Creativity is blocked (and encouraged!) by habits

Becoming more creative is not easy. Habits must be broken, perspectives changed, and thought patterns revised. Here are some reasons why it is difficult for most of us to be creative at all times:

The Known Vs. The New

People usually base their decisions on the best, most complete, and most accurate information or experience available. But the newer and more unique the solution required, the harder it is to get good and sufficient information. That is why the easiest solutions are not new and different.

Obstacles To Creativity

To unleash the creative process, much of what is usually known and taken for granted, must be looked at in a different way, for a new purpose

Habits Restrict Awareness

Habits tend to tune out those things and ideas around us that could be the basis for new insights; routine everyday decision-making works against searching for or accepting new ideas.

Rigid Categories Prevent Insight

We see the world selectively through a set of filters created by our experiences.
Wanting to fit new things into existing categories increases as we gain experience. Note the response of someone exposed to something new. They will probably start out saying, that it is the same as something they already know. If they are told it is not, they may take several tries at establishing an identification based on similarity with something they know.

The net-effect is that even when exposed to something new, we try to treat it like something familiar and we become reluctant to creating new categories.

Conceptual blocks

A conceptual block is a mind set that prevents a person from seeing a problem or a solution in an unconventional way.

• Perceptual Blocks: Stereotyping, Imaginary boundaries, Information overload.

• Emotional Blocks: Fear of taking a Risk, Dislike for uncertainty, Judgmental attitude, Lack of challenge

• Cultural Blocks: Our way is right, taboos

• Environmental Blocks: distractions in our surroundings

• Intellectual Blocks: insufficient knowledge, denying the possibility that a solution can be achieved using a different specialty.

• Expressive Blocks: inability or willingness to express ideas clearly to others or oneself

Overcoming the Obstacles

1. Remove the fear of failure
2. Change the solution mode. If the problem is being explored verbally, try making a diagram or representing it mathematically. Assume a solution and see if it can be made to fit the problem.
3. Adjust attitudes. Emphasize the positive aspects of the solution. Ensure that risks are worth taking. Encourage the acceptance of alternate solutions.
4. Use provocative Questions. Ask what if questions; get past the perceived block and then work backwards.
   
5. Change the rules. Are specific rules or conditions blocking progress?

Moby gratis

Edit your videos, add music, and don't worry about getting sued. Moby has set up this site, where he just gives away music for independent film makers to use in their films.

It's an awesome marketing scheme on his part. He gets exposure in all kinds of films that would have otherwise used other music to score their films, and this indirectly promotes his commercial music.

A win-win situation for moby and the film makers. The only glitch I see is the fact that you can't edit the music (only shorten it). What if I wanted to sample a sound, or loop a segment for whatever reason. Or what if I want to use this for a video game? And what if it's a short film INSIDE a video game? Will I be "vigorously pursued by the relevant copyright owner"?

It sort of contradicts the whole philosophy. I would go a step further and make it free, editable, for whatever content (staying true to the non-commercial bit of the contract, though).

In any case, it's a step in the right direction. It won't be long before more artists catch on.

Li Ka-shing

[from wikipedia]
Li Ka-shing was born in Chaozhou in the Guangdong Province, China in 1928. In 1940 the Li family fled to Hong Kong to avoid the turmoils in China.[5] Li's family stayed at the home of his wealthy uncle. The arrogance of Li's uncle with his immense wealth ignited Li's determination to make a place for himself in the world.

Li's father died in Hong Kong. Shouldering the responsibility of looking after the livelihood of the family, Li was forced to leave school before the age of 15 and found a job in a plastics trading company where he labored 16 hours a day. By 1950, his hard work, prudence and his pursuit of excellence had enabled him to start his own company, Cheung Kong Industries. From manufacturing plastics, Li led and developed his company into a leading real estate investment company in Hong Kong that was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1972. Cheung Kong continued to expand by acquiring Hutchison Whampoa and Hongkong Electric Holdings Limited in 1979 and 1985 respectively.

The Honourable Sir Li Ka-shing, GBM, KBE (simplified Chinese: 李嘉诚; traditional Chinese: 李嘉誠; pinyin: Lǐ Jiāchéng, Jyutping: Lei5 Gaa1-sing4, Li2 Gia1-sêng5 gdr, born July 29, 1928), is a wealthy businessman from Hong Kong. He is the richest person of Chinese descent in the world, one of the richest and most influential investors in Asia, and the eleventh richest man in the world according to Forbes with an estimated wealth of $26.5 billion on March 5, 2008.[2] Presently, he is the Chairman of Hutchison Whampoa Limited (HWL) and Cheung Kong Holdings in Hong Kong.

