The Creative Spark Plug Lecture Series

Note: We’ve taken CSP off the shelves for repackaging. Thank you for the great first run! We promise it will be back soon.

Artists have this amazing way of approaching their work that many of us wish we had, too. It’s some particular powerful belief, a willingness to do whatever it takes to express ourselves. And it’s easy to feel that if we had that belief, that drive, nothing could stop us.

We’re right.

Someone with “creative” pinned to their lapel has had a lot of time to practice indulging their creativity and overcoming the obstacles set in front of them. Because of that, their work springs from a very unique mindset — but that doesn’t mean they have something we don’t. It just means they learned something we haven’t (yet) learned ourselves.

It is a false assumption that only some people are “traditionally creative” and the rest of us are something else. In actuality, ALL PEOPLE (you and me included) have a base of creativity waiting to be opened up and made to flourish. If you tap that creativity in your work and learn to make your work into your art… you are suddenly equipped with a whole new set of skills that will make you shine brilliantly in whatever you choose to do.

As it turns out, the “starving artist” stereotype is bad for all of us — not just the artists. This stereotype leads us to believe that anyone who chooses to make art their focus will be broke for the rest of their lives. This means art like painting and dancing and singing, sure — but it also applies to your art, the kind that happens when you add a creative edge to your work. There’s no money in art, we’re told. You can’t make a living with art. They say, Quit screwing around with drawing classes and music lessons and go be a doctor or a lawyer, or get an MBA. Right. Some of us had that same experience — and some of us abandoned what we loved as a result. Some of us even came to believe that what we did for a living had to be starkly separate from what we loved, and it’s kept our lives grey as a result.

That stereotype is just plain wrong.

All of us stand to benefit powerfully — we’re talking high quality full color digital resolution — from making art of our work. And because successful artists have to conquer the starving artist stereotype before they do anything else, this makes those same artists precisely the people to talk to if you’re looking to inform your work with something spectacular. Once you know what a successful artist knows, once you have that understanding and purpose and fundamental meaning, you can suddenly expand your own work — no matter what it is — into something with depth and breadth and infinite possibilities.

The artist’s perspective is oft-neglected because of the “starving artist” assumption, but it’s too valuable to simply ignore. Seeing your work from an artistic standpoint makes the work real. Art is purposeful. Art has meaning. Art comes from a place so deep within us, we often can’t explain it before we’re doing it. Art is more fundamentally human than “work”. If you can make your work your art, you can do anything. You can touch your audience deeply. You can open minds. You can connect in a way that modern business has forgotten (and is only remembering very slowly).

You’re halfway through this page, which means you already have a head start.

We knew that the solution would be found in talking to fine artists, designers, musicians, opera divas, rock stars… and that we could translate their understanding of success into a language that anyone could apply. We knew that we had to produce something that would enable you to make your work into your art.

So we decided to teach you how to think like an artist — and not just any artist. We’ve brought together five experienced, successful creative professionals from five different walks of life, and together we’re going to share how you can bring true creativity and artistic passion to the work you do. More than that, we’re going to translate each artist’s journey into honest-to-goodness action steps you can take to bring that same success to the work you do, no matter what that work is.

So if you are an accountant, this series is for you.

If you run a day care center, this series is for you.

If you write code or sales copy or sell widgets, this series is for you.

Maybe you’re a scientist or a math professor or a web developer or a camera technician. It doesn’t matter. Your creative impulse is in there, waiting to be given the chance to dynamize your work. You’ve got everything you need to grow your business beyond your wildest dreams. All you need now is to know how to use it.

That’s where we come in.

Our five wonderful guests — plus one bonus lecture we’re saving for last! — have agreed to sit down with us and share their process in excruciating detail. Each of them has had a successful creative career doing what moves them, and each will impart the action steps that got them to where they are and allowed them to make a living with their art. We’ll talk about their creative process and help you see how you can apply their methods to any business on the planet, one step at a time. These lectures will help you search out the meaning in your own work, give it depth and breadth, and inform it with the creative impulse that you assumed was unavailable to you.

If that sounds as incredible as we think it does (dude, we’re just about vibrating over here)… please read on.

The Creative Spark Plug: Tech Specs

The Creative Spark Plug is a 6-week lecture series designed to bring natural creative perspective to your business, and improve your ability to make a living doing what you love. In each lecture, we tackle the challenges that you will encounter in the course of doing your Great Work — and we have the benefit of five fantastic arts professionals who have first hand experience facing these challenges head-on.

