Peter Himmelman talks creativity, focus, and vision

Concepts

Creativity  

• Our brain’s fear response is great for protecting us from tigers and being abandoned when we are too young to fend for ourselves - unfortunately it can prevents us from taking any perceived risk so it can stifle creative action.

• You can manage that fear response by giving it a name - Peter calls it MARV and imagines it as a bald cartoon

• Once you have MARV visualized, you can send him for a break; Peter’s book offers a range of easy-and-fun techniques.

Gratitude

• Gratitude in almost any form makes your brain more ready for creative action

• Many of Peters “MARV-management” techniques use different forms of expressing gratitude.

• Gratitude also unlocks the biggest value - on any journey to improve, you can feel it internally without needing a lot of accolades from others, so it’s a kind of doorway

• You can feel gratitude for what you are learning on the journey, not just the outer accomplishment; this reinforces doing more because it moves your motivation inward.

Vision

• Vision can be simple set of actions or a longer-term process.

• Working to a vision can lead you to different choices, different habits (see peters book for a useful list along with exercises)

• There are “filters” and “doorways” on your path to creativity and goal accomplishment that are important to know how to navigate.

Links to things mentioned

• Peter’s company Big Muse’s Web site

• Peter in the ResultMaps resource center

• Peter in Forbes

• Peter’s critically acclaimed book “Let Me Out” on Amazon

““Peter Himmelman is an award-winning musician, and he knows what it takes to overcome fear and unlock our creative potential. In Let Me Out, his energy, humanity, and imagination literally leap off the page. I can’t wait to share it with my readers and my students.”

”

— Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take

““Let Me Out gets to the heart of how we can keep fear from limiting our potential by tapping into our inner resilience, creativity, and strength. There’s deep wisdom here along with very practical tools for translating our ideas into the real world.””

— Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post

---

Articles by Peter

• Creativity: The Strategic Necessity You May Have Overlooked

• Change In Times Of Fear (How To Reclaim Your Creativity In The Storm Of Disruption)

• Hearing Like Prince: How A Rock Star Can Teach Leaders To Listen

• The Idea-Revealers: Where Business And Art Intersect

• How Purpose Drives Innovation: Finding Our Way to Things of Higher Value

• The Utility Of Urgency (Or How Tension Begets Creativity)

• An Unexpected Reason People Lack Creativity: And How To Overcome It

• Stop Searching For Contentment: The Value Of An Unsettled Mind

• How Willing Are You To Make An Investment In Creativity?

• Five Super-Strange Ideas That Will Definitely Make You More Creative

• Moving toward a qualitative life

Other Sessions

• Sean Sheppard, Co-founder of GrowthX and GrowthX Academy

• Will Bunker, Co-founder OneAndOnly (now Match.com), VChatter, President; GrowthX co-founder; investor in 160+ tech companies, 5 exits

• TK Kader, Founder and CEO of Unstoppable, ToutApp (A16z), SVP Strategy at Marketo, Adobe;

• Jason McCann, CEO of Vari

• Andy Petranek, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Whole Life Challenge

• Arjun Dev Aurora, Founder and CEO Retargeter; Founder, Valence; Nike, Investment Committee

• Lori Williams-Peters, VP Business Excellence, InvisionApp Inc.