Being eccentric and creative and productive
“I hope I’m becoming more eccentric.More room in the brain.”
Musician Tom Waits
Being eccentric can help our creative thinking and courage.
In his article The Entrepreneurial Spirit, management expert Tom Peters asks, “Feeling a little weird lately? Take time to see where your passion and entrepreneurial spirit is calling you. Even in corporate America, the entrepreneurial spirit must remain alive. That spirit can solve the toughest of corporate problems, if only we let it.”
Also see his new program: Tom Peters Live! - Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, at YourSuccessStore
As psychologist Robert Ornstein, PhD has noted, “If you spend too much time being like everybody else, you decrease your chances of coming up with something different.” He is author of The Psychology of Consciousness.
English fashion and portrait photographer Cecil Beaton [1904–1980], also a stage and costume designer for films and the theatre, advised, “Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Karl Lagerfeld, a fashion designer, photographer and publisher, and artistic director of Chanel, says in a magazine profile that his desk kept getting “buried” under papers, sketchbooks, magazines, books, newspapers, and art supplies.
“To deal with the problem,” the article notes, “he recently bought four more desks. They got buried, too… Another room had a huge table heaped with more books, CDs, DVDs, photographs, iPods, and magazines.
“Look,” [Lagerfeld] said, sounding a little amazed. “It goes on and on and on.” He considered for a moment. “But I love it!” …
In his home there is “a narrow room lined with shelves. On the top of a bureau were perhaps two hundred pairs of fingerless gloves, arranged in neat piles according to color (he explained that he chose the gray pair he’s wearing because of the overcast sky). There are also dozens of pairs of jeans, and belts laid out by the hundred.
“Next door was a windowless room containing a dozen garment racks on wheels, each one stuffed with suits—perhaps five hundred in all—in black or gray hues. “I have suits here I’ve never worn,” Lagerfeld said. “To normal people it may look sick, huh?” He shrugged. “I don’t know what ‘normal’ means, anyway.”
[From In the Now - Where Karl Lagerfeld lives. By John Colapinto, New Yorker, March 19, 2007; photograph by Francois-Marie Banier]
Another example of a creative leader having large numbers in their life is mentioned by historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who says Beethoven’s apartments numbered more than 60, as he kept moving on to a new one.
That item is from Boorstin’s book Creators - a History of Heroes of the Imagination - and quoted in my article Eccentricity and Creativity.
British neuropsychologist David Weeks studied and interviewed a wide range of such “daring and different” people for his book Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, and concluded “One of the principal reasons eccentrics continually challenge the established order is because they want to experiment, to try out new ways of doing things.”
More quotes and books on the pages eccentricity and eccentricity2
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