Heroic Interview: Creativity on Demand with Michael J. Gelb

You're listening to Creativity on Demand, an Optimal Living interview with Michael Geld and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Optimal Living 101. Today, I am thrilled to have Michael Gel back. Originally, we talked about how to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, which, as I shared in that interview, is literally at least tied for first is one of the most transformative books I've ever read. I can look at my life today and look back at when I read that in 2001 and see how profoundly it influenced me. And since reading that book, was blessed to get to meet Michael at a conscious capitalism event that he emceed, I walked up to him and said, michael, you changed my life. Thank you. Became friends, and Michael's been a great supporter and just friend and mentor since. And I'm really excited to welcome you today, Michael, to talk about your new book, Creativity on Demand. So thanks for being here.

My pleasure. Thank you.

All right, well, let's jump in. You've written 13 books. Nice work on creativity. Let's start from the high level. So creativity on Demand. How is that different from all the other books that you've written so far?

Well, it's the best. And the reason is that what I aimed to do here was consolidate the best of everything that I've taught in my previous books and then add a special ingredient, which I realized. The reason I wrote this book is I realized that there's a missing ingredient. That although in the past I've taken people through the elements necessary for cultivating a creative mindset, and I've taken people through the creative process. What are the phases? What are the best techniques and methods for generating new ideas, for making new connections? The aha that led to this book was that the energy, the creative energy, is the missing link for most people. Even if you have the mindset, even if you know the process, the energy is the key to manifesting it, to sustaining it. The subtitle of the new book is how to Ignite and Sustain the Fire of Genius. It's one thing to ignite it, it's another thing to sustain it, to manifest it. And I realized that is a function of energy. The motivation was I want to empower people with the most practical, accessible methods for ramping up their core level of creative energy and then connect that to the mindset and the process.

Yeah, well, so much to talk about there. Let's just go to the energy. You describe it as chi in the book. Let's talk about that. What is that?

Well, it's the Chinese word for Vital energy for life energy. In Japanese, it's ki, means the same thing. In yoga, it's prana. In the Hebrew tradition, it's ruach. In America, it's mojo. It's the fundamental, unlimited, easy to access, absolutely free superpower that everybody has access to, but most folks don't know how to utilize that access. The good news is they've been studying this in China for 5,000 years and passing it down through lineages. And I was on a seminar. It's called Qigong. Gong is the Chinese word, just means to cultivate. It means workout. So I was doing an intensive seminar, cultivating my chi, when this epiphany just. It was like a lightning bolt. It was a lightning bolt of inspiration. The classic bang. I just suddenly had this notion, oh, my God, this is the missing link for most people. In that moment, I said, okay, I have to make this really simple and accessible. It occurred to me, since most of my clients work in what I call an hac, that's a high acronym culture. It occurred to me, this is Q, Creative Universal Energy Cue. Creative Universal Energy. And I saw Q cue. And I saw that that could be represented by the letter Q. And then instantaneously, I thought, it's intelligent Qi. Creative Universal energy is intelligent. Well, qi just happens to be the spelling of qi in Chinese. Creative universal energy. That is intelligent. And then I started to get this flood of more acronyms. I thought, gee, this is quite interesting. It's the secret of quality improvement. Leonardo da Vinci's phrase for creativity was quickening invention. I said, ah, I have a quiet illumination. This is the key to our quintessential. All this happened simultaneously. And then I realized I've been studying this for many, many years. But I realized it was part of the secret to my own effectiveness in teaching creativity. It wasn't just the words that I share. It's not just the exercises I do. It's the energy that's transmitted. Where people feel that this light bulb goes off, this lightning bolt hits them, and they're inspired to create and to follow through on their creative process. So I went around and met with many of the greatest qigong masters in the world, also a couple of meditation masters and yoga masters, and some of my friends who are very highly ranked aikido masters. I asked them this very simple question. I said, what's your most powerful practice that the average person can do in 20 minutes or less to raise their baseline of creative energy? I took what they shared, and they were very generous. Then in most cases, I rewrote it and practiced it and tried it out on some people. And when I sent it back to the masters for approval, they said, oh, I like your simplified version better. Can I use it? So that's what's in the new book, these practices. And it's the first time that these kinds of practices have been linked to the different elements of the creative mindset and the different elements and phases of the creative process so that you could specifically access the energy you need, for example, to generate lots of ideas. But then when you need to shift modes and start making strategies to apply your ideas, that requires another kind of energy. So we give you the practice that you need to access that kind of energy.

