. Tricksters help us see what we pretend not to see. The Emperor would still be strutting around naked if the trickster boy hadn’t spoken a truth that the rest of the village denied. Truth comes easier with laughter. I can tell you that there is much public prancing in the world of accelerators and incubators but very little real apparel. Humor is necessary in a landscape so rife with pretending.

Artists are often of necessity the tricksters of their culture. It is the artists’ job to open eyes to what is there (versus what we think is there). It is the artists’ job to bring the communal attention into the present, to slap-stop the puffed up importance of things that do not matter so that the things of real importance can be seen. With a 24 hour news cycle and a congress ruled by corporate dollars it is hard for us to sort out what is valuable and what is not. The narrative in the commons rarely reaches the level of significance. It is no wonder that many people confess to getting their news from John Stewart and Stephen Colbert (both heroes of mine).

The greatest lessons of my life did not come gently and I am all the more grateful for the force behind the learning. My lessons came with status drops and like Wiley Coyote I have gone more than once over the cliff with an anvil close behind. Comedy is mean. Learning requires falling down. Stepping into the unknown is potent because of the myriad of things to trip over. If you can’t laugh at the bungle you’ll miss the lesson.

897. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, check out my new comic strip Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Filed under: Art, Creativity, Education, entrepreneur, Perspective, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: art, humor, laughter, learning | 2 Comments »

Wake Up To A New World

Posted on September 4, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

891. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“It isn’t explanations that carry us forward, it’s our desire to go on.” Paolo Coello, Brida

I had a very late night. Combined with a very early flight I had no choice but to sleep my way across the country. Not only did I wake up in a different city, a different time zone, a different climate, I also felt as if I woke up into a different lifetime. I was away for a very long time. In that time I traveled by car across seven states in less than 24 hours. I stood in the pouring rain. I heard thunder roll without ceasing for over 15 minutes. I drank too much wine, ran from a skunk, loaded a truck with furniture and boxes, played poorly a ukulele, laughed until I had to sit down, cleaned a pond of leaves and debris, put my feet in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, fell asleep on the sugar white sands of the beach, danced like it was the last day of my life, ate when I was hungry, walked at midnight almost every night, sang a James Taylor song over and over, and took a load of treasured shoes to the salvation army. In that time, Tom died and I was inundated with calls from people who wanted me to know. Friends long lost reached out to me to wrap me in their warmth and condolences. I had conversations of grief and celebration while standing on a pier, sitting on a park bench, riding in a car, sitting in my bed, and walking through the leaves fallen too early. I took off my shoes so I could feel them crunch beneath my feet.

When I stepped off the plane I entered into a familiar airport but it seemed as if it was familiar from another lifetime. I knew the place but was no longer the person who knew the place. I stood in SeaTac for a few moments and wondered if I was dreaming. People raced passed me. They had flights to catch and family to meet. I was in the way so I stepped to the side. I kept waiting for the scene to change. I kept waiting to wake up but I didn’t so I wandered through the airport, I taught a tourist how to buy a light rail ticket, I bought one for myself and rode the train into downtown.

Once, many years ago, I visited my elementary school and although everything was as it had been when I was a boy, it all seemed so small. As I walked from the train station to my studio I had the same impression. This place has become small. Or I have grown and what once seemed boundless now feels tight and confining. Standing in my studio, I opened the windows to let in the air, I remembered Carol saying, “I’ve broken up with the world. I want a whole new relationship with it so I’ve let the old relationship go.” That’s it, I think. I have broken up with the world. I’m not going to wake up from this dream because I woke up into this dream. While I was gone I let the old world go. I can’t explain it. I have new eyes. I’ve awakened to an opportunity for a whole new relationship with the world.

Filed under: Perspective, Possibility, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Play The Ukulele

Posted on August 30, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

888. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Last night I was at Ukulele practice in a garden on the shores of Lake Michigan. I am a rank beginner and learning to play the Ukulele with 47 other people. We were laughing our way through Over The Rainbow. I was playing air Ukulele pretending that I was expert at my chord progressions, when a sphinx butterfly circled us, flew into the garden right next to me, and began drinking from the flowers. It was close enough to touch. I’d never seen anything like it before. I was so captivated by the butterfly that I forgot to pretend that I was strumming.

A sphinx butterfly looks like an exotic hummingbird. It is shaped like a hummingbird, its wings beat like a hummingbird, it hovers like a hummingbird, and yet it is not a hummingbird. My section of the ukulele band completely dropped their chord progressions and joined me in gaping at the butterfly. We entered an intense debate about whether it was a hummingbird or indeed a sphinx butterfly. The people seated to the left of the garden voted for hummingbird. Those of us on the right were solidly in the butterfly camp. I had no idea so I went with those seated around me. Each camp had solid justifications and good reasons for their point of view. The butterfly paid us no attention. It was not concerned about our debate or our need to identify its species. It continued feeding regardless of the label we attached to it.

I can’t help it. In moments like this I step into the role of witness. I watched people enrapt by a butterfly. I watched their loving debate, their laughter, their awe. I watched this group of amazing people hold their treasured ukuleles of many colors – green, purple, midnight blue, orange, red, pink and sky blue, white and black – watching a butterfly of many colors – pink, orange, purple, salmon, white, blue and black – and I was in awe of their awe. They did not see how beautiful they were as they admired the beauty of the butterfly.

