How To Be Creative’ – from Gapingvoid, (3 of 3)

The last in this three part series interpreting Gapingvoid’s How To Be Creative tips as it relates to cool towns and beta communities…

21. Selling out is harder than it looks. Don’t water down/commercialize your ideas before you absolutely need to – you may be doing everyone a disservice. Our beta communities have a ‘Building Exterior/Interior Image Brainstorm’ where we encourage everyone to submit whatever place in the world inspires them.

22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself. In other words, do, don’t talk about why you want to. Beta communities don’t leave you a choice but to ‘do’, otherwise nothing will get built, which is why…

23. Worrying about “Commercial vs. Artistic” is a complete waste of time.

24. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually. This illustrates the beauty of the beta community’s social network – participants find inspiration comes naturally just being around so many creative people, and its online bulletin board captures those fleeting epiphanies for posterity. I can’t emphasize the value of this enough.

25. You have to find your own schtick. People in beta communities not only have roles, they create ones they want to have, like a green-minded architect without a practicing license contributing exciting design examples, or simply a born leader who never had a chance to lead, but none of it matters if you don’t…

26. Write from the heart.

27. The best way to get approval is not to need it. Developers and investors repeatedly say the reason they don’t build walkable, green, indie-business oriented destinations is that the market won’t support it. Beta communities allow these ignored, progressive markets to build their own such places without their approval. This is when beta community members soon realize…

28. Power is never given. Power is taken.

29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually. If you suffer for your art, you suffer. If you sell out, you suffer from the accusation. You’ll suffer either way, so you may as well build the live/work/play destination of your dreams in the process.

30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it. Here’s a gold nugget from director Tim Burton to gapingvoid author, Hugh MacLeod, “If you have the creative bug, it isn’t ever going to go away. I’d just get used to the idea of dealing with it.” If you’ve got it, flaunt it… and throughout your community.

31. Remain frugal. There’s a whole category on this site for this one, and it’s a fundamental theme for all beta communities and their resulting cool places. Why? Because one can’t always balance the fine line between doing only what you want to do and selling out :)

About The Author

neilkt