creativity – Small Business Odyssey

March 2, 2012

Eckhart Tolle Talks to Google: Technology and Consciousness

Bradley Horowitz interviewed Eckhart Tolle at Google and discovered Tolle’s views on technology and consciousness. The interview in front of Google staff is available on YouTube or can be played directly from this blog (90 minutes – 60 minutes interview and 30 minutes Q & A).

It would be a bit of a stretch to call it an ‘interview’ – for example, Horowitz asked Tolle, “What is Wisdom?’ and 20 minutes later was able to ask another question.

The responses from Eckhart Tolle to a limited number of interview questions were both profound and practical. He started off by extolling the openness and transparency of the Google work environment and its conduciveness to creativity. However, he had a warning, ‘We are in danger of losing ourselves in technology’.

Eckhart Tolle’s Question: Are you losing yourself in technology?

A key point that Eckhart Tolle makes in the interview is that you are constantly bombarded by information and get sucked into the endless stream of new knowledge. The consequence, he suggests, is that you can lose yourself in technology. He argues that you end up living in your mind and not in your consciousness which fundamentally determines who you are. So if you are not connected to your real self, you can become confused, over-powered and disorientated by more and more information.

Tolle advances the idea that living in your mind all the time creates a number of core issues. You become preoccupied with problems and with the future or the past – you are not in the present. He maintains that it is only in the Power of the Now (the present moment) that you become truly creative. Being in the moment taps into your consciousness and your creative existence. It ultimately contributes to your productivity because you are able to better use your time.

Eckhart Tolle: The return to consciousness

Tolle suggests that you can stop yourself even for a minute or two (or 30 seconds) to tap into the present moment. You can do this on a number of levels:

your sensory perception – seeing and feeling your surroundings and the energy embedded in the objects in your environment
your inner body – getting in touch with your own body and inner sensations (e.g. how you feel in the moment)
your consciousness – the essential you.

Tolle offers a number of simple ways to access this consciousness and your essential self. He proposes a number of simple steps that you can take to still your mind and get in touch with your consciousness:

fix your gaze on something natural, e.g. a plant, the sky, the trees outside your window
look at some image on your computer screen that you have added to serve as a meditation reminder or catalyst
be conscious of your in-breath and your out-breath for a moment – conscious breathing.

He maintains that if you practise being in the moment often enough you will attain a new level of consciousness, increased creativity and a better quality of life – you will actually live, not just think. The other key benefit that Eckhart Tolle offers is that your problems will fall away because you will have new insights and perspectives that will help to dissolve your issues.

It is intriguing to watch Eckhart Tolle talk to managers and staff at Google (the epitomy of technology), about the dangers of technology and the need for a return to consciousness to maintain the quality of our human lives.

February 18, 2012February 18, 2012

Procrastination: The Enemy of Productivity

Procrastination can have many manifestations but ultimately it impacts heavily on your productivity. Some authors suggest that procrastination is putting off important tasks in favor of less important tasks or doing tasks you enjoy rather than tasks that will lead you to your goal.

There are many reasons why we procrastinate. In my personal productivity course I discuss fear of failure and fear of success as possible causes. In this blog post, I will look at procrastination in terms of pursuing our preferences, over doing what we should do in order to be productive.

[Image credit: Procrastination Flowchart by jean-louis zimmermann]

Procrastination: doing what you love rather than what will make you productive

One of the manifestations of your procrastination could be that you avoid the mundane, routine tasks that are necessary to realize and maintain your goals. If you are a creative-type person, you will find yourself spending time on creating new things – new websites, blog posts or other endeavors – at the expense of doing things that are necessary to move you closer to your goals – things that would enhance your productivity in terms of goal achievement.

Sometimes we can become productive in the wrong things – we can concentrate on the 80% of things that don’t lead directly to our goals and ignore the 20% of tasks that do. Yaro Starak describes this 8o/20 rule in the following terms:

… the important thing to understand is that in your life there are certain activities you do (your 20 percent) that account for the majority (your 80 percent) of your happiness and outputs.

If you focus only on the things that you enjoy, then you will avoid the things that are less exciting but that contribute more to your goals. In fact, one of the things that have been identified about successful people is that each day they do first the things that they don’t like doing but see as necessary for goal achievement (before they do the things they like). This daily discipline is a way they overcome procrastination to improve their productivity and achieve their goals in life.

