The Groove Issue 103 - Use Your Memories to Come Up with Something New
USE YOUR MEMORIES TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING NEW
As the summer draws to a close, and good memories pile up in your brain and on the camera rolls of your phone, you should know that those moments fuel your creative capacity to benefit your businesses or career.
Memory is what allows us to make associations that don’t yet exist and to generate novel combinations that are unique so we can surprise, excite or attract new clients or audiences to whatever it is that we do.
On top of that, when you have the capacity to evoke memories and turn them into feelings, more sparks and stronger associations bloom.
Remember The Feelings
Joan Mitchell in her studio in Paris in September 1956. Photo by Loomis Dean.
There are moments and stages in your life when perhaps things aren’t that inspiring. But we all have memories of good times (like a fun summer), and we can evoke the feelings that those moments bring to us to come up with something new.
Joan Mitchell started all her paintings as “always some sort of association”. She was pretty good at digging deep and pulling out the feeling when remembering a landscape or looking at a river or a bridge.
But what made her wildly successful is that she wasn’t translating the memory and the feeling into verbatim representations. The unique associations that Mitchell was doing were the ones that turned her into one of the most critically acclaimed American abstract painters.
Sometimes the same feeling allowed her to finish the work, but she acknowledged that mid-way a different and more relevant feeling could have taken over, and she shifted to finish with what was a better memory and subsequent feeling for the work at hand.
Joan Mitchell, Sans neige, 1969, oil-on-canvas.
Memories Open Up A Different Reality
Things don’t have to be what they are. The most successful visionaries, artists and entrepreneurs don’t take their current circumstance at face value; they look into their memories, fantasies and dreams to keep them going.
Although she lived most of her adult life between the cities of New York and Paris, Mitchell was able to turn her memories of nature into associations that translated in her abstract work.
She told Irving Sandler in a 1957 interview that “I carry my landscapes around with me” to emphasize that it wasn’t necessary to always look at fields or lakes. For her it wasn’t what her immediate life was, it was what she could do with her memories and feelings.
With these memories, which served as endless sources of motivation and inspiration, Mitchell was able to pull out her feelings, and that was the starting point for her to make art that has transcended generations and captivated people all over the world.
Joan Mitchell, Lyric, ca. 1951, oil on canvas.
Art Markman, a cognitive scientist from the University of Texas, argues in his book Smart Thinking, that creativity is driven by memory, as it’s where you go to find new solutions to problems and to associate new elements that you hadn’t considered before.
Markman doesn’t cover feelings in this argument, though, but other researchers fully support the involvement of emotion in the creative process aided by memories, going as far as proving that if a person doesn't block their memories and the feelings that come from that, they are more likely to form creative associations.
Keeping that camera roll of sunsets and beaches, mountains, and greeneries alive in your brain, and more importantly, in your heart, should be a place for you to look for ideas when you need them in your life. And I can’t promise you’ll always succeed with great marketing ideas or a compelling new body of work, but at least you’d reap the benefits of having a positive feeling. That is the most magnetic and creative space to be.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members of my online course, Jumpstart.
If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
Have you already gotten your copy?
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook. Get it here.
TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.