“How To Get It Done” (From A Master Project Juggler)
Among my most passionate fascinations is creativity and the drive to create. This post originated with a piece I read on one of my favorite current blogs, Co. Create by Fast Company. (I have linked the Fast Company Post above.) Their mission statement says that they “explore creativity in the converging worlds of branding, entertainment, and tech.” Quite a lot of their articles focus on highly creative people giving suggestions about how to wring the best material out of every situation.
A formal personal bibliography of influential authors and thinkers is still a long ways from completion. Distilling the origins of my own ideas and philosophies is, I think, pretty crucial for me to understand my truth, my passions, and whatever contributions I might ultimately have for writing and artistic expression. At some point, I may put more energy into a comprehensive survey of influences, but for now this is just a small survey.
Cover of Howl
Somewhere, between my formal education and the present day, I managed to cram my brain with the writings of many of Bohemian movements and free thinkers of the last century. To a certain extent, I may have sought a way forward in my life and work because I have never really bonded with the conventional approach. The “safe” or conventional approach still doesn’t really resonate with me; to this day, I would rather take creativity/productivity cues from someone whose work I respect or whom I count among my many influences, and for whatever reason, the conventional approach doesn’t usually interest me all that much.
I have found influences among many and varied thinkers, artists, writers, and activists of the last century. Among my influences, I can count both well-known and obscure personalities and people. From Allen Ginsberg, whose poem, “Howl” is among the greatest in American literature, certainly among the greatest of his own out-sized generation, I learned alliteration, the power of ellipsis, how to live my truth and mine my life experience for my art/craft. Howl’s first two lines reverberate even now: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” I have found greater value in the methods of confirmed free-thinker and Nobel laureate (of chemistry), Kary Mullis than in many scientists more well-known to the public. (Mullis’s book, Dancing Naked In the Mind Field, blew my mind appropriately the first time I read it.)
A veteran internet marketer and self-proclaimed “world renown nutrition expert” named David Wolfe has been instrumental in helping me to form some of my own views on the subject of healthy nutrition. He has made a career of traveling, speaking, cultivating a “high raw” foods lifestyle, and modeling the successful entrepreneur. His best known book, The Sunfood Diet Success System, has radically informed my own nutritional theories. Another health influence on me, whose work I first found straight out of college when I first walked into a health food store, was Christopher Hobbs. The first book on herbs and health that I ever bought was Foundations of Health by Christopher Hobbs. I have bought or read hundreds of other books on the subject since, but I would still argue that Hobbs’ book has been among the most influential on my own thoughts on the subject.
Terence McKenna is another influence, though more on the meme level than on the level of the writer’s craft. Of his many books, I have read and benefited from a number: True Hallucinations, which Terence wrote about his first trip to the Amazon in the early 1970’s, and introduced us to him and his equally fascinating and erudite brother, Dennis McKenna, who is a research-oriented pharmacologist/botanist/chemist who is still active in his field. (Incidentally, Dennis has just published a book detailing his life with Terence, called The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.) Other favorite Terence McKenna books include, The Archaic Revival and Food of the Gods. The elder McKenna (Terence) also has countless articles, interviews, one CD, which involved him intoning his most radical ideas over an album-length trance track, and innumerable talks and sound bites available for download on the internet.
Greenfae's Leaves 