Eating Veggies & Creativity for Breakfast

Your Daily Dose of Sunshine - Today’s Inspiration

• Beck’s Spray-Painted Vegetables Lyrics

• The Randomness of Creativity

• Salvador Dali and that Mustache

Beck’s Spray-Painted Vegetables Lyrics

Today, the song, Loser, by Beck came on the radio. This is one of those songs that makes zero sense and is somehow really fun to try to sing along to if you’re into Rock and Roll. There are lyrics like “spray-paint the vegetables,” and “get crazy with the Cheeze Whiz.” It was released in 1994 and it’s been listened to 403,579,703 times on Spotify and 231 Million times on YouTube music.

Makes no sense whatsoever, and is crazy popular. What does that tell us about the world we live in?

There is an official music video - but it is so far from business appropriate, I won’t share it. And, don’t go looking it up if you’re not ready to see weird at an elevated level, and youth drug culture. Stay away! There - crisis averted.

But it got me thinking about some of the greatest creative minds out there, and how some of their ideas are far-flung, out of this world bizarre, or verging on ridiculous! And how much I love them for it.

The Randomness of Creativity

For some reason, I felt the need to search the internet for scholarly articles in the area of randomness and creativity. It didn’t feel like something I could just speak about from my own perspective, although, the ideas that waft into my brain are certainly random, and the inspirations for my own art and poetry come from every which way. I came across a number of articles, and thus the rabbit hole of curiosity began.

Okay, I may have gone too scholarly. My head hurts now. But the general idea of semantic space is being able to capture meaning in language. Creative people can hear one word and be reminded - make larger leaps between associations - to other words, concepts, ideas, or memories.

As a poet, I can see a cloud formation and have it turn into a poem about a jazz singer. Or hear a nonsense song lyric and have it bring me to scientific research articles on brain waves and data mining that is far over my head, but fascinating.

I remember once learning that the neural pathways of our brains look very much like the Universe. And the idea that creatives travel further in semantic space makes me think of deep space exploration and, “Oh, the places we can go!”

The above is not a great image - mostly because of the incredible scale difference. One is magnified exponentially, the other is being captured via telescope.

Where am I going with this? That there are inspirations everywhere, that creativity breeds curiosity, or perhaps the other way around, and that this is a very good thing. Let the Universe inside breathe and expand just like the Universe itself is doing. We can put away scrolling for a minute, and learn something, anything, and have it affect the way we work the next day. Truly.

The things I study for fun often come up in conversations when I’m working as a salesperson with leads and prospects. I cannot tell you the number of conversations I’ve had that started as a normal cold call, and then some turn of phrase tuned me in to the idea that this person may be interested in the same things I am, and the dialogue begins, and the next thing we know, we are curious to get to know one another better. The beginning of rapport.

I don’t think it’s all the Sales Books we read that make the next sale. It’s the reading for pleasure, brain expansion, spirit of inquiry, inquisitiveness, and joy found in learning that level us up in the world of communication with others. What do you think?

Salvador Dali and that Mustache

Thinking of nonsense and creativity had Salvador Dali on my mind all day as well. My dad introduced me to this artist when I was young, and I’ve been a fan all my life.

We saw his Lincoln in Dalivision on display at a gallery in San Francisco. I didn’t get it at first. My dad kept having me step back from the painting and then had me blur my eyes. When the image of Abraham Lincoln’s face emerged from out of a bunch of painted boxes and a female figure, I was stunned. I think I cried. I wouldn’t put it past me. Even as a kid, I could be moved to tears by art.

Next I fell in love with his landscapes and melting clocks. You only have to work selling corporate gifts during the holidays and racking up 16 hour days for a few weeks every year to identify with the melting clock!

Dali didn’t just paint abstract, wildly imaginative art, he lived and reveled in the absurd. He once filled a friend’s Rolls Royce with 500 kilograms of cauliflower and drove it to the Sorbonne.

And with that, I think I’ve come full circle with the vegetables and art compilation of influences!

I hope you have a fantastic day filled with great conversations around interesting topics that make you feel alive! Please feel free to tell me your most random bit of conversation and the spark that it caused. I'd love to hear about it.

I’m so glad you’re here.