In last week’s class, we have watched two TED talks, which are Stefan Sagmeister’s 7 Rules For Making More Happiness and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Your Elusive Creative Success. We have learned more about happiness in design from Stefan Sagmeister. We were also introduced to Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer of Eat Pray Love, and we have learned about creating a protective psychological construct for creative people and why creative people have the negative stigma of being mentally ill. These two TED talks were very important to me and I have learned a lot from those two.
In Stefan Sagmeister’s TED talk, 7 Rules For making More Happiness, Sagmeister continues to talk about happiness in design, which we have gone over two weeks ago. He was doing a documentary about his own happiness and he wanted to see if he can train his mind as he would with his body in order to have an improved feeling. During this time, Sagmeister looked at several surveys regarding happiness, and he found people who are sociable and married are much happier than those who are introverted and single. I personally disagree with his findings because I believe that anyone can be happy even if they are introverted or single. I am a single introvert myself and I am happy in my life. Someone can be the most sociable person in the world, but may be unhappy in their life. We can’t just assume that if people unhappy because they are introvert or if they are happy because they are extroverts. For all we know, it could be the other way around.
Sagmeister goes on to share an analogy from one of his fellow TED speaker, Jonathan Haidt. Haidt’s analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind is compared with the human being the conscious mind and the big elephant being the unconscious mind. According to this analogy, the human (the conscious) thinks he can tell the elephant (the unconscious) what to do, but the elephant (the unconscious) has his own ideas. Sagmeister then reflected this analogy on the times we are living in now, where we let our unconscious minds influence our decisions in ways we are not even aware of. Then, he states that in order to make yourself happy as a designer, you have to do more of the things you like to do and less of the things you do not like to do. It would helpful in knowing what it is one actually likes doing.
Sagmeister gave a list of rules for making happiness in the design. The first rule is to think about ideas and content without pressure. You must have a project with a healthy deadline so you can freely explore you ideas. The second rule is to travel to new places. Travelling can have a great influence on the design with culture. The third rule is to use a wide variety of tools and techniques. Avoid sitting in front of the computer all day and use various techniques in your designs. The fourth rule is to work on projects that matter to you. The design project should be close to your heart. The fifth rule is to have things come back from the printer done well. You need to have the best end result for the designs. The sixth rule is to get feedback from people who see our work. The projects should have visible impacts for people to give feedback. The seventh and last rule is to design a project that feels partly new and partly familiar. The designs should be something new but at the same time, it should be something that people can easily relate to.
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s Your Elusive Creative Success, Gilbert discussed about her success with her book Eat, Pray, Love. After the success of her book, people come up to Gilbert all worried. They would ask her if she’s afraid that she would “never top this book” or if she’s going to continue writing books and none of them would ever going to be like Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert remembered that she was asked similar when she first shared her aspirations to be a writer. She was asked if she was scared that she would never get any form of success. She admits that she is fearful of those ideas, stating that her greatest success “is behind her” I see where she’s coming from in terms of getting more success. I think that it is a fear that anyone in the creative career can have because everyone wants success and no one wants to be a “one hit wonder.” They want to be recognized for everything that they do in their creative careers, so having no success or just being a one hit wonder would be crushing.
Gilbert is uncomfortable with this logic of artistry being linked to mental illnesses. It seems as if people who have creative careers have a reputation for being mentally unstable and are more likely to commit suicide than those in other career fields. Even if it wasn’t suicide, creative people seem to be undone by their very own works. The sad thing about this is that when we see this, all we do is look the other way because we have heard this so many times that it’s practically engraved in our minds and we have accepted the idea of artistry leading to suffering and sadness. I am uncomfortable with this logic too. Some creative people are perfectly fine in terms of mental health, so cannot jump to conclusion and automatically say that they are mentally ill. There are some creative people who do have mental illnesses, but do not let that hinder their lives or creative careers. I should know this, because I suffer from Obsessive- Compulsive Disorder. My OCD does not hinder me in my life and it won’t hinder my career. I agree with Elizabeth Gilbert in encouraging creative minds to live.
So Gilbert states that in order for her not to go down that dark path, she has to create a protective psychological construct for herself. Therefore she had to find a way to create a safe distance between her as she’s writing and her natural anxiety. She was searching for better ways than we currently have now that would help creative people manage the emotional risks of creativity. The search led her to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, where it was believed that there were some magical divine spirits, called daemons or “geniuses”, that were guiding and protecting the creative people. Then it was up until the Renaissance Times where it was ultimately decided that the creative people are geniuses themselves. There was pressure being put on the creative people because now other people have high expectations of them, which was probably the reasons why we have lost several creative within the past 500 years. This is disappointing for me because it seems like society has put creative people in a category by itself and they expect a lot out of the creative people. As an artist, I do want to show people my best works, but I don’t want unnecessarily high expectations to be placed on me. All I want is for my art to be appreciated, and I want the same for other creative people.
In my opinion, the overall moral of last week’s class and the two TED talks is to maintain happiness and sanity in the creativity. There’s already this negative assumption of creative people being mentally ill and it’s due to society putting a lot of pressure on them. This show that you have to be happy not only in design, but in any creative field that you are in. Therefore, make sure that you are indeed happy with your own creative work.
