{"id":31704,"date":"2023-03-08T21:04:08","date_gmt":"2023-03-09T05:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=31704"},"modified":"2023-03-08T21:04:08","modified_gmt":"2023-03-09T05:04:08","slug":"why-travel-is-good-for-this-homebody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/why-travel-is-good-for-this-homebody\/","title":{"rendered":"Why travel is good for this homebody"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several years ago I was at a conference and came across a book by Ken\u00a0Wytsma titled Create Vs. Copy<\/em>[1].\u00a0<\/em>It explored the value of copying others as a learning tool but warned against relying on it as you progressed – especially if you were seeking to copy something purely for personal gain. I picked up a handful of copies. Because of its short length (only 192 pages in a 5″ x 7″ book!) I thought it might be a good read for the young men who were just about to enter high school at our church and also made up the bulk of our worship band on Sunday mornings.<\/p>\n

We discussed different parts of Sunday mornings and music. What was copying and what was creating? Picking from a catalog of Bethel and Hillsong songs that most of our congregation knew was pretty much copying, we agreed. After all the sheet music was provided and even a click track the musicians can hear in their ear pieces to ensure the same tempo is kept as it is in the recordings.<\/p>\n

But we also agreed that selecting which songs, the order they went in and how they paired with the message was creative and ultimately that took longer than it did for the musicians to learn each selected song (apparently there is some pattern to Christian music that makes picking up new songs fairly simple for an accomplished musician). If I had read it then, I would probably relate the idea of System 1 thinking to the picking of the songs from Daniel Kahneman’s, Thinking Fast and Slow<\/em>[2], and System 2 thinking as it related to the using of intentional thinking to put the songs in order to do their best to support the message that morning.<\/p>\n

Steal Like an Artist[3] isn’t a new idea. The author copts to as much by littering the print edition with several quotes including on the first page of text where we find a quote from Pablo Picasso, “Art is theft”[4]. However, he provides some unique ideas of how one might learn to “steal like an artist.”<\/p>\n

I’m a homebody. My perfect vacation, is five days at home, sleeping in, meeting a friend for coffee around 10 a.m., having lunch on my own to people watch, then meeting another coffee in the mid-afternoon with another friend, going home to have dinner with my family and then building a Lego set and doing some reading in the backyard. The idea of getting in the car or flying on a plane somewhere is totally unappealing to me. But Kleon’s suggestion that travelling is an ideal way to learn how to hone your creative craft made me realize that the travel I have done in my life has been immensely influential to my creativity today.<\/p>\n

“Travel makes the world look new,” he writes. “And when the world looks new, our brains work harder.”[5] In an earlier blog post on this site I admitted to defaulting often to the System 1 thinking Kahneman\u00a0describes in Thinking Fast and Slow<\/em>. Travelling is a perfect way to force your brain into System 2 thinking, where you need to pause and ramp up your creativity. Understanding money conversions, navigating a new city, thinking about not only where to get food but what you might find on the menu when you arrive, these are all hacks to kick your brain into System 2 thinking.<\/p>\n

On the opposite page of this quote is a simple graph. On the y-axis is “insight” and on the x-axis is “distance.” Simply, the further you travel from home the greater your capacity to develop your artistry will become.<\/p>\n

This was a threshold moment for me as described by Robert Coven in his TEDxCaryAcademy talk[6].<\/p>\n

Travel on my own through Europe after college, as an auto journalist and being flown around the world to drive cars and recently with colleagues in doctoral programs at George Fox University have all been extraordinarily informative to how I approach problems creatively, how I have developed empathy for newcomers to Canada and the questions I ask when I consume a news report. I did not understand this impact before reading Steal Like an Artist<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As I think about by NPO, which at this moment is about exploring how vision can cascade more effectively through an organization, I am wondering how these “a-ha” moments can be encouraged or even manufactured. Helping organizations open their staff’s minds to the same insight the decision maker has would be brilliant. It’s definitely something I am going to use my System 2 brain to explore.<\/p>\n

[1] Wytsma, Ken. Create vs. Copy: Embrace Change, Ignite Creativity, Break Through with Imagination. Moody Publishers, 2016<\/p>\n

[2] Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011<\/p>\n

[3] Kleon, Austin. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. Workman Publishing Company, 2012<\/p>\n

[4] Steal Like an Artist, page 1<\/p>\n

[5] Steal Like an Artist, page 94<\/p>\n

[6] https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GCPYSKSFky4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several years ago I was at a conference and came across a book by Ken\u00a0Wytsma titled Create Vs. Copy[1].\u00a0It explored the value of copying others as a learning tool but warned against relying on it as you progressed – especially if you were seeking to copy something purely for personal gain. I picked up a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2310],"tags":[2489,2325],"class_list":["post-31704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doctor-of-leadership-3","tag-dlgp02","tag-kleon","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31704"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31712,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31704\/revisions\/31712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}