Geoff Hoff – The Creativity Expert

Duality of Mind (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writers and business people often find themselves tied to their desk, to their computer or yellow pad. We often forget to get out in the world, to experience new things, see what people are doing today that they weren’t, necessarily, yesterday. To see what problems and issues they have that we can find creative solutions to.

Strictly on the creative side, our subconscious mind is a voracious consumer of new data. That is what it plays with, and when it plays with enough, it rewards us with strange and wonderful ideas gleaned from the mixing and stirring of what we’ve been feeding it. This is what creativity is, as I’ve written in these posts often. This is our inspiration and our juice.

When we spend our days behind our desks and spend any down time on social media or watching television, we are, effectively, starving our subconscious mind of it’s vital nutrients, and a starved subconscious won’t be able to feed you the wonderful ideas you need to keep you in business.

A simple walk around the block is {…Continue Reading}

Making Money (Photo credit: 401K)

I had a discussion with one of my readers about dreams and goals on my post about creative revolution. He said his goal was to make a lot of money so he could do his favorite thing: giving money away. Noble, but I assert that making tons of money, even if it is to be able to give tons of money, isn’t a goal or dream you can really wrap your passions around. Some people really are committed to simply making money and are very good at it, but I suspected that his dreams, when really looked, are a lot more specific. (If you want to know if you are one of those people, take a look at your profession and income. It will tell you right away.)

As an example, I am passionate about people discovering who they really are, then doing something with that discovery. (Another way to say that is people reawakening their creativity, then doing something with that.) If I have lots of money, I can realize that dream a lot more powerfully, but the dream isn’t the money, that’s only the tool.

With the advent of the human potential movement – personified in the 80s by events like the est training but predating that by many decades – we have been conditioned to think that what we focus on, we will manifest. This is the theory behind the movie The Secret and everything that exploded on the scene because of that movie. That can be true as far as it goes, but, {…Continue Reading}

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was at a seminar this weekend where I seemed to talk about little besides creativity and passion, two of my favorite words. I talked about both in terms of being an “aging hippie”. When I was asked by the seminar leader what that meant to me, I talked about the energy of the hippie movement, that it was about love instead of greed, that it was about trying to figure out a new way to be on the planet that respected other people and the planet itself.

I surprised myself by becoming emotional when I mentioned the new passion in the current generation of young people. I had thought that we blew it in the 80s when we turned the energy from “what’s wrong with peace, love and understanding” to “it’s all about me. Gimme, gimme, gimme,” but the energy we created in the sixties and early seventies didn’t go away, it just went in to a natural cycle and is on its way back now with the occupy movement and the new crop of young engineers and entrepreneurs that are dedicated to finding a way to live responsibly.

It moves me to see this energy, this passion. I had thought, in the last few decades, that all that was there and available for young people was apathy. I have been proven gloriously wrong, I’m thrilled to say.

What does this have to do with creativity and business? Everything. We are in a revolution, which was one of the words we used back during the hippie days. This new revolution isn’t about destruction, it’s about creation. Being online is still a revolutionary act: it goes against the general wisdom that, to get ahead, you must {…Continue Reading}

Goal Setting (Photo credit: lululemon athletica)

I was at a meeting many years ago, for a stage show I was directing, and was insisting we create some goals and a plan of action. The fellow who created the show got a puzzled look on his face.

“What happens if we meet our goals?”

He truly had no idea.

It was a question that had never occurred to me. He was a “seat-of-your-pants” type guy and had done fairly well in his life, had accomplished a lot, but had never really set long term goals and strategies. As ideas came to him, he set them in motion and let them run a very organic course. Planning seemed a new concept to him.

For me, not planning, at least a little, was unthinkable. Up until this moment I had considered myself like him, a bit of a “seat-of-your-pants”, let the wind carry me and the fates have their way guy, but was humbled in front of a true master.

I stumbled a little at the question, then said something like, “then we make new ones.”  I had lots of judgements about that question, none of them flattering to the poor guy, but thinking back on it I see that many people simply don’t make long term plans because {…Continue Reading}