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            A messenger boy standing in the lift as it went slowly up to the top of the advertising agency was chewing a peppermint humbug. The older man in the lift looked disapproving. Uncomfortable at the uneasy atmosphere the boy pulled out the bag of humbugs and offered them to the man.

“Do you want one?”

“No, thank you,” said the man, adding “do you know who I am?”

The boy shook his head.

“I am the Chairman.”

“In that case,” replied the boy, “you’d better have two.”

Three years later he was Creative Director of the Agency.

            The messenger boy first observed the disapproval of the Chairman; then sought to defuse the atmosphere by engaging him. The Chairman came back with his riposte. The boy seized his chance to make light of the situation.

Since creativity is the ability to perceive relationships, observation is a key part of improving it. Our focused observation may be good but our peripheral vision is often appalling. Without it we cannot be creative.

A government minister asked “How can I make Singaporeans more alert?” I replied “Release three tigers in Orchard Road”. There are other ways to improve observation. We start by giving Mentees exercises to improve their grasp of what is going on around them. We don’t put them in a tiger’s cage but we do help them to put themselves under a discipline of observing.

Young people should be taught this early in life. An easy way to do so is to get them inventing stories about people at the next table in a restaurant. This way children become extremely observant, a habit that, once established, stays with them for life.

Observation is more than seeing basic facts. A horse trotting down a motorway causes us to look for clues as to why, what effect it is having on car drivers, who is prepared to stop and help and who drives relentlessly on. We will try to see if the horse is hurt, is in control of itself or running wild. A lot more information is needed to move to the next stage.

Observation is the start to creativity. Analysing what we have seen makes sense of observation. It is then that we relate what we perceive to other, possibly unconnected, events. Making ourselves see connections is what makes us creative.

The training needed to enhance creativity is a mixture of exercises based on achievable standards and practical application in daily life. All this can be learnt by email and skype as well as by face-to-face sessions. It goes without saying that Terrific Mentors run the best creativity courses. Ask us about them if you are interested.

May your creativity bring you joy and wealth.

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You wouldn’t like to be told that you could no longer vote because your contribution to society was too little. Your contribution to society is not only a matter of taxes but of thought. Everybody is obliged, in relation to his or her ability, to contribute some thought to the society in which they live. It is what democracy is about.

Your vote is cast to express your wishes for the future of your family and country by electing someone who will get your ideas implemented. Is the thought you contribute through your vote the best for future generations or is it simply what you want now?

If the latter you are not doing the right thing for society, for your children and grandchildren or for the planet. You could use your thinking talent better. If on the other hand, your vote is cast for the person who can provide a sustainable future, who can help to think through the enormous problems we face, then you are fulfilling your obligation as well as you can.

Changing our inner attitudes in order to change our lives (as William James observed in yesterday’s Daily Paradox) is the basis on which creativity can be regained. How is this to be done?

As with every worthwhile step in life it is a matter of understanding, achieved through training, and discipline. We embrace the former, anxious to improve our performance, enhance our value, enjoy our lives and make a better contribution. We sometimes shun discipline because of the demands it makes on time, energy and thinking. No change can be achieved without it. Take heart, discipline, too, can be fun.

Before training we need to establish two things about our purpose in life. First, that when we find our own purpose we find the purpose of life. Searching for life’s purpose in abstract is a philosophical game some enjoy. It is not how most people find the answer. That comes only when they find their own purpose.

Second, we need to understand that, as David Viscott pointed out, “the purpose of life is to discover your gift; the meaning of life is to give it away”.

Once these two points are accepted training for a more creative life can begin. I will tell you how tomorrow in Creativity Enhanced.

Einstein said: “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Einstein was talking about the miracle of creativity, of being able to transform the everyday experience, the mundane observation, the taken-for-granted association into something that makes life useful, purposeful and fulfilling.

Creativity is regained by seeing everything as a miracle.

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If creativity is the ability to perceive relationships what is the process by which we do that? It sounds passive, as though perceiving was merely keeping our eyes open and having an ah-ha moment. It does not require association of genius ability to say that a cat standing by her feeding bowl looking around is hungry. Or are there other, more subtle, reasons for her behaviour?

We are creative all the time, mostly without recognizing it. Our memories are associative, relating something we want to remember to something we readily call to mind. You can recite your shopping list if your memory hooks are in place and you relate an item you want to purchase to one of them. With practice it becomes second nature. It is a simple act of creativity.

A French schoolmaster told me I would use the language not because of good vocabulary but because I could get around an unknown word by substituting it with a known phrase. In the same way seeing something can evoke a memory or a thought of pleasure or pain. Elgar’s Enigma Variations set me mentally walking over the Malvern Hills in England where I spent part of my childhood. Some WWII songs reduce me to tears with their memories of loss and sadness. It is a small step from these associations to relationships that produce new thoughts and ideas.

