Welcome to session three of week two. We're going to talk about the zoom out part of our zoom in, zoom out creativity method or framework and we're going to talk about collecting wild ideas. And I'm going to tell you some stories about people who had Wild ideas that change the world, and what we can learn from these people. Pablo Picasso. Picasso was a great artist, also a sculptor. He lived a long, fruitful life. He lived to the age of 92, passed away in 1973. He worked up into his last days. He went through world war and moving from Spain to France to Southern France, but everywhere he went, he setup his studio and showed up in his studio almost everyday and worked really hard at his art and he was unafraid of innovating. I saw an exhibition of his sculptures in France in Paris, I think at the Pompidou Museum. And it was striking how Picasso continually tried new and different things. And he was never afraid to try new and different things, some of them rather wild and never considered the critics or what people thought of it. He was driven by his own innate need of creativity. Creating things that are novel and useful in the sense that they're interesting and they're art and they bring us pleasure, when we look at them. Picasso said something very clever, I think. I found this on a post card in Antibes. For a time, his studio was in Antibes on the French Riviera and there's a museum there, Picasso Museum and the postcard had a Picasso saying and the saying is if you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the point of doing it? His point is that there is a spontaneity, a spontaneous element in creativity and that leads us to try things, sometimes really wild things. Not planning every absolute detail, but trying things and sometimes things happen by accident and they create unexpected and perhaps, wonderful results. The lesson we learn from Picasso is first of all, when you light that creativity fire, that can drive your creativity for 92 years and produce an incredible body of wonderful work. That's constantly, changing and evolving an reinventing itself. But also, don't be afraid. Take risks. If you don't take risks, then you can't make anything novel and useful, truly happen. Pirandelli. Pirandelli was an Italian playwright. He wrote a play called Six Characters in Search of an Author. The play was performed in 1921. It was not well received. By the way, Picasso's work as well in the early days was not well received. Today, his paintings bring tens of millions of dollars. But initially, [COUGH] because they were creative, because they were truly novel, innovative. They were not well received, because they looked strange to people. The features, the nose, the ears were in the wrong place on faces that Picasso painted. Pirandelli. Pirandelli's play was also n ot well received, Six Characters in Search of an Author. In the play, many of you have seen it or are familiar with it. Actors walk on the stage and they begin to chat about creating a play and where's the director? And who's the director? And what are we going to do? This is unusual. Normally in a play, there's a plot and there's a story and people have characters and real roles and they play the roles and they say their lines. And here we have people walking on the stage, talking about making a play happen. During the whole play, that's what it's about. How do we make this play happened in search of an author. People didn't receive this well. They felt it's somehow making fun of them or mocking them and Pirandello was simply pushing the borders, pushing the limits of what a play is and reinventing a play and creating a new kind of play and. Of course, it's now become a classic in a sense, kind of a Shakespearean classic in the sense that it's widely performed, widely studied and greatly appreciated. And finally, music. So we've talked about art and theater and now music. On your screen, you see George Bizet. George Bizet created the opera, Carmen. Carmen is perhaps the most beloved opera among all the operas and the great operas that we love to watch and listen to. Bizet was French and his great innovation was of course, highly, highly controversial. At the time, Bizet wrote Carmen. In France, there was a tradition of grand opera. Operas with tragic endings, where the heroine sings for last area and dies tragically on stage and then there was a tradition of comic opera. Comic opera were light love stories with light music and happy endings and those two areas, comic opera and tragic opera, grand opera. They didn't meet. And when you went to the opera, you knew what you were going to get. You're going to get comic opera or you're going to get tragic opera. And Bizet wrote Carmen and Carmen combined the two, it did x plus y. He combined tragic opera and comic opera. Carmen begins lightly and happily a wonderfully light music and then it becomes darker and heavier and more tragic and people had never seen this combination, they didn't know what to make of it. And when Carmen was first performed, the audience, I guess, didn't really riot, but they shouted and they protested and they rejected this and Bizet was rather heartbroken. Some think, he's rather early death may have been caused by the failure of his great opera to be widely accepted. It didn't take long though and in just a few years, Carmen was performed many, many times and people got it. This is something of great value. Why should operas be totally tragic or totally comic? Life is not solely comic or solely tragic. Life is a combination of those two things and Bizet understood that and his opera has created great pleasure for people through the ages and it will forever. So I'd like to use Georges Bizet to do a little exercise, a little self-awareness exercise. Because remember, part of our discussion in cracking the creativity code is this journey that we take inside ourselves to discover who we really are and what our passion is. And the question I would like to ask you is imagine you are George Bizet and you knew that you were writing an opera, Carmen and it would become one day perhaps the world's most beloved opera, most performed opera all over the world. But you know that in your lifetime, you are going to be scorned, criticized and fiercely ridiculed for your creativity, because this is something unfamiliar. It takes people out of their comfort zone until they get used to it, quite a bit of time is going to pass. Would you pay the price? Would you still create Carmen? Knowing that in your lifetime, you not only will not enjoy the benefits of it, but that you would be scorned and ridiculed, criticized, fiercely by the critics. Do you have the fortitude to take that opposition? Because many times creative people, creative breakthroughs, in fact, encounter tremendous opposition. Think about your own persistence, your own moral fiber, your own strength in order to become a creative person. Do you have that element? And this ends the session number three. Please join us again for session four.