Considered one of the most powerful figures in Asia, Li was named "Asia's Most Powerful Man" by Asiaweek in 2001. Forbes Magazine and the Forbes family honored Li Ka-shing with the first ever "Malcolm S. Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award" on September 5, 2006, in Singapore.[3] In spite of his wealth, Li has a reputation for leading a no-frills lifestyle, and is known to wear simple black dress shoes and an inexpensive Seiko wristwatch. Li is also regarded as one of Asia's most generous philanthropists, donating over $1 billion USD to date to charity and other various philanthropic causes.

Vision is perhaps our greatest strength.. it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.

Ethics is what we do when nobody is looking

But somebody is always looking. Specially on the internet.

Your sister may have decided you shouldn't do something on the internet. Or maybe your company filters everything and doesn't let you post to your blog, or thinks you shouldn't have access to certain pages. Or maybe even your country has decided to stop you from doing such things. Anonymity is hard to get these days.

Happily, there are some ways to bypass this. I am talking about things like Anonymouse.org, The Onion Router, and I2P.

Anonymouse was put together in a week by Alexander Pircher, a computer science student from Germany in 1997. It has since grown to become one of the most popular point your browser to when you need to surf anonymously. The principle is simple: you just type in an url and it'll fetch it for you, anonymously.

That solves web-surfing to blocked sites from repressive countries. It slows down the process of actually seeing the webpage, but, technically speaking, you're only visiting Anonymouse.org - your request is stored on a proxy and that cached copy is what you access. If you don't mind going back to the website every time you need to surf anonymously, it is a great and simple way to do it.

The Onion Router is another alternative to achieve anonymity. It is developed on the concept of routing onions (wikipedia), which are "data structures used to create paths through which many messages can be transmitted". Messages are encrypted and passed from one server to the other, forming a layered structure in which a message can't be deciphered without knowledge of the previous' server encryption - hence the name onion router.

Installation is straight-forward and available for most popular operating systems (windows, mac, linux). And usage for anonymous web-surfing is further facilitated with the installation of a Tor Button extension on Firefox - which lets you switch with the click of a button between anonymous and public modes. Tor's proxy also lets you anonymize other aplications - like a chat client for example - just by pointing that application to the local tor proxy.

Still on the line of anonymizing applications, but going a step further lies the I2P network. It no only lets you set up anonymous web-surfing and other applications (like the chat client) through the use of a local proxy, but it is designed to let you do a number of things (anonymously) on the net. Like anonymous blogging, anonymous Bit Torrent, and hosting web-pages, anonymously. You could also do some of these things with Tor (like anonymous Bit Torrent) by simply pointing the client to the local proxy, but they discourage it because it puts too much of a load on the network - and I2P is specially designed for this.

There are more differences between the two last alternatives I mentioned, so, to get a more in-depth idea of what these are and which you may actually need to use, take a look at this Network comparison between Tor and I2P.

In all, your online presence can be masked (although you will pay the price on speed, as these methods slow down your internet experience). But the real question behind this is... Should we do it?

I mean, what's legal and not just depends on your country's politicians. The same way your sister or your company may have decided what you should and should not do, someone (somewhere) in your country decided that you shouldn't download this or see that. And I'm not just talking about The Great Firewall of China and other countries which censor nearly everything like Cuba, Iran, Tunisia, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Not being able to see/download something is censorship nonetheless, and you have this in a number of countries (from USA to France to South Africa to Australia). Groups like RIAA and MPAA and local governments keep an eye out on the internet to try to "catch" "criminals" doing such "illegal" things as downloading an mp3, or making a digital copy of a movie. But the game has no sense when what's "legal" and what's not is defined by them anyway. It's like trying to play chess while the other person keeps making up new rules as they go along.

Sure, legality is a way of enforcing ethics. But it's got no sense when they indiscriminately sue for making a local copy of music they have legally bought. I personally think there's nothing ethically wrong with downloading, for example, Popa Chubby's Stealing the Devil's Guitar if you've bought the cd and your little sister sat on it and broke it. Or playing your old snes games on an emulator - taking for granted that you bought these in the past and, for example, your snes broke down and you can't play them anymore.

I guess I'm trying to say that legality should correspond to what is ethical, not the other way around. And, well, if your country doesn't allow you to make a choice, you've got a couple of choices to help you become anonymous and do what you think is ethical. After all, ethics is what we do when nobody's looking.