Awaken Your Creativity Then Use It In Your Business with Geoff Hoff the Creativity Expert

Geoff Hoff - Creativity Expert
Welcome to the site. I’m Geoff Hoff. I am a writer, publisher and public speaker and have been studying the process of creativity for most of my life. In the past several years, I have been delving into taking the process of creativity and bringing it to how we make our income. When you combine the two, you instantly open up the possibility of new and outrageous ways to go beyond what you ever thought possible.

As you look through the posts on this site, you will see articles on a variety of subjects, from writing to marketing, from opinion pieces to tech help and more. Read through several of them. You will start having ideas about how to bring out your own creativity and then what to do with it. As you read, leave comments. Ask questions. I am here to support you in your own creative and business journeys.

I can prove to you that you are creative AND I can teach you to
use your creativity to enhance your life, your business and your bottom line.
Join me in my 21 Day Creativity Challenge today!

Posted in Success

How to Save the World – A Rant

NYC: W.R. Grace Building

NYC: W.R. Grace Building (Photo credit: wallyg)

This is an unusual post for me. Bear with me, it’s not just a rant. I do offer a solution of sorts.

Over the last several months I have seen articles, blog posts, videos and posts on social media pointing to an all-pervasive, century-long, us-against-them campaign against the general population of this country by corporations, sometimes with the consent of government, sometimes in opposition to it, to keep us happy and docile consumers and to convince us to go against our own interests by manipulating us into believing the interests of the corporations are far more important.

When I hear or read these things, my first impulse is to succumb to despair. With the exaggerated imagery of a writer, I find myself saying I feel like getting in my car to drive to the end of the Santa Monica peer, then just keep going. Don’t worry, nothing like that is going to happen, but it puts an image on how I feel about these things.

I am, by nature, a fairly optimistic fellow who believes in the basic goodness of his fellow man. I am not, or at least have not been, a cynic. Cynicism does not come naturally to me. However, when I was {…Continue Reading}

Posted in Opinion | 8 Comments

Creativity and the Tech Stuff – Right or Left Brain?

Left and Right Brain

Left and Right Brain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What do creativity and tech stuff have to do with each other? It is something I grapple with almost daily. You see, I do both. I handle people’s online tech needs with my Computer Guy service and hold weekly teleseminars where I often talk about the tech side of being online. I also teach creative writing, blog about creativity and work with people to bring their native creativity to their business.

One of the reasons I do so well working with people on their tech issues is that, unlike many techies, I speak human. I approach the technology from a very practical, “you can do this” viewpoint. It’s the same way I approach creativity. (It’s also the way I approach things like the Law of Attraction, but that’s the subject of another blog post.)

Many people talk about the difference between being right brain and being left brain. The general thought is that {…Continue Reading}

Posted in Education | 2 Comments

The Secret To Success Is… Failure?

Deutsch: Verbogenes Vorderrad eines Fahrrads n...

There are many phrases that we have all heard that are designed to motivate us to move forward no matter what has happened. “Get back up on the horse” or “Get back on the bike” are two. Winston Churchill said,”Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Dale Carnegie said, “Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”  Pat O’Bryan likes to say, “It’s not failure, it’s just data.” Tony Robins, Zig Ziggler, Napoleon Hill and Bill Gates and many others have said very similar things.

For many of us, any failure, any set-back, is an excuse to stop, to say, “It’s not worth it, I can’t go on. I give up.”  The difference between people who are successful and those who aren’t can be distilled down to a very simple concept. Successful people know failure is part of the process, they expect it, they aren’t disappointed when it happens. Instead, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, learn what went wrong, figure out how to do it better and move forward. (That sentence is full of cliches, but if a cliche says exactly what you want to say, why not use it?)

There are tons of stories of people who didn’t let failure stop them. Thomas Edison is famously reported to have said {…Continue Reading}

Posted in Success | 11 Comments

Learning About Business from Doctor Who?

The Mark 2 fibreglass (Tom Yardley-Jones) Tard...

The Mark 2 fibreglass (Tom Yardley-Jones) Tardis as used in the 1980s - photo taken by me Zir 23:49, 18 May 2007 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I admit it, I sometimes get hooked on odd or silly television shows. Lately, it is the British science fiction show Doctor Who. I stream it from Netflix onto my iPad, which I have connected to my television set. How Doctor Who-like is that? The show is about a several-thousand-year-old “Time Lord” who travels through time and space in a blue police call box called a Tardis, and changes form every now and then (presumably when the actor playing him decides to move on to other roles) in an event he calls “regeneration”. I told you it was silly. (For all you Doctor Who fans, yes, I said it. It’s silly. You know it is even if you won’t acknowledge it to yourself. From one fan to another, simply admit it. You’ll feel better and the show will still be just as fun. You’re welcome.)

The Doctor, as he is called, hates to be alone and always travels with a companion, a human from Earth. Usually it is a very pretty human. Although he often has to rescue the companion from some peril, the companion also often rescues him and he almost always learns new things from his companion. He almost always resists the fact that he can, indeed, learn anything new, being several-thousands of years old after all, but he learns nonetheless.

This is the thing that occurs to me: If a several-thousand-year-old Time Lord can still learn things, and from an ordinary person, we all can, no matter how smart we already are. (Yes, I know, it’s just a TV show, and a silly one at that. Bear with me.) There is a philosophical phrase I heard many years ago, I forget where and who said it,”A true master is someone who {…Continue Reading}

Posted in Education | 4 Comments

Feed Your Mind

Duality of Mind

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}

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Is Making Money The Goal?

Money

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}

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A Creative Revolution

Russian Rainbow Gathering. Nezhitino, August 2005

(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}

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

The Power of Article Marketing – A 30 Day Article Challenge

You may have heard that article marketing can be a powerful addition to your marketing efforts. Getting people to your sites is the first part of any effective online marketing and I know that when I have regularly posted articles to the article directories, I have gotten much more traffic to my sites, had more people sign up to my list and had people who actually purchased my products and courses.

Knowing that, today, I decided to challenge myself to write and post 30 articles in 30 days at eZine Articles. The first one is there, awaiting approval. When I mentioned it on Facebook, I informally challenged other people to join me in the challenge.

I am now making the challenge official. Write and post 30 articles in the 30 days. (If you don’t yet have an account at eZine Articles, it is free to sign up. Just go to http://ezinearticles.com.)

If you are in, please let us know by posting in the comments area below. Also enter your “expert author” link so we can go look at your articles. Read the other articles of people who have joined the challenge.

My link is http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Geoff_Hoff

Posted in Article Marketing | 11 Comments

Set Goals or Go with the Flow? Planning for the Creative Mind

Goal Setting

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}

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments