I was in college when I read that Steve Jobs was returning to Apple and planned to offer computers in multiple colors. Choice seemed like a good thing to me. I bought some stock. It split and grew.
I also worked for Sam’s Wholesale in college and learned that Walmart’s stock had just leveled out after plummeting. I started participating in Walmart’s emplyee stock program. Part of every paycheck was withheld and invested in company stock without any brokerage fees.
When I got married I worked for free at a music publishing company. But my sugar-mamma wife was a well-paid auditor. We decided to invest a fourth of her paycheck in her company’s investment program and other stocks and mutual funds. We invested aggressively, took big risks, and they paid off much of the time.
Since then, we’ve not always saved and invested. There have been months when I had no income coming in and no prospects for the next month, but when possible, when we’ve had more than enough, we’ve tucked it away in a savings account at the very least. This has been handy. In my first year as an artist I flipped down a bunny slop mountain and broke my hip. We had to use all our savings to pay the bills and treat all the medical problems that lingered for years afterward. When we built a house and then my career turned downward, we had to use savings to pay our mortgage some months. And we’ve used savings to help people we come across who need more help than our checking account can give them.
But the more I see of the developing world, the more I’m uneasy with our investment strategy past and present, regardless of its usefulness from time to time. These days, whatever we don’t use - to pay our bills and help out - currently goes into a savings account “just in case.” Some months that’s nothing. Sometimes it’s an embarrassingly large amount. That’s the music/blog/speaking business: Unpredictable.
When there’s more than a month’s income in savings (the longest I’ve been without work), I’m asking weird questions now like Why should I save for the future when people are dying in the present? And guys like Francis Chan are getting to me too.
I’m in a battle - a skirmish really - between being practical/prepared and becoming what might just be more Jesus than I’m comfortable with. It’s too risky. What if?
I know very few things for certain when it comes to money. But I know that investing is not inherently evil. And those who do it aren’t either. But I also suspect that investing (especially above a certain dollar amount) isn’t often necessary - not if we take seriously what God has to say about church, community, family and retirement. Oh, wait, retirement’s not in the bible. Exactly my point. And investing comes with its own spiritual hazards, just as poverty does.
I’m finding myself experimenting, praying a very scary prayer these days:
“Two things I ask of you, O LORD;
do not refuse me before I die:
Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
but give me only my daily bread.
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
and say, ‘Who is the LORD ?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
and so dishonor the name of my God.
(Proverbs 30:7-9)
This post isn’t about erecting new laws for God’s people concerning money and generosity. It’s about me being brought to an uncomfortable place at which I now face some cutting questions: Why is abandoning savings so frightening for me? I don’t love money, so what is it I’m really afraid of losing if this prayer is answered?
I’m only blogging because I’ve been quarantined to my office and I’ve got nothing else to do in here. The rest of the house has been commandeered by four girls in various stages of undressedness.
Last night Gresham (age six) spent the night at a friend’s and some girls came over to spend the night with Gabriella (age seven). At the moment they’re taking showers and getting makeover’s before we head out the door to church. This makes no sense to me. Which is good. It reaffirms my man-ness, I suppose, after that unfortunate cake confession.
Why is it fun to wash one’s hair? To put paint on one’s face? To dress up in one’s uncomfortable clothes?
Besides the plate of bacon and pancakes, this makeover thing seems to be the highlight of the whole spending-the-night deal this weekend. Whereas, the highlight of spending the night at my friends’ houses as a kid was flipping Space Invaders and, in later years, Mario Brothers for the zillionth time. And mooning somebody. And sticking Oreos to someone’s house and cars. And drinking my body weight in Jolt and Dr.Pepper. That was fun. And makes total sense to me.
Penelope, age three, stood in the hallway greeting strangers while her mommy talked to big brother’s teacher and then big sister’s.
Then mommy turned her attention at last to Penelope, whose bottom lip was pushed out in a pout. “What’s wrong?” mommy asked.
“Some people say I’m cute. And some people can’t see me.”
That’s when we learned there are only two kinds of people in the world, according to Penelope: Those who think she’s cute. And those who just haven’t met her yet.
What’s this series all about? Read Creative Contradiction #1.
2. Convergent and divergent. The folks with the most consistent creative output are thought to be using two contradictory yet complimentary modes of thinking: convergent and divergent.
Convergent thinking is logic, measured by IQ tests. It’s used to solve a definable problem and find its one right answer. Black and white. Cut and dry.
Divergent thinking, on the other hand, leads to no one conclusion but generates a mound of ideas and possible relationships between them. Central to divergent thinking is the ability to see associations between seemingly unrelated thoughts, and to see all sides or perspectives of an issue.
Most of my day is spent in divergent thinking. My wife asks me often, “Who are you talking to?” My mouth and hands move a lot when I’m driving or making breakfast. I’m dialoguing through songs, blog posts, conversations, pitches. It’s embarrassing but I can’t stop it. And I don’t want to really. It’s true that 99% of that mound of ideas created by divergent thinking is crap. But that 1% is golden.