I'd love to talk about that a little bit more. So your subtitle again. Creativity on Demand subtitle. Ignite and sustain the fire of genius, which is genius. I'd love to hear just a quick overview of, well, how do we ignite that energy that really is the fire of genius? And then separately, the sustaining part, which you just alluded to. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Sure. Well, there are many, many different ways of doing it. The first one is simply to recognize that every action, every thought you have has an energy consequence. For better or worse, everybody's familiar. If you're worried, if you're anxious, if you're not in the present, if you're reviewing the past too much or spending too much time concerned about the future, you're draining energy. If you are feeling gratitude, if you're feeling optimism, if you're feeling love or appreciation, if you're laughing, you're strengthening your energy. So we're aware that internally we have our attitudes internally affect our energy in a profound way. And everybody's also aware that our energy is affected by the external world. There's a really fun exercise early on in the book to help people understand. QI is part of our everyday experience. And I get people to go on their browser and look up Metal Machine music by Lou Reed. It's one of the worst musical compositions ever created. And people don't know if Lou Reed was doing this as a commentary on the mechanized, dehumanized nature of society, if that was his motivation or if it was some kind of joke. But it's one of the most horrifying things. And any sentient being will recoil upon listening to this. Go ahead and look it up. Listen to it for as long as you can, which I predict won't be more than 10 seconds, because you'll feel your whole being contract. Then Go to walk on the wild side. And especially when you get to the chorus part. Well, he does the chorus. And feel what happens to your energy. All of a sudden it's uplifted. So we know that if you listen to Mozart, we know that it has this positive effect. It integrates your nervous system, the coherence of the cerebral cortex. Most people feel better when they listen to Mozart, for example. So we know that the external world, if we're in nature, beautiful garden, looking at the sky, standing by the ocean, we feel much more enlivened than if we're stuck at an airport gate or in a crummy hotel room or in a little cubicle. So we're aware that our internal state affects our energy, and we're aware that our external state affects our energy. This book is filled with practices that you can do to optimize your energy at any time. Whatever is happening in the external world, sometimes you don't have control over that. You know, traditionally, qigong is practiced in a beautiful garden in a place with wonderful feng shui early in the morning, when the energies of the universe are just right for your ability to access them and transmute them. But that's not reality for most people. So I look for practices that you can use to change your state to, first of all, just to feel better, to feel more balanced and whole and enlivened, but then specifically to access your creativity. Practices that you can do at any time, 20 minutes or less, that will change your internal energetic state and magnify the effects of. You might say, why don't you just practice feeling gratitude or practice feeling love? Well, that's a great thing to do. But this is.

This.

Supercharges the effect of that kind of positive thinking.

Amazing. Without going into. I mean, not having the book in front of us right now. In terms of those who are listening, what would be an example? So if I'm in an airport and I want to just ground and be able to kind of be more present, what's the simple practice I can do to do that? I say that knowing that I'm going to be traveling quite a bit. I know you travel a ton. So how do you maintain your energy?