So if you want to improve your personal productivity, it pays to look at the important tasks that you tend to avoid because they are routine or boring. Ask yourself how you could give them a new priority, instead of leaving them to last (when you invariably have no time to complete them).

It may be you are putting off social bookmarking, writing that important blog post, updating your browser or making simple (but important changes) to your website – all in favor of enjoying endless interactions on websites such as Facebook or Squidoo. Alternatively, you may be avoiding engaging on these social networks because you find logging in, reading and commenting boring tasks.

You really have to take a close look at your procrastination and determine what is going on for you, if you want to improve your productivity.

February 9, 2012February 10, 2012

How I Created an Animated Music Video from my Montville Photos with Animoto

image of Animoto HD video - View from Montville

Animoto is a state-of-the-art program that enables you to very easily convert photos into animated, music videos. In a previous post, I discussed three levels of membership of Animoto – Free, Plus and Business.

In this post, I want to focus on how I created an Animoto video from photos taken during my recent visit to Montville. First let’s look at how Animoto can make you look professional and improve your productivity.

Creating an animated music video from your photos with Animoto

I had taken 35 photos at Montville with my Panasonic Camera and I wanted to present them as a group under a theme. I had previously taken out Animoto Plus membership ($30 per year) so I can now create as many non-commercial videos of whatever length I want. So here is the process:

Decide the theme and title for the video – I chose, ‘View fromMontville’
Upload the photos to Animoto – I uploaded the folder with the photos and Animoto assigned spots for them and progressively uploaded them. This can take a while if you have a slow connection. While I have a fast connection, I was still able to use the waiting time to clean up some of my email.
Decide the sequence of the photos for the video – you can move the photos around to change the sequence (drag-and-drop). I left the photos in the sequence in which I took them.
Highlight photos to stand out as stills – this was a simple process of highlighting a photo and clicking on the ‘highlight button’. This facility enables you to have a few photos that feature (they will be stills during the animated video and one will typically come into focus at the end – a really cool feature).
Add a text slide – this comes with a headline and a single text line. I chose to use the video title. ‘View from Montville’, and the sub-title, ‘Sounds of Mountain Birds’ (there is a limitation on the number of characters). Again you can locate the text slide where you choose (via the drag-and-drop option).
Decide the accompanying music – Animoto provides a music library covering a range of genres. I chose to use my own audio – the MP3 I created by using Audacity to edit the recorded sounds of birds (developed through the voice recorder on my Samsung Galaxy S11). One of the tricks here is to match the chosen audio to the length of your video (determined by the number of photos). I had to expand my previously recorded audio to cover the number of photos involved. I originally uploaded a 1.18 minute audio and Animoto identified about 8 photos that would not be included in the video because the audio was too short. So I expanded the MP3 to 2.15 minutes (I had lots of recordings of bird sounds via my Samsung phone). The resultant video is 1.24 minutes long. A rule of thumb then that you can use is 2.15 minutes of audio to cover 35 photos (there is obviously some compression of the audio which is done automatically by Animoto).
Decide the quality you want for your video – I discovered that there are some relatively new options for this. The basic quality (350p) comes at no additional cost. At the moment you can improve the quality by choosing the 480p option ($3) or the high definition 720p option ($6). I chose the latter because it really makes a difference to a video that involves mainly scenes taken from a distance (the HD enhances the depth perspective and the color).

While the basic quality video (380p) comes with two formats (for computer and smartphone), the HD quality option comes with four different formats that are suitable for:

viewing on a computer (MP4)
viewing on a HD television (ISO)
using with a HD projector
burning as a Blue-ray disc (or as an AVCHD encodedDVD) for playback on a Blue-ray player

The 480p quality option includes formats 1, 2 & 4 above and adds formats for playback on standard resolution TV’s and smartphones. However, the HD quality option automatically incudes access to all the lower quality formats.

In my next post, I will have the completed HD Animoto video available for streaming on the blog and I will explain how I was able to install the video.

Meanwhile, visit the Animoto site and be inspired by what you can achieve in terms of improved productivity and creativity.