David Brooks, a New York Times writer, wrote a piece not long ago which touched on my guest on this episode of the Life Well Lived Podcast. Titled "Longing for an Internet cleanse", Brooks’s short article lamented how we have come to view and experience time in the instantaneous “everything now” age we live in. The article was subtitled “a small rebellion against the quickening of time”, and Brooks wrote tellingly about the work and words of Mako Fujimura.

Brooks wrote:

"There is a rapid, dirty river of information coursing through us all day. If you’re in the news business, or a consumer of the news business, your reaction to events has to be instant or it is outdated. If you’re on social media, there are these swarming mobs who rise out of nowhere, leave people broken and do not stick around to perform the patient Kintsugi act of gluing them back together. Probably like you, I’ve felt a great need to take a break from this pace every once in a while and step into a slower dimension of time. Mako’s paintings are very good for these moments … Mako once advised me to stare at one of his paintings for 10 to 12 minutes. I thought it would be boring, but it was astonishing. As I stood still in front of it, my eyes adjusted to the work. What had seemed like a plain blue field now looked like a galaxy of color."

Mako Fujimura is a world-renowned Japanese-American artist, writer and advocate for creativity.

His fellow artist Robert Kushner has described Mako’s work as “a new kind of art, about hope, healing, redemption and refuge”.

Mako’s latest book, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, is published this month by Yale University Press. 

It is an exploration of creativity’s quintessential—and often overlooked—role in the spiritual life. 

Conceived over thirty years of painting and creating in his studio, this book is Mako Fujimura’s broad and deep exploration of creativity and the spiritual aspects of “making” as he comes into the quiet space in the studio in a discipline of awareness, waiting, prayer, and praise.

During this conversation we try to explore this sense, of creativity and wonder and spirituality, and how those two things align.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• What the experience of creative flow feels like
• The gift of creativity, and how Mako no longer fears that gift being taken away
• The influence of memory and experience, both from his own life and the lives of his ancestors, on his work
• Global diversity, warring factions and the oneness of humanity
• The battle between artistic freedom and commercial success
• Why he writes
• What Mako learned about the universality of experience from some time spent in Cork, Ireland
• How religion and church doctrine has failed humanity, and where we, individually and collectively, might go from here

I hope you enjoy this conversation with artist and writer Mako Fujimura, about art, creativity, spirituality, beauty, freedom and life, as much as I did.

TIMESTAMPS

1:00: A small rebellion against the quickening of time
7:30: What creative flow might feel like
20:00: Does Mako fear the gift of creativity disappearing or being taken away?
20:45: His art and how it might be described, through Japanese lineage and training
28:00: Individual experience added to intergenerational and ancestral memory
30:00: Race, nationality, culture, individual expression and the oneness of humanity
39:42: How we might prepare ourselves for success
41:10: Lewis Hyde's book The Gift, and how the gift economy can peacefully co-exist with capitalistic society
49:39: The battle between freedom and commercial success
53:10: Why he writes
1:00:00: Church and religious expression and where we go from

Productivity is one of those areas that has exploded into a major industry over the past couple of decades.

The concept of productivity is something that started out, really, in the 18th and 19th centuries from an industrial capitalist imperative to “produce” as much as possible from the resources available. Out of the American baby boom generation which came of age in the corporate landscape of the 1970s and ‘80s came two major milestones in the history of personal productivity that have influenced the way so many of us do so many things: firstly, the book Getting Things Done by David Allen was published in 2001, which was described by Wired magazine as “a new cult for the info age” and the Guardian as ideas that are nothing short of life-changing", and secondly, and more broadly, the rise of the Internet as an almost free tool available to almost everybody, and which with its array of social networks and apps, many of them driven by the technology companies of California’s Silicon Valley, has transformed the way we do everything.

The guest on this episode is Khe Hy, the founder of Rad Reads, a collection of essays and blogs and workbooks and techniques which takes a wise, perhaps even spiritual, approach to productivity. 

Khe has built Rad Reads after what he calls his “third of a life crisis”, when he quit Wall Street after 14 years working in the financial world. 

Among the things we talk about are:

• The life lessons he learned from his career in high finance
• How productivity might fit into happiness
• How he thinks about the concepts of doing and being
• Tools that help us get things done, and what we might need to do first
• Khe's powerful “$10,000 per hour” framework, which allows us to consider the value of the things we do in the context of two simple questions
• The coronavirus pandemic, and what Khe has learned about himself and his place in the world from the events of the past 12 months.

Timestamps:

7:00: "Third of a life crisis" ... "Ambition treadmill to nowhere" ... 
11:00: Lessons about money from 14 years on Wall Street
14:00: The power of compounding
16:00: We are our own worst enemies
17:20: Understanding how the system works
21:00: Productivity and happiness
25:30: Doing vs being
36:00: The three key components of productivity
43:30: The place of tools
48:30: The $10,000 per hour framework
54:40: What he's learned about himself from the pandemic year

This is Episode Number 35 of the Life Well Lived Podcast, with the co-founder of Creating the Future, Hildy Gottlieb.

Hildy Gottlieb is a social scientist and the founder of an organisation called Creating the Future.

Creating the Future is focused on helping people and organisations to change the systems they find themselves in, to aim those systems at bringing out the best in people, all by changing the questions they ask.

The movement is a multi-year experiment to answer the question, “If people everywhere are asking the kinds of questions that bring out the best in themselves and those around them, how much more humane could the world be?”

During this wide-ranging conversation we talk about:

• The discovery that despite great work being done by bright people in forward-thinking organisations, nothing was changing
• Creating the Future’s "Catalytic Thinking" framework, based on research on what makes positive change happen - and what, specifically, is not happening when people struggle to create change?
• The mission of Creating the Future to conduct a multi-year experiment with Catalytic Thinking, and share the lessons learned through the work so that anybody can create change
• The blurring of the lines between traditional for-profit, non-profit and public sector organisations and the trend towards "profit for purpose", "conscious capitalism" and other ideas around "business for good"
• The disconnect between the stock market and the world that the vast majority of people live in
• How big systems, which can cause a convoluted mass of problems in so many ways for so many people, might be challenged and changed
• The concept of “collective enoughness”, and why competition has in many ways created the unsustainability that the world is grappling to deal with now
• How systems have coached generations of children to feel not enough, and how that manifests in tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world
• The neuroscience of thinking from a place of fear, and how it is utilised by advertisers, marketers and politicians, and how love can overcome that fear
• How trying to ask the right question is the wrong approach
• Navigating the "messy middle" between where we find ourselves and where we might want to go

I do hope you enjoy this conversation with the co-founder of Creating the Future, Hildy Gottlieb.

Links mentioned in the show:

• Creating a Better World Means Asking Better Questions [Stanford Review article]
• The Creating The Future website
• Watch Hildy Gottlieb's TEDx talk here