Yeah, it's great. The simplest practice is called standing meditation. You stand with your feet shoulder width apart. What's great about this, you can do standing meditation without anybody knowing you're doing it. I did this. I just came back. I gave a keynote in Rome last week and had a long wait at customs and immigration. I did standing meditation until the line moved. And then I did walking meditation once, the line moved. When it stopped again, I did standing meditation again. What you do is you stand with your feet shoulder width apart. Distribute your weight evenly. Knees are slightly bent. There's a gentle fold in your hips. Your spine is upright, shoulders relaxed. As one of my favorite teachers says, imagine yourself one inch taller and 10 years younger. If you're in public when you do this, you keep your eyes open, but your eyes are soft. And then you can do this right now, just say the two words. Say let go. Let go. Let go. So you notice where your tongue goes when you say l. Let L. Your tongue goes to this point, which just happens to be the acupuncture point that connects the circuit of energy that goes up the back of your body and down the front. So you gently place your tongue just at that point where you say la and let go. And you breathe in through your nose and allow the breath to go right down to your lower belly. And your lower belly expands, your lower ribs expand, your lower back expands as you breathe in. Then you just exhale naturally and easily. So you're drawing the breath into your center, which is literally the center of gravity of your body. In Leonardo da Vinci's famous Vitruvian man, one of the things he's demonstrating is that the arms and the legs are equidistant from this central point just below the navel. So you stand, spine lengthening, 1 inch taller, 10 years younger, weight evenly distributed, knees slightly bent, little fold in the hip. It helps to have an inner smile. You don't want to have a goofy, silly smile on your face. You don't want to attract attention, but you have an inner kind of Mona Lisa like smile. And you continue with this flow of breathing into your center and just standing there with your weight evenly distributed. See what that does? This is so simple. It gives a message to your nervous system that says, ah, I'm supported and I'm balanced. The two sides of my body are balanced. And what's fascinating is even though you're standing still, there are subtle adjustments taking place. So you allow yourself to stand as though you were standing the ocean. So the feeling is not standing rigidly, but rather letting yourself be receptive, passive, and relaxed as you stand upright and poised and enjoy the subtle adjustments that your body makes. Now, just that exercise for a few minutes will give most people an experience of enhanced energy. Start doing it just for a minute or two because it takes some getting used to. Work your way up to 5 minutes and then 20 minutes is enough for most people to feel a dramatic enhancement of their energy. It's also, by the way, one of the teachers that I've studied with, Dr. Yang Yang, he's a PhD in exercise physiology and a Chinese lineage master, is doing research at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and elsewhere. And he's discovered that this practice, starting with just a few minutes and working your way up to 20 minutes is one of the most effective evidence based means for overcoming insomnia. And by the way, if you sleep better, you're going to be more creative because you have more dream time and more incubation time for all the creative ideas you're going to get when you practice the methods in the creative process chapter.

You have me in a deeply. I'm doing this right now, so I've been following your lead, just loving it. Oh, it just is. And I love the way you describe the ocean of to really allow that fluidity and to allow those tiny little adjustments to be present and to not be rigid yet to be that 1 inch taller and 10 years younger. Such an amazing grounding presence and flow. You know, it makes me wonder. I have some other things that I've got that I want to make sure we talk about, but makes me wonder. I sit in meditation every morning. It's kind of my thing and I used to do the hour and a half an hour. Then you have a two year old and it becomes 20 minutes. Right, but that's just what I do. First thing, what are your thoughts in terms of qigong vis a vis meditation? Obviously they complement one another, but if you only had 20 minutes, which one would you do or which one do you do?

Well, again, that just depends on each person and tuning into yourself. You might do something different each day. And that's why it's good to have a full menu instead of just one dish that you're eating oatmeal every morning for breakfast. Well, maybe you want scrambled eggs or maybe you want some gluten free pancakes. Let's just go back and say that the first series of exercises that I share in the book are so simple. It's standing meditation, sitting meditation, how to do Qi practice, when you're lying down and when you're walking and when you're breathing. We start with the most basic things that we're all doing every day anyway and how to use these everyday activities to strengthen your core baseline of creative universal energy. Then we go into some of the traditional classic practices like the Three Treasures, the standing meditation, the Cloud Hands meditation, which is a classic Tai Chi exercise. Very simple, very beautiful, very relaxing.

So.

I am a very kinesthetic type person. I'm very movement oriented. So it's part of why I love the moving practices. So if I only have 20 minutes, I usually do cloud hands. If I have five minutes, I might do a short version of the Three Treasures Standing meditation. If I have one minute, then I do the standing meditation as I described it to you. But I add another element which is described later on in the book, where you rock very gently forward and back. And as you rock back, you draw the creative universal energy into your center as you inhale. And as you rock forward, you let that energy expand to fill your own personal energy field, sometimes called the aura. So you rock back and you're drawing in the energy of the universe into your center as you inhale and you rock forward very gently, almost imperceptibly, and you fill your energy field with the energy that you've collected. So if I have one minute, because a lot of times I only have one minute and I need to recharge my energy, I just do that little rocking version of the standing meditation. But what's so great now is I've studied with so many different masters and I really intensively, I've done intensive retreats and I've done a lot of private lessons. And basically, if you take what's in the book, which is the best of what I know, you have a phenomenal menu of options and possibilities so that you can choose the practice that suits the state you're in, the mode you're in, or what you need to actually get done in the world.

Yeah, it's brilliant. I just love that collection of what do you need? What's going on? What's the creative challenge? And here's how you can deal with it in X minutes and really just connect that fire of genius within. So love that. Thank you. For another example, I did that little rocking thing as you were describing it, and just. I'm excited to integrate this more Whole other conversation there. But let's come back to the creativity and this energy. And for me, when I think of creativity, there's kind of the again that igniting and sustaining. But talk to us about how we can learn to trust intuition. Intuition, how do we learn to trust it?

Yeah, well, a couple things here. First of all, it helps to understand that all of this is built into the architecture of your mind, that you're designed to be creative. It's part of your birthright. It's the way you were born. Every child is wildly. You went to school and got de genius. My mission is to regenius you. We've studied what the great minds of history. Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Queen Elizabeth I, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie. What do these great minds do? And we found especially the things that they all do that happen to be the same that they all recommend that we do. And now contemporary science is catching up with a lot of these practices. Everybody knows, for example, that it's better to sleep on something before you make an important decision. If you're trying to write something, sleep on it, look at it again in the morning, you'll think better. Well now Professor Robert Stickgold at Harvard and his associate Dr. Sara Mednick have demonstrated what's actually happening in the brain. We need to sleep on things because we're consolidating the formation of the new synapses that are manifesting as we generate a new idea or think intensively about something. So this wisdom is being validated by our contemporary scientific understanding. And the other thing we've learned is, and again, this is anecdotal, but we're starting to figure it out scientifically now, is that intuition is body centered. So people say. I had a gut feeling. I knew it in my heart, I felt it in my bones. My blood whispered to me. But as everyone has discovered, your bones, your blood, your heart, your gut don't send you voicemails or emails or text messages. They speak to you in a very subtle voice. It is a kinesthetic, energetic voice. One of the real empowering elements of these practices is they hone your ability to get clearer communication from your gut, from your heart, from your bones, from your blood. They help remove the static, the noise that interferes with the message of the depth of your own being. And one thing we know about the great minds of history, they were really good at tuning into their gut, heart, bones and blood. Not just the great minds of history. Also any successful entrepreneur. Professor Weston Agor did a long term study of American business leaders and found that the number one most distinguishing characteristics of the most successful leaders were those who were able to trust their intuition. And it helps to have a practice.

That.

Lets you quiet the static and the noise and all the nonsense and the information overload and the exhaustion and become a clearer channel, a clearer antenna for the download that awaits you.

Yeah. And then on that front, what's your recommendation in terms of consistency of practice and amount of time invested and all that good stuff? Sure.

Well, that's why the book Features these practices that are 20 minutes or less.

Because.

If you can do 20 minutes in a day, maybe it's four or five minute sessions, because your day is that crazy. A lot of my clients, it might be 21 minute sessions, but if you can set aside 20 minutes, if you can actually find 20 minutes, that seems to be the. I mean, it's helpful to do a minute, it's helpful to do 30 seconds, but that seems to be the point at which you can begin to make a fundamental change in your baseline of creative energy.

