Chad Silverstein talks about creativity and innovation, drawing on the historical role of campfire settings in generating ideas. He explores how journaling, drawing, and informal conversation drive the iterative process of developing and expressing ideas.
Chapters
Somebody had the courage up to go out and figure out a way to get warm. Right. Struck flint together. Fire. You know what I mean? What was a. What was the first big innovation for us had to be fire, I think. Okay. And I'm sure they drew pictures of it. You know, they put it on the cave walls for anybody to see to. To spread this great news. What do we. So we started off by trying to figure out how to. How to think and feel our way into life. And we captured it via words and drawings and writings. And so, like today, what do most people do when they want to light a fire in themselves? If they're a thinking, feeling person and they get any good counsel, the person counseling them will say, I'm listening to you. I think this is really great. Why don't you start journaling it? Why don't you start throwing it up? Because I can feel it in you. But you need to get it out on the cave wall a bit more. And then when you get it out on that cave wall, after you've used your heart and your head and you've thrown it up without fear, so the real you is there to see something between the mind and the heart connects it. When we see it in black and white on the wall, and we go, son of a bitch, that's a rolling stone. And that's how Dylan decided to be a songwriter and not a playwright. You know what I mean? Yeah. And we could go on and on like, that's the gig. So how do you know which is how much is heart and head? Draw, write, play, you know, and play is way underrated. So we draw, we write, and then we go play. You and I were playing that day. We were playing. Yeah. And way too many, Way too many people think that they're going to figure out where to go with their company or themselves in a brainstorming session in a boardroom. And the reality is, and I wrote this post today based on a practice I had with a client today, that the reality is most great innovations come around a campfire in the history of humanity. That's the truth. When people just. Somebody starts a fire and they say, hey, marketing, come on, we're going to warm up sales, come on over. Engineering. I've got a fire going. Let's sit around the fire and talk. And in a very warm, intimate campfire kind of a setting, great ideas have been spawned through the history of time. And it's just amazing to me.
And.
So, I don't know, I just. I get excited talking about that.
Well, Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of curious about.
The.
The. I guess I don't know why this is coming to me, but the. The value in kind of iterating. You know, I'm. I'm. You know, what I'm hearing when you say this campfire talk.
Right.
Is that. That something. It starts somewhere. And this has kind of been true for me. And, and, you know, a lot of the startups I'm involved with, and. And, you know, I just think for entrepreneurs in general, even if you look at kind of, you know, history, you know, Amazon started selling books, not, you know, everything.
Right, right.
They had, you know, Kindles, and that was the big thing. Right. With this digital book. It didn't know that I was going to buy, you know, soap and, you know, whatever batteries. So, you know, the campfire kind of experience or the journaling, the puking it up. Dylan, I think that's kind of what got me thinking of this, is that it feels like you got to just get it out and then it'll start to emerge, even if it's not the thing that comes out first. It's the process of. We talk about puking it up, but it is. It's like you got to get it out of your system one way or another.
That's right.
And that can be done in journaling. I think that's very effective way to do it. Writing. It could be in doodling. It could be in jogging. It could be in meditating. All of that could be in therapy. You know, it could be with, you know, a loved one. It's somehow you've got to get it out of your system and into the world to even get some feedback and determine, you know, what's true, what's next, et cetera.
