January 21, 2011

cool is just conservative fear dressed in black

I love a good manifesto. Yesterday I happened upon an interview on CBC Radio's "Tapestry" with industrial design guru/architect-of- the-creative, Bruce Mau, in which he expounded on his highly inspirational Incomplete Manifesto For Growth. Read it in its incomplete entirety here.

Reading through it last night, one of the tenets sounded bells and alarms in my mind, causing rusty dusty synapses to start firing and jolting me out of my (literal and creative) hibernation. Let's see where it leads.
A few selections:

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

9. Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

14. Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

29. Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

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