John T. Unger

John specializes in impossibility remediation: If “they” say it can’t be done, he’s out to prove “them” wrong. Creative misinterpretation and seeing things that no one else does are the key to his success. John has been a full-time professional artist for a solid decade, and he’s traveled all over the experiential map: Poet, writer, tech geek, designer, illustrator, musician, teacher, actor — this man has been places, and he’s got more than a few strong opinions to share.

Chris Zydel

This amazing woman has spent the last thirty years actively and delightedly proving wrong all the people who told her that life is supposed to be dull and joyless… by insisting on living her own life in a singularly rich and deeply meaningful way. She’s been where you are, for it took her many years to believe in her own creativity — but once she got there, she began creating with joyful abandon. Chris’s work in helping others to find their creativity, whether they have “lost” their creative drive, or were under the (false) impression they were never creative in the first place, makes her a perfect addition to this lecture series, and we know you’ll agree.

Fabeku Fatunmise

Fabeku has been working with sound as a way of saying buhbye to stuck and
struggle and making life more awesome for the past 18 years. He uses sacred sound to release creativity and increase productivity in incredible ways. He’s got certifications and accreditations like crazy that prove he knows his stuff, and his personality and sense of humor simply shine. But the thing we really noticed? Was how totally into sound he is. He is thrilled and obsessed with music, and as a result his work — and his perspective — is unmatchable.

Natalie Christie

Natalie had a flourishing operatic performance career for most of her life. She has been renowned on an international scale, and she’s sung with (and for) some pretty amazing people. Not only does she know intimately the struggles of a career in classical singing, she also knows what it’s like to search for a different path when everyone else is telling you what you “should” be doing. She continues to explore her engagement in the opera world, as well as other aspects of herself that have a positive impact on the world around her: She writes on personal development, helps singers and non-singers alike, and is determined to assist people in living the life they’ve always wanted to live (regardless of where they started).

Paul Durban

Paul is a 20-year design veteran who works with media of all flavors — print, electronic, audio, video — and he’s seen just about everything the industry has to throw at someone. Pair that with the obsessive research habits he developed as a college professor, and Paul knows more about how to pretty-up information and A/V technologies than anyone we can name. He also has a unique outlook on life and work that will change the way you do business. When he started Blazonfire with his wife a year ago, they were inundated with projects — an overwhelming influx of work. That rush would never have stuck without Paul’s skill and wonderful set of values, and he’s going to take us through the tenets of his creative work in this series.

The Bonus Lecture: Emii

Emii is a rock/pop musician and singer whose new single is launching to the mainstream market on April 6th, 2010. She moved to New York when she was 18 and clawed her way up through the ranks of the independent music industry. She now lives in Los Angeles, signed with an independent label she believes in, supporting herself by making and performing music every day of her life. She is quite familiar with what it takes to turn a creative spark into a real living — and maybe more. We love this quote from Adrian Gurvitz (her producer) — “You could tell her forever she shouldn’t do something and she carries straight on doing it.” That’s how she’s gotten to where she is today. If anyone can provide real guidance on how to live life in the face of adversity, it’s Emii.

Lecture Content

In each lecture, we’ll discuss:

Each artist’s career from scratch to present — and the pivotal action steps that got them to where they are now.
Each artist’s unique creative process, and how they continually bring meaning and purpose into their work.
The challenges they’ve met along the way, and how they dealt with them when their resources were limited.
New perspectives on non-creative work that turns it into creative work — and how you can be your own kind of artist.
How you can take what this creative professional has done and apply it directly to your work — no matter what that work may be.

Here’s a clip from Paul Durban’s lecture to get you started:

Paul Durban on Creativity and Preparedness (MP3)

Each audio file is presented in easy-to-download MP3 format that you can play on your computer or burn to CD to listen to in the car, or upload to your iPod for your morning run. And this package isn’t limited to just the audio lectures!

Kick-In-The-Pants Emails

It would be one thing for us to give you the audio and leave it at that. But we want you to really apply this stuff. We want it to make a difference for you, and we want to make it easy for you to follow through on the advice our artists are giving. So when we deliver each week’s lecture recording, we’re also going to send you a set of kick-in-the-pants emails to help you get moving on applying these concepts to your work and life at large. We know that the idea of buying a product like this results in that little worry: “God, I should really implement this stuff! It would change everything! But what if life gets in the way and I just… don’t?”

That’s not going to happen this time.

