This post comes courtesy of Dan Pink and another one of his Pinkcasts.
This week, Dan talks with Austin Kleon, author of the classic book, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative and his newest book, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.
One of the items featured in Keep Going is the idea of a bliss station.
Kleon seems to have gotten the idea for a bliss station from Joseph Campbell, author of The Power Of Myth. Here’s how Campbell describes a bliss station:
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
Kleon describes a bliss station as a special time or special place in which we disconnect from the world so that we can connect with ourselves.
Kleon then goes on to show how one can create their own bliss station in three easy steps:
- get out your smartphone and put it in airplane mode
- put in a pair of earplugs
- set the timer on your phone for 15 minutes
At this point, you are ready to enter your bliss – a place where you can do your most creative work.
Here’s the video:
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Pink even provides a link to his favorite earplugs. Unfortunately, it’s for a box of 200 sets of earplugs. I’d like to give the bliss station a try, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to commit to 200 pairs of earplugs.
Maybe I’ll just try and cover my ears with my hands for 15 minutes and see if I enter the world of bliss.
Who knows, I might be able to get a blog post out of such an attempt (photo included)…
*image from quotefancy.com