I therefore find it disturbing that nearly one hundred students at a top university could not say what the Costa Concordia accident implied for Singapore, the second busiest harbour in the world. Why? “Italy is a long way away”.

One of my children at the age of four observed an aircraft leaving a vapour trail. He said “Look, Dad, another of those airplanes scratching the sky”. He grew up to be highly creative because he avoided doing what George Meredith warned us of  “When we let romance go we change the sky for the ceiling”.

William James, Harvard Psychologist, said “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” It is from this point of view that we approach creativity. The rapid changes we have all had to deal with have left many without a rational or secure base. Some have fled to religion, some from it. But flight in any direction denies thinking for ourselves, solving our own problems.

            Albert Szent-Gyorgyi counseled “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, but thinking what nobody has thought.” We discover only when we create and we believe what we discover ourselves more than what others discover for us.

Let’s move forward tomorrow to Creativity Regained.

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            With all the technology to construct learning games and mind stretchers you would think that creativity should be on the increase. For a small number of people it undoubtedly is. Developing new ways to handle powerful computing resource requires skill, persistence and a sense of what is going to make a market. Geeks rule!

            And that is precisely the trouble. The technology is driving the needs, not the other way round. From casino to classroom the things we can do are determining the things we will do. The problem is universal. When the Catholic Church discovered the computer they turned the Ten Commandments into over nine hundred orders. The excitement of creating sins overwhelmed the drudgery of thinking and commonsense.

Being a slave to technology is no more worthy than being hooked on religion or drugs or any obsession. Servant masters are a great idea but only when they are humans, not robots. Inevitably, resource has a bearing on what we do. If there is nothing to eat but grass, we eat grass. Wiser to think about what we are going to need to fill our bellies and then create or adapt technology to provide it.

Even when we do think ahead it is for so short a time that unfortunate and unforeseen consequences often result. The remedy is then to patch the mistake rather than seek a better initial way to approach the subject. Major software companies are past masters at this, launching products before they are fully tried and allowing armies of disgruntled buyers to do the testing for them.

Creativity is the ability to perceive relationships. The forms it takes are many and varied; this description fits them all. However, the relationships we need to perceive are not only the ones that occur immediately. Oscar Wilde was creative with his instant, amusing wit. Chain, Fleming and Florey were creative in perceiving the remedial properties of a mould that grew in mines from which they developed penicillin, forerunner of all antibiotics.

Today our short-term creativity is poor, our longer-term, woeful. Why is that?

There are two reasons – poor observation and inadequate self-questioning. The lack of being able to interrogate ourselves is reflected in the way we question other people both in commercial and in social settings. The former is caused by our being spoiled with too much security and too little danger. For all that the world is a dangerous place the risk most of us run daily is minimal. The latter results from a response-mode of education. Its lack of rigour leaves us mentally flabby and sadly disinterested.

Tomorrow we will try to deal with solutions in Creativity Approached.

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            The dangers of not developing adequate creativity are many. They are seldom discussed and little recognised. Today we see the consequences of a lack of creativity all around us. Notwithstanding that we are inventing new products and services faster than ever; or that ways of entertaining us are exploited with fewer inhibitions than before; or the wild and irresponsible creativity of the financial system declaring new money daily without reference to the impact on existing money; despite all of these, personal creativity is in decline.

            Where once people had the time and incentive to make their own amusements they now depend on others to provide them. Where once talk between friends, between parents and children, between teachers and pupils formed the major part of learning, today education has become little more than exam passing and career equipping. Now we communicate by abbreviated sms and occasional URL link to someone else’s ideas.

Increasingly the sms provides the landlubbers version of the SOS sent by mariners lost in an uncharted ocean. The analogy is significant.

There is much discussion about the sanctity of life, often in the context of voluntary suicide or planned euthanasia. An individual’s right to life is critically important but to treat it as the only criterion for proving mankind’s humanity misses the point. It is not right to physical life that is overwhelmingly important but right to the life of the spirit.

However you perceive or believe the spirit of mankind to be manifest, and regardless of whether it involves religious belief, it is that spirit which defines us. It follows that it is only by developing that spirit that we can develop as a species.

The wealth of the world depends on both the ability to create resources and the ability to enjoy them. So much emphasis has been placed on the creation of them that we have forgotten how important their appreciation is. A thing of beauty is to be shared, not to be locked away from view.

If this seems ‘far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife’ to earn a crust I fear you are not seeing the way the world is changing. The need for labour is inexorably declining. Are we preparing for the day when there are so few jobs that people will pay to do them? Of all today’s needs for creativity that of helping people to fill their days and lives usefully and rewardingly is more important than any other.

