I have often looked at ancient structures with wonder and silently pondered, “How exactly did they build that?”

From the Great Pyramids, to the perfect stone fittings of Machu Picchu, to the pillars of Stonehenge.

Below is a six minute video clip that goes a long way in explaining how Stonehenge might have been built. You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate how this one man, Wally Wallington, shows how he can move Stonehenge-like pillars weighing 22,000 lbs and move a barn over 300 ft. - all by himself, using only gravity and his ingenuity - enjoy!.

The other day I was thinking about all the conflict in the world and how people get personal, picky, angry, petty, fight and go to war.

Apparently Joseph Stalin (the infamous dictator) was purported to have said, “There are people and there are problems. When you get rid of the people, you get rid of the problems.” which would explain why he had no problem in killing 20 million plus people but as history has shown, he didn’t solve the problems.

As a creative consultant I love problems because I know that problems are merely the flip side of solutions. Thus every problem is really an opportunity in disguise - kind of like creative tension in that without minor chords music would be dull and flat.

And we humans are very creative in so many ways - e.g., some are gifted with numbers, others are gifted with their hands, others are gifted with their sense of compassion and of course there are those who are gifted in the arts and sciences.*

So while individual creative gifts might be awesome, such as the individual works of masters like Pablo Picasso, it is team creativity that really makes our human race awesome. The lone inventor is cool but the organization that can send people safely to the moon and back, well - this is a feat beyond the power of one.

The video clip below is a great example of the power of many when operating to the beat of harmonic cooperation for a goal that is greater than that of each of the individual contributions.

It is a video of Perpetuum Jazzile - an a cappella jazz choir from Slovenia. I’m not certain how many people are on stage but it is all voice, no instruments and they do an amazing rendition of “Africa” - the song originally made famous in the 1980s by the rock band Toto.

The musicianship of how creatively this Slovenian group start out the piece by mimicking the sounds of rain and thunder is very creative (i.e., they simulate an African thunderstorm with their hands and feet). The beat box voicing is awesome as is all the other voices - truly inspiring!

I’ve never been to Slovenia but the harmonic beauty and creativity expressed in this video reminds me of the inner beauty, common love for music, art, creativity and science that we humans share universally.

It also reminds of the power in numbers and the magic we can accomplish together when harmonically aligned - enjoy!

*Setting up all those mics and getting balanced levels is more electrical science than artistic musical creativity but ask any audio engineer or producer and they will tell you that their mic’ing science is also an art!

Last month I did something I almost never do - enter a writing contest.

Adele Annesi, a local editor who presented a workshop last Fall that I attended, hosted a blog writing contest in April with her friend Jamie Cat Callan, author of "French Women Don’t Sleep Alone" and "The Writers Toolbox."

The contest was seemingly simple in that Adele and Jamie provided the opening line, "We were drinking champagne and losing our shirts." and contestants were to add 500 words to this line and tell a short story.

So one morning while staring into my coffee cup, I decided it would be a good challenge to push my creativity into the fictional unknown and see what I could come up with.

I hit pen to paper, well actually wireless keyboard and mouse to wordprocessor, and voila - came up with the following entry that actually won!

This was a surprise for me on a couple levels - a) most of my writing for past couple years as been business centric - writing for business web sites, multimedia scripts, and other left brain commercial activities that serve clients and pay bills; b) fictional writing is also something I’m not well versed in as documentary style writing is more my default when writing for myself; c) winning gave me an emotional boost to reconsider my talents and has inspired me to commit to more writing exercises that are just for fun and help me to expand my story telling capabilities.

Okay, I’ve rambled so here is my winning entry as submitted.

Champagne and Strawberries

We were drinking champagne and losing our shirts. Well, technically we were loosening our shirts button by button, but it was obvious to all around us that ultimately the shirts were on their way to becoming untethered to our bodies as we sat pool side in Puerto Vallarta drinking Veuve Clicquot champagne flavored with fresh strawberries.

Once upon a time, Veuve Clicquot was a premium champagne but then they sold out to a big conglomerate. Thus that once famous orange bottle, previously known as the best buy for carefully cultivated bubbly, is now known in the beverage trade as "agent orange" given how said conglomerate buys any-old grapes from any-old vineyard. Regardless, our bubblies were mildly chilled and a delight to sip on that hot afternoon.

Sharon actually liked the idea of losing her shirt as she was sporting a bright orange bikini under her gorgeously simple, white flowing shirt - one with a full column of ten handmade wooden buttons in the front. I had only three buttons on my lime green polo shirt. Obviously my torso could not compete with her perfectly sculpted curves endowed by mother nature and years of working out. But yes, one could say I too liked the idea of shirt losing provided it was mutual.

It was Sharon’s idea to start a game of spin the empty Perrier water bottle while waiting for lunch. The premise started simply enough in that with each successful spin the opposing partner would loosen a button and when all buttons were open, off came the shirt. And yet each button held a mystical power that once loosened, started to reveal the increasing desires of flesh. Powerful desires that began to bubble to the surface akin to the bubbles in our fluted glasses - slowly, gently, freely, twinkling on their rise to the surface.

Luck was on my side that afternoon as Sharon had lost eight of her ten buttons while I still had two of mine. This luck might have had something to do with my right knee propped under the table in such a way that I was able to tilt the table a hair, thereby influencing the bottle spins ever so gently. So even though Sharon had started with a button head start, there we sat even with two buttons each to go when lunch arrived.

