Staying Creative
I have long said that if there is one characteristic that I prize the most, it is creativity. When people ask me why I stayed in the banking business so long and specifically so long with Bankers Trust, I always come back to the same answer. The era from 1976 to2001 was a quarter-century of tremendous creativity in finance and banking. Innovation was my stock and trade and I was the guy who would rather do one new deal that had never been done before than five deals that were lucrative, but were just ones that required turning the crank. I could see the difference between my thinking and the way others were motivated. Many were simply by motivated by where and how they could make the most money, and that was usually in being the second one to do a deal and then doing it over and over again while it was still lucrative. Others wanted the comfort and stability of knowing that they could develop expertise in a specific arena and come in every day and turn the crank, not having to worry about either what they were supposed to do or what they were likely to make doing it. Neither of those two approaches ever appealed to me. It was this creative itchiness that kept me open to being moved from here there and wherever as the bank management needed and wanted. I was always game and was always able to convince myself of the merits of the move on the basis that there was a lot to learn and a lot of room to innovate. I believe that the most fertile ground for innovation is transplanting successful ideas from one area to another and that only happens if you are willing to be a cross-over player and suffer the discomfort of being in new territory over and over again. It’s all what got me out of bed for 45 years.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a decent amount of self-awareness and I spend a fair amount of time staying in touch with myself and what makes me tick. I have long realized that the things I have liked most in life are those things that involve high quotients of creativity. I’ve known for some time that I liked building businesses rather than just running them, because while both require some degree of creativity, there is little doubt that the start-up environment is more requiring of creativity than anything in a steady state. It was always about being an overtaker rather than an caretaker or undertaker.
This preference is probably what caused me to start writing thirty years ago. To me, writing only has a little to do with either influencing readers or recording history or even just observations. It is about the process of creating something and standing back and being proud of the accomplishment. It’s one of the reasons I have now co-authored or ghost-authored three books for friends. I can take almost as much pleasure out of creating a work based on someone else’s story or ideas than by doing it all on my own. Once again, the creative process and the accomplishment is what is getting served.
As I began the retirement process, at my son Thomas’ suggestion, I started writing this blog. I have now written and published 2,013 stories through this vehicle and am still going strong. I seem to have found a perfect formula for me to write 1300 or so words on any and every topic almost unceasingly every day. One friend wonders when I will run out of things to write about and I explain that my mind isn’t wired that way. In some ways he has done me a favor of pointing out one of the differences I seem to enjoy from many other people. I seem to have an endless font of thoughts and ideas and those get spurred by any number of world events and just normal everyday life that I see going on around me. I guess it begins with being observant, moves to being questioning about things others might ignore or blindly accept, and ends with being driven to create. The Bible opens with the line, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” What could be more telling as to how we are supposed to live our lives. That does not mean I feel God-like, but rather that man is destined to try to emulate his god and is creating was what God does, then creating is what I feel I should be doing.
The thing about retirement is that it frees up some or all of your time to spend as you wish. Some people who are about turning the crank or even perhaps honing their skills to a fine point, like to spend their time doing things like playing golf. Others who prize comfort and leisure, find books to read and places to sit and relax. But I find myself always itching to create. The writing takes the daily edge of that Jones, but as more time frees up, I find that more avenues are needed. I have discovered that gardening gives me such an outlet. There is lots of room for creativity in gardening and I have found most of the avenues. As I have explained before, I blend the plant matter with metal art, pottery and even painting boulders. Visual imagery has always been a part of my playbook, but I have never considered myself an artist in the traditional sense of the word. Nonetheless, when people come to visit and tour my gardens, they most often comment about my creativity in that realm.
I recently bought yet another wind spinner when we visited Sedona in January. It was another copper vertical wind spinner called a “flame” spinner because it moves the way a fire might move. I placed it in the front next to a small stone Japanese lantern that sits at the driveway entrance to the path to the patio. It has proven to be a great place for it because it catches good wind there and is both visible to people who drive up to visit and from my favorite seat in the living room. The movement is like the benefit of having moving water in the Feng Shui room. Having a wind sculpture moving ever so smoothly and regularly is a way to bring any scene alive. I consider that selection, that thought and that placement to be a form of creativity that makes me feel good about what I add to the serenity of this property.
One of the parts of the world that has long intrigues me is the part that has become known as the Silk Road. The story of Marco Polo ranks as one of my favorite tales. I got a taste of the Silk Road when we travelled through Turkey and visited several caravanserai in places like Cappadocia. I feel very compelled by imagining these caravans traveling some 40 miles per day from one rest stop to another, and the blending of eastern and western art forms that decorate these way stations is very inspiring to me. I am currently both listening to a book called The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan and watching a Netflix series called The Silk Road hosted by a young French journalist who travels from Venice to Xi’an in China. His land journey starts in Istanbul and goes through Turkey until it hits Armenia, Persia and then the “Stans”, on the way to China and Mongolia, skirting along the top of places like the Indu Kush and the steppes of Middle Asia. One of the images that I keep seeing throughout the journey is the symbol of the blue and white glass “evil eye” that one finds all through Turkey. It is actually an amulet to ward off the evil eye. I have decided to emulate a amulet tree that I saw on the series. Think of an ornament tree or bottle tree and now use evil eye amulets. I have acquired 250 amulets of various sizes. Yesterday I used my truck to pick up a dead tree branch and I have fashioned it with a Manzanita branch into an amulet tree of my own. It stand about seven feet tall and today I am staying creative by covering it with amulets. Hopefully it will ward off evil spirits, but at least it will ward off for a moment my desperate need to express my creativity.