Yeah. And then showing up consistently. So again, you get the benefit in 30 seconds or a minute or three minutes, when and as needed. But there's something about cultivating that relationship to something bigger than ourselves and that creative fire and that antenna. Right. Being nice and strongly structured and, and all that good stuff. And again, being able to choose from the menu that you've outlined and just kind of have that consistency. Yet diversity of practices is amazing. Well, let's talk about the three sections of your book really quickly. So we've got Mastering Creative Energy. We have Mastering the Creative Mindset. We have Mastering the Creative Process. Can you just give us a high level on how those fit together?

Sure. When I first wrote the book, when I sent it into the publisher, it started with 20,000 words on my background and how I came to understand and be prepared to write about all this. Then I thought, people need the mindset first. So mindset chapter came first. Then I thought, okay, now they need to know about the process. Now the grand finale, I'll teach them about the energy. So my editor gets back to me. She says, you cut the first 20,000 words because people already, people trust you. You're a trusted purveyor of guidance on creativity and innovation. And, and people just write an autobiography separately. They don't need to know the whole story. Then she said, and what's really unique and unusual about this book, I've never seen or heard anything like it is the material you've generated on creative energy. She said, so put that first. And then she said, and then take the other two chapters and come up with more exercises to empower people's mindset through an energy practice and process through an energy practice. So that's how the book got structured. And by the way, that was a great chance for me to practice some of the elements of the creative mindset. Embracing the unknown, bracing uncertainty, strengthening your confusion, endurance, letting go of attachment, opening yourself to the higher purpose of what you're doing. Because it was very, I worked very hard on those 20,000 words and the structure of the book. And I thought it was really great. But I said, put aside the ego, sleep on this and ask yourself the question, what will best serve the reader? I woke up in the morning, it was absolutely vividly clear. The editor was right. I deleted the first 20,000 words. I made Mastering Creative Energy the first section of the book because people need to know, okay, what is this energy? How does it relate to my everyday life? And then what are the simplest, most powerful methods for cultivating it? So that's how the book begins. Okay, now I have a sense of how to begin cultivating this energy. How do I develop mindset? What are the attitudes and how can I nurture the attitudes that will help me be as creative and effective as possible? And then mastering the creative process. Okay, Michael Gelb, over the last 40 years that you've been studying this stuff and writing and teaching, what are the absolutely most powerful, useful things that your clients have really done that really work to be more creative? So I just powered those into the Mastering the Creative Process chapter and then came up with some energy practices to support them. So that's the big picture structure.

I love it. And every interaction I've had with you has been such a demonstration of what we're talking about. So it's really inspiring for me to hear you describe that and to see the little microcosm. And of course, I read the earlier version of the book and just so neat to see the navigation of the creative process in your own embrace of all these ideas and. And again, just the embodiment of it. So people can learn more about the book. Just go straight to Amazon. Is that the best place? Or send them to Sounds True or what's the best way to get that?

Yeah, well, they can go to my website, michaelgill.com because there's lots of information there about creativity on demand and everything else. And they can order the book through a link on my site, or they can go straight to Amazon or they can go to the Sounds True site, which has all sorts of other wonderful, great stuff as well. So whatever their preferred method is, make it so.

That's fantastic. We'll put links to your site, michaelgelb.com and then we also are blessed to have a few of your classes in our academy. How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, how to Innovate like Edison. How to master the Creative Mindset. Really, really cool. We'll have links to those nearby as well. And yeah, this is exciting. I'm really excited to tap into this more and to integrate more of the kinesthetic experience with my meditative practice and to really harness this and look forward to having more conversations with you about it. And again, just appreciate you taking the time for this chat and all the work that you do. You've been such a huge inspiration for me and I know countless others, so you rock. Thank you. And creativity on demand. Awesome stuff.

Thank you.

All right, we'll talk soon.

Great. We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview. Please visit BrianJohnson me for more.