We ate our food, laughed with the oceans breezes, toasted our new record deal, then ordered another bottle of agent orange to go. We paid our bill, grabbed the new bottle and headed back to our private bungalow. Once there, we kept our focus for the next 20 minutes and penned our new song, then we lost our shirts and gave into desire.

Okay, the song title is still a work in progress but you get the idea, "We lost our shirts to set our minds free so our bodies could surf souls intoxicated with agent orange."

Essentially it’s a remix of, "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Bikini."

Creating this post is a mixed bag for me as many of you who know me, know that I advocate that Creativity is a Science and not an art or some abstract personality-based thing. And, I even have the mathematical proof to back this creative science which I wrote about in the late 1990s and published in my book, Always Creative, where I presented the math - i.e., Creativity = Infinity minus Pie-R-Squared, where Pie-R-Squared is the area of a defined circle of what’s working.

But the science of creativity aside, living creatively is also a mindset and two things recently reminded me of this.

First, I was in the process of digitizing many of the motivational tapes in my library, one of which was a six cassette series by Nightingale-Conant that featured Dr. Wayne Dyer’s “How to be a no-limit person.” Note I had purchased these tapes in the early 1980s long before CDs and MP3 Players hit the scene hence the cassette conversions.

At the end of that series, they gave a free sample lecture from one of Wayne’s other books, “What do you really want for your children” where Dr. Dyer talks about creativity. In this sample lecture, which I’m including here in this post as mp3 audio clip, Dr. Dyer defines creativity as follows: “… You don’t become creative by being like everybody else … Especially if you were raised to fit in and be like others … Creativity is about how you apply your own matchless-self to everything you do …”

And here is the mp3 file as a down load click here

To a great extent I like what he says and concur, but I have some problems in that he is giving a philosophical approach first without providing the scientific basis on which such philosophy can ride. Thus on some level he is promoting the idea of creativity as being merely an approach to life when that is only partially correct, which leads me to the other data point.

Around the time I was digitizing said cassettes, I enjoyed a lively debate with one of our pool attendants during a quiet afternoon when not many others were pool side. She started the conversation with, “I’m just not creative, at least not compared to my brother and this accounting class I’m taking is really soooo uncreative.”

I laughed. As a business school trained accountant, I told her that accounting can be extremely creative, just look at Enron, MCI-WorldCom, forecasts of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, etc. And one can quickly grasp how numbers and the numbering of numbers can get wildly creative.

There is even an old accounting joke to this effect that goes something like this:

An employer is looking to hire a new controller and interviews three people: one young, one middle aged, one older, all CPAs.

The employer asks the first prospect, the younger one, “How much is one plus one?” To which the young accountant says, “Two.” “Are you sure?” “Yes absolutely. One plus one is always two.”

Then the employer interviews the second prospect, the middle aged CPA, and asks the same question, “How much is one plus one?” To which the CPA said, “Well, it’s usually two, but sometimes it can be two and a half or one and three quarters depending on how you value inventory, spoilage, returns, etc., but yes, most of the times one plus one is two.”

Then the employer interviews the third CPA and asks the same question, “How much is one plus one?” To which the older CPA states, “What do you want it to be?”

Guess who got the job and guess why we have so much fuzzy accounting in governments and public companies despite our best efforts to legislate transparency

Back to the pool attendant.

Ultimately our conversation got to how creativity-expressed comes in many shapes and styles - e.g., Your creativity might not look like others as she was comparing her creativity level to her brother’s and how he seemingly can riff with new ideas in a given dept and she can’t quite compete in said dept.; We spoke about how creativity comes in many forms and how visual creativity is different from accounting creativity which is different from music and/or painting and/or acting and/or physical creativity, etc…

Which brings me to the final point and that is of brainstorming. It seems like most people think that brainstorming is being creative when in truth, brainstorming and idea generation is only 25% of the creative science.

The other 75% of the creative process is where the rubber really hits the road. This includes selecting one or more of the ideas from the brainstorming process, implementing said ideas, measuring the results of said implementation, then analyzing the results by comparing them to where you were before you had the ideas you just implemented.

I’ve even heard this from the heads of top advertising agencies. In particular, one president was discussing a certain weight-loss food brand and he said, “Chuck, coming up with the new marketing ideas is the smallest part of the process, perhaps less than 10%, and yes it is the fun part. But, the implementation of the marketing campaign is the larger part of the process. Project management of getting all the items printed, out into the stores on time and within budget, without any mistakes in copy, colors, brand messaging, etc.”

This agency executive even went on to say that his team got paid $2 million per year to manage the account. One million was for the creative consultations and the other million was to manage and implement. He confessed that the second million was a royal pain and full of traps and gatchas and that he would gladly give up that second million but also knew that it would only be a matter of time before he would lose the first million if all he did was the creative. Thus while this executive could riff on new marketing ideas in his sleep, he also knew that creativity expressed and implemented is a package and not just brainstorming.

This audio interview is approximately 35 minutes in length and an 8.6 meg mp3 file

Some of the Themes Discussed in This Interview with Howard Include:

• Why capitalism should be re-invented …
• The ethical imperative of saving neighbors …
• Institutional growth in the record industry ala Warner Brothers vs CBS …
• How to feel great about your work no matter where you are or who you are working for …
• The cost of ripping people off and Enron reflections …
• Selling commodities versus selling novelties …
• Getting to the heart of art, science, and everyday things …
• Saving Western Civilization and the miracle fabric of kings …
• The protest industry …
• And, the truths behind Vision Quest Live that will change your work life forever plus more …

About Howard Bloom
Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery”–the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he’d invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals…a skill which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.