Brainwashed

The article Brainwashed discusses the hardships of being a creative person in our world today. He discusses "7 layers" we can use to make ourselves become more creative innovative people. The layer "Acknowledging the Lizard" which he describes the part of our brain that wants to play things safe, meaning do what is comfortable for us, rather than risking a lifestyle trying to make art for a living, when it's not guaranteed we will make it. Godin says by being aware of this, we can acknowledge this part of our brain, and learn how to drive it away and ignore it. By ignoring it, we can literally bypass notions of what societal norms have established for us, and do what we truly want without "playing it safe." Two of the layers he also discussed that spoke to me were Make Art and Shipping.
Make Art spoke to me because human being can do this, and it betters all of us. As Godin says "art is the very human act of creating the uncreated, of connecting with another person at a human level. What we’ve seen is that more and more markets will reward art handsomely, and hand out the compliant work to the lowest bidder." I think this statement is so important because this is how we get closer to connection, furthering knowledge, and bettering our lives. The second Shipping spoke to me because if we dont 'get our ideas or our creative endeavors out there, then what's the point? We have to be able to bypass our insecurities, and what we're "afraid" of, and ship what we have. If nothing is shared, it's useless.

I think in relation to the blog assignments, this article furthers my belief that the blog assignments do not really help me in my creative life. This is more of an assignment that requires little to no creative thought. I'm not producing anything of originality or really learning more about anything that I didn't already know while writing these. It's more a regurgitation of things I have already learned, to prove that I know what I am talking about. I think it would be better to have the blogs involve more creativity. For instance, forcing us to create something like we did with our extra credit projects, then uploading them to the internet, and having our peers have to write a critique about what they think we could improve on, what was good, and so on. I think this would help us become more fluent in technical language, more aware of what we might have done wrong, and more conscious of shared ideas between classmates.