This is the role of the human being isn’t it? To see the beauty of the world. To appreciate and give a name to the awesome and unimaginable. To engage with the beauty and then to join in a simple way with the creation of beauty: this group who gathers each Wednesday night to play their ukulele’s together and laugh and drink wine and gape in utter amazement at a butterfly.

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Gratitude, Perspective, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: awe, beauty, witness | Leave a comment »

Stand In The Chaos

Posted on August 29, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

887. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Here’s the last one from the archives. I’ll be back live tomorrow. This was post 282:

This is my favorite revelation of the week. It comes from a friend who has for the past several years been doing big work on herself. Like all big shifts of perception it sounds so simple but is hard to embody. I’m beginning to understand that most revelations do not come with fireworks and a brass band; they are subtle. They are simple because they’ve been there all along and we just did not see them. They slip in with little fanfare, like removing your sunglasses.

This is how she said it: I’ve learned to be in the chaos without buying into the chaos. See, no fanfare. And, if you are truly underwhelmed, ask yourself when was the last time you resisted, defended, justified, needed to be right, fought for others to see what you see, needed approval, bought into the notion of perfection, or any of a thousand other ways you buy into the chaos. Are you anxious, afraid, motivated by what you fear or do not want, in survival mode, or certain that the universe is throwing obstacles in your way? Chaos, chaos, chaos.

Can you imagine what it might mean in your life to be able to stand solidly in the chaos without needing to control it, contain it, or deny it? Can you be present without needing to manipulate or force anything or anyone yet say without inhibition exactly what you need (it’s not the need that matters, it is how you fill it that defines you).

Reread the first part of her statement: I’ve learned to be. Her focus shifted. The earth did not shake, the clouds did not part, no ascension or angels or twenty-one gun salute. Her focus shifted, she realized choices are creative acts and instead of being caught in the whirlpool, it swirls around her.

What could you buy if you stopped investing in chaos?

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Grasp The Impossible

Posted on August 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

866. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

For the next few days I’ll be at the gathering of my clan. My papa turns 80 so I’m reposting from the archives. This one was post 406:

Yesterday David and I were supposed to talk about teaching opportunities but instead we fell into a great conversation about communal narrative, the power of belief, quantum mechanics, and the incomprehensible size of the universe. If you want to experience the sacred all you need do is look through a telescope or a microscope. Or, better yet, take a walk and pay attention. Or, even better, look into the eyes of someone you love. Or, even better still, look into the eyes of someone you don’t know and allow that their hopes and dreams and desires are just as big and potent and real as are yours. Incomprehensible! And that’s precisely the point: if you can grasp it in its entirety it is probably not worth knowing. How might we tell our story together if we allowed that it is impossible to grasp the enormity of any living being?

Just before I went scuba diving for the first time Lora was giddy but she couldn’t tell me why. She was an advanced diver and knew the revelation that is available for first time divers. There is the surface of the ocean in all its beauty and drama and that’s what most of us see; ask most people about the ocean and they will talk about the surface or what they’ve seen in National Geographic. The first dive beneath the surface, not just seeing it but being in it, there is beauty and color and the shocking infinity and power of life that opens when you go just a little ways beneath the surface. There are no words. Your inner world changes when you recognize how little you really know of the outer world.

What was even more shocking for me was returning to the surface after my first dive. What was true beneath the surface was also true above it. I’d stopped seeing the beauty and the color and the teeming life above the water line because I had generic words for it: I assumed I knew so I stopped seeing and experiencing how incomprehensible (sacred) is this world we inhabit.

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Force Nothing

Posted on August 4, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

865. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

For the next few days I’ll be at the gathering of my clan. My papa turns 80 so I’m reposting from the archives. This one was post 402:

Today Saul talked about moving through life with more than a dull force. It was an amazing clear image to me, a community of people who only know how to move through life using dull force. Not sharp force, not intense force: dull. I imagined the word ‘dull’ to mean a few things: 1) unconscious and 2) blunted from feeling; life as dull color.

Many years ago just prior to moving to Los Angeles my friend Dwight gave me a how-to-drive-in-LA lesson. He said, “It’s all about forcing traffic to do what you want it to do.” We laughed as my usually benign and peaceful friend Dwight morphed into a self-centered road demon forcing traffic to his will. His lesson was more than insightful, it was prescient: I found drivers in LA to be mostly aggressively unconscious of others and aggressively protected against feeling the impact of their hostility: accidents and a violent city was always the other person’s fault. It was, to me, the city of moving-through and very hard to be present-in. It was the image that hopped into my mind when Saul said, “dull force.” Rodney King, road rage and marshal law; I imagine the land upon which the city was built to be in shock with dull force; all of those orange groves paved over, the hills and blue-blue sky choked with the exhaust of automobiles driven by people trying to be some other place.

Saul bent over to demonstrate a point, pretending to tie his shoe, he said “If you allow there are options other than trying to force your way through your day, you might actually be in your day; you might see that there is no stress necessary to engage with the tasks before you. Rather than dull force you might actually participate within your day!” The idea tickled him and we laughed.

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