Book Review-Creativity, A Short and Cheerful Guide By John Cleese

 

Any book by John Cleese is expected to be very entertaining. This book is also informative and helpful. John Cleese was a founder of Monty Python comedy troupe. He is also a sought-after speaker on various things which applies to the business world, especially regarding our decision-making acumen, or lack of acumen. He is, to use the overused cliché, an out of the box thinker, a renaissance man.

This is a very short book where Cleese dives into what it means to be creative, he doesn't do it in a pedantic way, instead he does it in his own playful way. The combination is  a winning one, we are entertained as well as informed.  

The first couple of chapters sets the stage: The Creative Mindset and Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. The Creative Mindset sets the tone for the rest of the book: what is a creative mindset and how does one get into a creative mindset? The Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind chapter describes the dichotomy that many imposes on the way the brain operates. While I ascribe to a more continuous thinking process for us humans, it is a popular belief, and I will not quibble. The Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind idea seems like it follows the Kahneman and Tversky formulation of the System 1 and System 2 dichotomy, it is, and it isn’t, there are differences. Cleese focuses on how Tortoise Mind can liberate the mind by setting aside our self-imposed constraints and hopefully challenge our biases in order to be more creative. The Tortoise Mind can be more wandering by nature, it is assessing all the different possibilities that are available to us, it is allowed to be playful. This is not completely what Kahneman and Tversky talks about, yet it also is in a different way. In my understanding System 2 is the rational thought process while Tortoise Mind is the mind where you do have time to explore,  to ask silly questions, to make minds wander, to be playful, and to get at the unconventional solutions.

This exploration of all the solution space  allows the mind to generate all solutions, ignoring the usual human imposed constraints. This is a wonderful way of explaining how creativity works. Our mental processes are often constrained by our biases, by our fears, and by anything else we can find to curtail the number of possibilities that occurs in our mind just so that we can to get at a solution, any solution. Cleese is of the opinion that we need to just let it all go, to let our mind wander, and to let that wondering create as many different solutions as possible and THEN we could all sort it out later as we apply our Hare Brain to filter out the unreasonable, the untenable, and the unrealistic.

The rest of the book consists of many different advices that Cleese offers up as useful tricks to create that Tortoise Mind. They are useful, funny, and while some of them are counter intuitive,  they perfect sense when  Cleese explains it. This is a section where you will often sit back and slap your forehead and exclaim: holy cow, why didn't I think of that? Well there is a reason for that and hopefully by the time you are done with this little book you will be able to explore your own creative mind fruitfully.

This is a book that I will be referring to many times in the future to help me release the constraints that I have, as well as being quite entertained.

Observations-September 11, 2020

September 11 is a date that is seared in the minds of most of us living in the United States. It is difficult to comprehend that 19 years have elapsed since that fateful day. As we see the memorials crop up on social media on this date; the sights, the eeriness of the day and the many days that followed flood our memories and  overwhelms our senses. Many of us will forever remember where we were when we first heard the news.

Unfortunately, it has been 19 years, this means that today’s teenagers cannot recall the events of that day; even those who were born before that day might not remember events clearly.  The commemorations and memorials will mostly elicit reactions from those who had lived through the day and its aftermath.

I still remember in devastating detail the events that I saw on this day 19 years ago, as I sat with my colleagues in the cafeteria of the company I worked for. I recall the image of the second tower blowing up, I recall the shock that resonated with us, that this could not be happening, and yet our doubts were dispelled immediately and emotionlessly as we saw live footages, both on traditional and social media repeat, time and time again, the horrors of people jumping off of the World Trade Center and their bodies tumbling helplessly into the pavement. I recall the ash and smoke-filled skies in Manhattan, as well as the helpless faces of those on the ground.  

For most of us who were not directly affected, the memories have inevitably become a little fuzzier with each passing year. If you are not part the select group: people who had family members or friends who had perished; or those who were first responders and their families, who paid with the health and lives for their immediate fealty to their duty, the pain and horror still remains, but for the rest of us, our recall of that day has lost much of the clarity and sharpness. The difference between then and now is that what was once vivid mental pictures have now become memories compressed into my mind along with so many other memories, my recall of the events had lost the immediacy of the moment. The shock that comes with witnessing the moment in real time had also faded.

This is not to say that the day’s events have less meaning to us, it is just what happens with human memory.

The memorials that we have dedicated year by year in total earnestness are pictures and monuments that we have seen before, and are static, earnestly paying tribute to those who had passed. We use photos of the dead to remind us of who they were, our visions of them is forever etched at that moment in time for static eternity, the static imagery does not actively remind us of them as they are, we have forever lost the chance to them as their active and dynamic selves.

We seek to celebrate and honor the heroic, but heroes are humans, not caricatures of who we think they should be, frozen in time. Heroes are not two dimensional and monochromatic, they are three dimensional and vibrant.  By emphasizing the heroic, we are neglecting the heroes.

We are performing these rituals of remembrance to assuage our own guilt and sadness. It is our mourning of the dead, which in a psychic sense is necessary, for us, but how does it serve the memory of the day?

I truly have no problems with the tributes as they are now, but deep in my mind, I keep thinking that we need to do more to make the memories and the memorials more sustainable, more active,  and we need to make the memorial more salient and proactive.

19 years is a short time in the arc of human existence. It would be imprudent to draw conclusions and make judgments on the meaning of our fading memories regarding 9/11. What we can do is to say that we should not let this memory go by ritualistically as if it was just another obligation we needed to satisfy.  

Why am I writing this right now, it is because I wondered what we will be thinking about when we think about 9/11 20 years from now or 40 years from now? How can we actively preserve both the horrors and inspirations of that day, that week, that month in perpetuity, as we had reflectively avowed? How can we turn the ritualistic rut of remembrance that we comfortably perform almost automatically into something more meaningful, more purposeful, and more thoughtful? How can we make our observance of the anniversary less automatic, less symbolic, less practiced, and less comfortably familiar?

The answer lies in what we have done as a collective, as a nation, and as a society.  Why does it take a celebrity like Jon Stewart to beg congress to make the first responder compensation fund permanent? If we are indeed grateful for their sacrifice, this should be a no-brainer. This is but one example where the politicians sought to politicize a monumental scar upon our collective psyche. Thankfully, Jon Stewart called their bluff and held their feet to the fire. It took all the potential bad publicity and potential bipartisan anger to get the present administration to back off. The question is why? Why should it take so much effort?

Part of the answer lies in what I had mentioned before, tragedies and deaths mean passive memorialization to us. It needs to mean active participation in the democracy, it needs to mean active reconstruction of our democracy as it should be practiced and executed, it needs to mean that active civic actions are organized to pay honor to those who had perished every September 11^th in addition to the traditional memorials. It needs to mean that we are continually bettering our society to make it worthy of their sacrifice.