(Part 4 in a 4-part series on working with creativepreneurs)
Guiding Creativepreneurs into Extraordinary Time Frames
Last but not least in our series, this post focuses on the importance of creative engagement, particularly the attainment of a special experience of time defined as flow. The creative act is not typical. In fact, by definition, it posits in this world something radically new. It can not be faked. Ezra Pound pointed to this when he created categories for writers in his book The ABC of Reading. For our purposes here, we are highlighting the first three.
Ezra Pound’s List of the Six Types of Writers
- Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
- The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
- The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
In contrast to Pound, I would argue that beyond his mechanical mind frame that stresses making a new process, innovation in the creative act, regardless of the medium, demands access to transpersonal dimensions. To engage the variety of transpersonal dimensions requires that we experience time in a manner that is not common, but instead extraordinary. This points to the importance of establishing the magic circle explored in the previous post.
The Transformation of Time
Flow became a focal point of research when Dr. Csikszentmihályi, who coined the term, became fascinated by artists who would get lost in their work. Also, related to Dr. Maslow’s peak experience, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in an activity, and generates a transformation in one’s sense of time.
Simply put, to be in flow, is to be in the zone. Clearly, Flow is the activation of your full potential.
Concluding this series on working with Creativepreneurs, it is important to stress how much emerges when a consultancy attends to both the extraverted demands of getting one’s work into the world, and the introverted demands of stoking your creative fires.