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Personal growth concept: “Big ears” and idea generation September 18, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development and Creativity.
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Part of the path to success in personal development can be through utilizing and adapting the ideas of others to stimulate creativity within our own custom self-actualization program.

In the musical world, if you can effectively listen to the ideas of others and improvise, building on those ideas, you are considered to have “big ears.”

Musician Jason Ricci explores this concept and other approaches to creativity in free instructional videos he posts on YouTube.

In an improvisational setting, Ricci says, it doesn’t matter if your skill level (“chops”) is not as high as you would like it to be. By utilizing the big ears approach you can work at recognizing good ideas from others and react to them, first with imitation, and then by developing them further or improvising upon those ideas.

With big ears, you’ll never run out of ideas to work with.

Ricci suggests that when we are on the learning curve of creativity, we may frequently need to imitate before we innovate.

He notes that doing this also helps us get out of the loop of our own “self” and ego.

Note: The Jason Ricci video I based this post on, is focused on the album Hooker ‘N Heat in which Ricci is analyzing the harmonica playing of Alan (Blind Owl) Wilson of the band Canned Heat in a jam session with blues legend John Lee Hooker.

Jason, who is an exceptional blues harmonica player, takes about a minute and a half in the video to get to the point where he explains the creative concepts, but stick with him – he has great creative insights, which can be applied to many other disciplines besides music, such as personal development.

Here  is the video link, if you are interested in exploring this further:

Hope you enjoy it – Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Difficulties in “doing what you love” July 11, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.
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Taking Joseph Campbell’s advice to “Follow our bliss” is tempting. It is appealing to imagine ourselves in a situation where we are always “in the zone” and a state of rapture with our major personal choices, particularly in our careers.

But in our efforts to reach our personal development potential, It can be frustrating and ultimately counter-productive to make our happiness contingent on a simplistic and restrictive interpretation of “doing what we love.”

In a somewhat fuzzy and imprecise explanation of what he meant by following your bliss, Campbell told Bill Moyers, “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time” (1)

Or as interpreted by many, “Do what you love, the rest will follow.”

But pure rapture or bliss derived from any endeavour is impossible to sustain indefinitely. It’s like burning the candle at both ends – more light, but it burns out quickly.

No matter how much we might love doing something, if we do it in any depth, with thoroughness and with consistency, it will have elements that we don’t love.

It’s nice to imagine a life of vocational bliss, but it’s probably more realistic to think in terms of doing what is satisfying to us.

(1) Cited in Wikipedia article on Joseph Campbell – Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers. Doubleday and Co., 1988.

— Dennis Mellersh