In the next Daily Paradox articles I shall suggest how to rekindle our creative instinct and make it work for a life of joy, not just a treadmill of labour.

We should, after all, be preparing for a global village, not a global courthouse.

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Side by side on the World News were two items that summarise much of what is wrong with economies and politics. Scene One: 600+ politicians shouting at each other across the floor of the chamber of the House of Commons in Britain. Accusations of malfeasance, impropriety and sleaze flying to and fro like confetti at a lunatic’s wedding. Not a single sensible thought expressed in the two or three minutes of clips screened.

Scene Two: Head of a firm in the construction industry commenting on the building slowdown that has put Britain technically back into recession. I summarise his brief comment: “Growth is slow. That is how it is going to be for some time. We should stop wringing our hands and plan for it.” Damn right.

In parts of the world politics has turned into a childish game with the scramble to stay in office dwarfing all other considerations. ‘Score-a-point’ politics is amusing, even witty, during times of prosperity. It is inappropriate at times of hardship and threat. A politician’s power is demonstrated not by the decibels he can raise for his voice but by the imaginative and creative ideas he can garner from his brain. So it is with all leaders.

Much of the world has still to develop. Asia is well on the way, Africa has hardly started. Growth is justified everywhere where there are resources that can be sustainably exploited without long-term damage to the planet. Where economies are developed and further growth is largely about excess and un-sustainability we have to plan for no growth. Politicians are supposed to lead. How many of them advocate this?

‘No growth’ will not make everyone impoverished or deprived; it will give them opportunities to lead more balanced lives, to share more equitably with their neighbours and to learn to appreciate the good things in life that you cannot buy, of which we talk so much and do so little. Europe led the world in arts and beauty and style; it could do so again if it shifted its perspective from quantity to quality.

Would a world devoted to living within its means, to being content with a high but not excessive standard of living and to developing its sensitivities and appreciation of beauty not be a much happier place in which to raise a family and live our hundred years with joy? Since the objective of so many is to reach paradise might it not be a good idea to start work on it here and now rather than wait for a possible but unknown place at an unidentified time in the future?

We have the resources and skills. What on earth is stopping us?

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The stock markets are not so much a roller-coaster ride as a series of sleeping-policemen bumps. Each jolt makes us ask ‘is this the big one?’; each retreat reminds us that there are some worrying waves around even if they do not amount to a tsunami. What are the forces at work and how will they play out in the coming months?

As I mentioned yesterday in Productive and unproductive investment, productive money has moved from government control to company control and with it some of the power to make things happen. However, elected governments are still in overall control, aren’t they? You might try asking the UK culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, as he defends his relationship with Murdoch’s BSkyB shares deal.

There are plenty of other examples of how highly valued companies increasingly call the tune in every area from building planning consents to tax changes. If wealth generation is the sole purpose of life this may not be a bad thing. Those who have made it often know how best to invest it. I question whether wealth generation is the sole purpose of life. Important, yes, but sole purpose? You frequently say no to that.

Loss of government control is not confined to power moving to wealthy companies. What has happened in the Netherlands is but a curtain-raiser to the events about to erupt in Spain and France. People Power is as contagious as any disease and entitlement is so deeply entrenched , especially in European cultures, that it will be surrendered reluctantly – or, in other words, only after a riot.

A government keeps control only by coercion or persuasion. No democratic electorate is going to settle for coercion today. Persuasion now amounts to bribery but bribery requires resource (money) to be effective. There is no money left so the political bribery will have to come from defaulting on debts. The consequence of this is devaluation of the currency involved but how do you devalue the Spanish Euro while keeping the German Euro fully valued? You either have two Euros (or twenty-seven) or abandon the currency altogether.

There is a third way. You issue more money. You call it Quantitative Easing (QE) so nobody really understands what is happening and you pour trillions of whatever into the money funds supporting the banks. As this is released into the economy the rate of inflation starts to grow, slowly at first, much faster later on until you have hyperinflation with more and more money being created to fuel the declining value of the currency.

What happens then? The poor get poorer and the rich barricade their homes.

It is going to be a bumpy ride indeed.

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If I lend you money to buy a meal and you do so the money is spent on paying for the meal. The good news is that you are paying towards sustaining the restaurant, its employees and suppliers, such as farmers, who provide the resources needed.

Once spent, the money I lent you has gone with no prospect of a return. You owe it to me – it was a loan – but to repay it you must earn or borrow it from someone else. My loan is “non-productive”.

If I lend money to an oil company they use that money to find and produce more oil which they sell. That enables them to pay back my loan and keep some profit themselves with which to pay their staff and suppliers but also to explore for more oil. My loan to them is productive.

Governments have been borrowing for many years to pay for education, social welfare like unemployment benefit and healthcare, defense and the costs of government and civil service. It is all expensive but unproductive. Indeed, helping people to live longer is economically counter-productive. However, we do not advocate shooting the retired and the sick as a swift remedy to the problem, effective as it would be.

