Brainwashed

Here is a link to Seth Godin's "Brainwashed." Please read this over before continuing on with this week's blog.
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When reading over this article, I notice that he talks about seven layers of reinventing yourself. Three that came across me as the most inspirational and interesting are Acknowledging the Lizard, Make Art, and Fail.

Acknowledging the Lizard is where he explains our resistance to creation. The lizard is the part in our brain that spits out anger every time there is a chance of danger. It cares about safety. The point of this section is to bring up the lizard and acknowledge it, so you can in turn ignore it. We need to produce that original work that can be crippled by this resistance.

Make Art deals with creating new art. And when he says "art," he doesn't mean a poem or painting exactly. By "art," he means creating the uncreated. Art deals with connecting with someone at a human level, taking risks, and being able to laugh at mistakes. Make something that changes everything, and you have created art.


Fail is a section that I appreciate him adding, because there is a huge chance you won't make it through life without being unsuccessful at one point. He mentions how some places actually require that you fail. The only way for places to grow is to do risky things, create something new, make art, and change people. That opens up so much room for failure.

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When relating these three layers summarized to each of the blogs I have been doing over the past ten weeks, I have discovered some interesting comparisons. Seth Godin's layers are actually very much connected to these blogs. Each week we get assigned a new blog to think about/write about. First of all, I think it is kind of important to ignore our lizard when doing this. We are given tasks, and if we want our blog to stand out, and if we want our ideas to be heard, we have to be creative. We have to ignore those urgencies saying that we could get in trouble for writing something like this. I think that is a huge part of showing our passion for our major. To get a new idea up and running, we have to think of new incredible news. This may not have as huge of an impact on our blogs now, but later on in the future it will become a huge part of our career.

Making art is the process of creating our blog. Just like Seth Godin said, it is creating something new. That is what we are doing in these blogs. We are given a task, and by finishing these tasks in our own creative way, we are creating our. WE are putting a new spin and a new outlook on the way people think about this kind of stuff by giving our perspective on it. We are giving it a new "look," which is adding new art on the whole type of art in general. Hopefully that makes sense, because that is just how I think about it. Plus, on top of the writing, we are designing our blog. We make art by showing what we think is pretty. We make art by showing others what colors we think mix well, and we are mixing them. Normally, the choices we make for our backgrounds reflect the type of people we are. The background on my blog is orange and green swirls, showing that I have a fun and bright life. I like bright colors. I think previewing this stuff for the people reading is definitely creating something new, and changing the way people think about you. You are changing something, so you are creating art (according to Seth Godin.)

I think that failing isn't as huge of a layer for these blogs, but it is more of a huge layer in life and career. I mean, of course we are able to fail with these blogs, by not doing them. Or we can even fail ourselves with these blogs, by not being able to put forth the point you wanted in the beginning. However, I think it is a little more difficult to fail with these blogs rather than succeed. In life, however, it is a gigantic part, especially in the career we are choosing. Being a video production major, audio major, or anything along those lines, requires so much creativity and patience. There is a good chance we will get so excited about a new television show idea that will in turn get shot down within the first second of explaining it. You can't expect to succeed every time, because in this business the slots are very difficult to get into. YOu need to take risks and go out of your comfort zone, or even other people's comfort zones as well. You need to think of something new, and something unique. That also goes back up to the make art layer. To get where you want to go you have to be able to take some risks, and you have to be able to move on when some of those risks cause you to fail.

These blogs help us as students because they allow our minds to think a little more on the creative side, without adding too much stress onto our already hective, studious lives. However, as artists, I don't think they are that much of a stepping stone. We are given a task, but these tasks really don't allow for too much of a "creative outlook." yes, they allow for some, but not much.