This post includes a contribution by Tom Harris.
the challenge
I wanted to do this for a long time as part of Habit Zero, but somehow I didn’t. Like many great things, what happened today was not planned — it just happened, and I am grateful for my friend Tom Harris for that.
So, today we are playing Ping Pong, and for that you’d have to choose a friend or a family member to play with. It starts with a creative exploration inspired by a Seed. Once you have an Insight, share it with your friend and ask them to use it as inspiration for their Insight.
Ready to play? Let’s go.
~~my~~ our insights
This beautiful day started with a creative exploration in Tel-Aviv. Most of the time, I just looked around for interesting things, but from time to time I picked a Seed to play with. When I played with the Flag Seed, I found this amazing blue circle on a ceiling. I called it: Japan in Blue.
I didn’t plan to play with the Ping Pong Prism today, but as I often do, I shared my Insight with a friend (I just had to because Tom started his morning with sharing a great video Insight he had captured).
An hour later I got this message without any explanation.
“Kōri ga tokete iru”. Rina, migrating Israeli magpie that she was, picked up something shiny from each landfall. A phrase from Japan, her favorite drink from California. But now this Reykjavik café in the midnight sun was home. Only this small land left above water. The ice cubes are melting. by Tom Harris
It took me a few seconds (and three text messages) to understand that Tom responded to my Insight with a beautiful 50-Word Story — a textual Insight of his own inspired by the photo I shared. I reread it and could imagine this woman sitting in this café in Iceland with a strange blue sun lighting the sky and a strange blue drink on the table, thinking about the eternal land of the rising sun. All the details connected perfectly.
reflection
In creativity, often one thing leads to another. Association chains — Insights that feed each other just to create a new Insight — are the essence of almost any creative process.
A great way to take this snowball effect to the next level is to work as a team. It is like an improvisation exercise where each sentence fuels the next one… if you just flow with it. But instead of acting and co-writing a dialogue, we are speaking using creative Insights.
To be creative we need to make room for surprise — we should plan to be surprised. One way to do that is to mindfully look around you and be ready to discover Insights. Sharing your Insights is another thing you can proactively do to set the stage for even bigger surprises. When you share your Insight, you are likely to get a response which is based on the experience, perspective, and imagination of someone else. It is an immediate extension of your idea, but it is mixed and created in someone else’s mind. There is just no way in the world a chain of associations created only in one’s mind will be the same.
mental notes
- Share your Insights. Don’t settle with feedback — aim to work with others to create a more surprising chain of Insights.
now it is your turn… be creative!