Here’s an example of how these two kinds of thinking work together. One night I dreamed I was watching a hummingbird outside our kitchen window. I woke up thinking about hummingbirds and everything related to them. I wasn’t trying to. It just happened. By the time I got out of the shower a mound of hummingbird related stuff was piled up in my head. And it stayed there, with all the other piles, for weeks. Then one day, eating dinner before a show, someone said I looked tired. They asked me how I was doing. I told them I felt “run down.” And I don’t think I heard anything else anyone said at dinner from that moment on. Instead, my brain started connecting stuff in the pile about hummingbirds with stuff I was feeling. And in the next few days I wrote words like “Feathered, tethered, feels like all the world’s a cage/worked up, run down, in this race to earn a wage/something inside tells me I was made to split the sky, so tell me why I’m living like a hummingbird/getting nowhere fast from all this work...”
One dream and a morning of divergent thinking built the mound. And divergent thinking connected the mound to a seemingly unrelated thought/feeling. And convergent thinking went to work on the pile to find only the best stuff. Convergent thinking sifted the pile by saying “Yes” and “No”, “Keep it” and “Trash it” a hundred times until the song was done.
Now, beware. If a creative person’s divergent thinking is stronger than their convergent thinking, they’ll have lots of projects going on and few completed, lots of output but low quality standards. They’ll tend to think every idea is a great one. But, if their convergent thinking is stronger than their divergent thinking, they’ll be so self-critical (always saying “no” in their head) that they’ll have low output of a higher quality - at least in their mind. But, and I know this from experience at the moment, if convergent thinking is turned up to 11, output will end altogether.
Ideally, we creatives need both kinds of thought in balance.
If you live or work with creatives…
Let them talk, if they’re a talker, about what’s in the pile. And then help them sift through it for the best ideas.
Do not tell a creative person everything they have done or are doing is great. Great means nothing if it’s all we hear. And hearing it too often kills our ability to self-critique, to think convergently.
Help develop the divergent part of a creative child’s mind, especially if he/she has perfectionistic tendencies, by drawing a doodle with a pencil on a piece of paper. Then ask the child to tell you everything they see in it. Don’t critique at all.
Help a child develop the convergent part of their mind by handing them a crayon and asking them to turn your doodle into one of those things they saw. They’ll have to make choices, pick from the pile they just made.
Does this help at all?
My nephew Phillip is extremely creative. His father, Brian, wonders if that’s why he moved his family here to Nashville a few years ago - not so Brian and I could work together, but so I could help interpret Phillip to him and reassure him on a regular basis that Phillip’s completely normal. For a creative person.
Creative people are weird complex. So this series is my attempt to explain us to anyone having to work or live with us. Each statement is laid out as a contradiction. I’m borrowing heavily from researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People but putting him in my own words. It’s more creative that way.
Keep in mind that these are generalities, which means they won’t be true all the time for everyone.
1. Energetic and reserved. Creatives aren’t lazy. We were built with two modes: work and idle. It’s important essential for a creative person to spend time in both.
When doing something they’re passionate about (something creative) creatives can focus and work feverishly for long hours at a time, forgetting to eat or go to the bathroom, sometimes staying up late, toiling long after every sane person has gone to bed. This is the work mode and it’s taxing even when it doesn’t look it would be. It may seem like I’m merely sitting at my computer typing, but what’s happening in my head is more than one fast-paced conversation (we’ll get to that later). It may look like I’m just painting or singing leisurely but my emotions and thoughts are thick, consuming every bit of my attention. Sometimes I look like I’m doing nothing at all, just sitting, but in my head a problem and a million solutions are being turned and examined from every perspective. It’s not hard work by any means, but it’s intense and isolating - I’m truly incapable of being fully present and fully involved with everything and everyone around me.
Thus the need for an idle mode. Without idle mode we’d have no relationships or much of a life. Creative people intuitively manage their creative energy by expending very little energy between creative sprints (or marathons). Some creatives sleep a lot. Others golf or eat or find some other way to relax. I shut my computer, ban music from being played in the house (hearing music sets off a work mode in my head), and just play with my kids or sit under a tree with my wife, or go for a drive alone.
Here’s the kicker though. I can’t always control my modes. I may be on a date with my wife, for instance. She’s talking to me about the movie we just saw. We’re laughing, having a great time. And all of a sudden, something she says sparks an idea. Seconds later a complete melody is playing in my mind, buzzing in my brain louder than the world around me. I don’t hear her anymore. I want to, but I can’t. I have to find a pen and something to write on or call our home phone and leave this melody on the answering machine in hopes that making a record of the idea will appease it for the next hour at least so I can get on with my life.
If you live with a creative person…
Remember the importance of both modes and allow time for each, within reason, without harming yourself or others.
Remember that our hand isn’t always able to reach the switch - we’re often as annoyed with us as you are when there’s a mode change.
When mode changes without warning, especially if we’re young and new to all this, we can feel out of control. Planning a break and setting goals helps control the modes.
Did any of this help?