To try to convince us that their spending is wise successive governments have referred to it as ‘investment’. Gordon Brown, a former UK Chancellor, was good at making profligate growth of the civil service sound like an investment. It was not, it was a cost. Understanding the difference is quite important if you are to be a Finance Minister. Building debt produces short-term benefit which soon disappears leaving longer-term problems.

Mortgaging the future, which we all do one way or another at certain times in our lives, is only viable when we know we can repay the debt. Once it reaches a level at which we cannot repay it we are in trouble. European debt has long since reached that level and recently pumping in another trillion euros has only compounded the problem.

While all this has been going on companies have mostly been behaving extremely prudently, building their cash reserves against the day they need to invest in modern machinery and software and reducing their dependence on the banks that let them down so badly when the last economic crisis struck.

So governments are losing it and companies are conserving it – almost the opposite of what capitalism was meant to be about. A government spent dollar produces no income. A company spent dollar produces new revenue. Interesting to think about where that will leave power to decide the future, even in the most democratic societies.

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A well-known street hawker had his summer stand on the corner of Westminster Bridge opposite the Houses of Parliament in London. He sold only two products – T-shirts and umbrellas thus catering for the weather needs of visitors to London.

We used to cross a city to retrieve an umbrella inadvertently left in a restaurant or shop. Taxi drivers were inundated with calls asking if they had found our weather protector. People eyed each other’s possession suspiciously because they all looked so alike. I knew a man who carried two in case he lost one. It would be wrong to say our lives were dominated by the ‘gamp’ but it certainly played a big part.

Today half the umbrellas in the stand in our entrance hall do not belong to us. We ‘borrow’ and ‘lend’ them as easily as we swop cups of coffee or gossip about the neighbours. The umbrella has become a universal possession taken when required, left behind when not. This makes sense. Why did it take so long for it to happen?

Two things brought about the change. Umbrellas got cheaper, a smaller part of most people’s outlay. Loss of one was not banker-threatening any more. At the same time we began to realise that possessions, with few exceptions, are not essential to the survival of our egos. Functional equipment like an umbrella can be shared to good effect. If I know I can pick one up anywhere when it starts to rain then I don’t need to carry one.

Could the umbrella syndrome spread to other parts of our lives? Certainly. In cities like Barcelona, Paris, Lyon, Washington, Helsinki and, of course, all over that cyclists paradise, The Netherlands, bicycles are public property and can be borrowed or rented with ease. You pick one up when you need it, leave it at your destination when you have finished with it.

Community ownership is well established all over the world. Mostly it is confined to what have become known as public services. Beyond these, our assets are generally private. As Christopher Lasch says: ‘The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.’  That is so well illustrated by the army of white collar workers lugging around heavy computers when all they need is a thumb drive.

Now that we are building integrated cities, where office and home are often the same, might we consider that the age of possessions is coming to an end? Do we realise how much energy would be saved if we did not have to cart our belongings on our backs?

We do not want to become, as Frank Lloyd Wright fears, janitors of our possessions.

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You wouldn’t want to be a tortoise changing planes in Dhaka airport right now. Four hundred of them have been arrested. Details of their interrogation are being kept secret for fear many more will be alerted and take avoiding action. Tortoises want to travel and they are not prepared to be thwarted by a Bangladeshi – or any other – ban. You have to admire their courage.

It all began with an article in Tortoise Travel Today, a popular but limited circulation magazine. On its own it would never have caused such a stir. Combined with Tracebook and LinkedShell, not to mention a few remarks in Totter, the special fares available to tortoises soon spread from one place to another until every available suitcase was booked for months ahead.

International Immigration was appalled, of course. It has always been the custom for tortoises to travel in special cages, allowing light and air on a generous scale. Now CST (cheap suitcase travel) has arrived and made available journeys that were previously no more than a twinkle on the tortoise shell. Why, before we know it there will be space travel for the innocents.

In all of this the authorities have as their guiding light a soft landing. The tortoise’s natural mobile home is fine for most climates and conditions but extended airless and lightless travel is not recommended. Every attempt is being made to regulate the quality of suitcase travel before it is too late. As we have often said ’The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of low price’. Or, as one tortoise remarked, ‘This could reduce our life expectancy to little over 200 years if we are not careful’.

Predictably, there will be a great deal of discussion about how best to raise CST quality levels without incurring massive extra cost. The Daily Paradox has a modest suggestion to make. Drill holes in the sides of the suitcases so that some air and some light can reach the tortoises inside. No need to spend a lot of money – the manufacturers of DIY drills will sponsor the holes. The tortoises will survive and flourish.

We are never short of a good idea at Terrific Mentors.