We’re going to help you keep track of everything these awesome people suggest, and we’re not going to let you forget about it. Each week you’ll receive at least two email booster shots with overviews, suggestions, action steps and reminders to make sure you get to work on integrating what you’re learning. And there’s one more thing that we’ll be delivering with those emails…

The Creative Spark Plug Workbook

As these lectures are produced, we’ll be compiling the Creative Spark Plug Workbook. Based on your needs and feedback, we’ll be sending you worksheets with essential exercises and thought experiments for you to work on throughout the week (and throughout the series). With all our artists’ bios and gorgeous illustrations by Martin Whitmore, the workbook will be the impetus that jump-starts your ability to take action and give your business the creative combustion it needs to be truly extraordinary.

Anyone who spends time at Ideaschema knows that our big focus and relentlessly-sought-out goal is ACTION, and this workbook will be the thing that spins you into action, too.

The Wrap Q&A with Megan M.

Once you’ve gone through all five audio lectures — and the bonus! — there’s one special session on Week 6. That week, we’ll open up the floor for Q&A, and Megan M. will help you through any obstacles or confusions you’re having in your effort to apply the series content to your life and work. This session will be LIVE, and we will spend as much time as necessary answering your questions and helping you with your thing. If you can’t make it to the live Q&A, you can email in your questions — and we’ll deliver the recording to you, plus a text outline of the questions and answers we covered so that you can integrate your changes even more easily.

We are determined to cover all the bases here — and we believe we can make the difference you’re looking for.

How about giving it a try?

The Creative Spark Plug Lecture Series, $197

We’ve taken CSP off the shelves for repackaging. Thank you for the great first run! We promise it will be back soon.

The price, and all that jazz.

The price of this lecture series is $197. If you really love your bullet points, that’s:

5 brilliant artistic professionals featured in 5 weeks of MP3 audio lectures, giving you their best creative advice.
1 bonus lecture with the rock diva who took her ramen-and-bagels grocery budget and turned it into a full-fledged recording contract.
A live Q&A session with Megan M. to answer all your questions and brainstorm solutions on Week 6.
Lecture text outlines and overviews, so that you can go back and look over the content without re-listening to the recordings.
A weekly set of kick-in-the-pants emails to keep you moving and paying attention to your goals.
The Creative Spark Plug Workbook, page by page, to set your focus on making this series work for you.

We feel pretty strongly about getting this into the hands of people who can make it count, and although we know many people who have no trouble paying this price for the awesome materials we’ve put together, we also know that some people aren’t in a position to do so. If you really can’t afford $197 all at once, send Megan an email and let her know your situation. We’re not above payment arrangements, because we’ve been there too.

How we feel about refunds: We know it’s tough to be sure if you’re making the right choice when you can’t see the product before you buy it — this isn’t a bookstore and we don’t have those cool headphone stations so that you can listen before you buy. Our favorite policy ever is one we’ve stolen from Naomi, who stole it in turn from Mark Silver at Heart of Business. He calls it the Backwards and Forwards Guarantee:

If this lecture series isn’t for you, we’ll give you a FULL refund of the money you spent. Your part of the deal? You let us know if you are aware of someone who can really use it, and we’ll give them access. Plus, if you let us know what didn’t work for you, we’ll either update and improve the series based on your recommendations — or we’ll suggest other resources that might help you out.

Here’s what will happen once you hit the buy button: First, it will pop up an E-Junkie shopping cart — either in this window, or in a new window. E-Junkie is a third party payment processor, just like PayPal. What this means is that E-Junkie keeps your information just as secure as PayPal does — and we don’t share ANY of your information with ANYONE. EVER.

Once you hit the “Checkout” button, you’ll be taken through a PayPal dialogue that has “Megan Elizabeth Morris” at the top of the page. That’s where you can pay with your PayPal account, or any credit card if you don’t have an account. (Some people have a hard time finding this option. It’s near the bottom of the PayPal page before you log in, and it says “Don’t have a PayPal account?”) Once you pay, you’ll get a confirmation email from megan@ideaschema.org, one from E-Junkie with your purchase details, and one from PayPal confirming the transfer. Keep a particular eye out for the first one, since it will give you all your start-up information so that you can dive into the initial content right away!

That’s all there is to it. Once again, email Megan if you need help. And good luck moving forward — we can’t wait to see where this takes you!

The Creative Spark Plug Lecture Series, $197

We’ve taken CSP off the shelves for repackaging. Thank you for the great first run! We promise it will be back soon.