Happy Soul Food Friday
This week: “Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure!”
- Who Am I Really and What do I Really, Really Want?
- Striving to Be an Artist of Life
- Living With and ON Purpose
“Who Are You? Who Who, Who Who? That’s What I Really Want to Know…”
Well, you can learn more about me and why I am wired the way I am from this recent San Diego Voyager Article:
Daily Inspiration: Meet Neville Billimoria – SDVoyager – San Diego
Striving to be an Artist of Life:
Here are some remarks from an event I spoke at some years ago, that is remarkably still relevant almost a decade later:
Making the case for (He)Art…
What does it mean to live in color?
Why would individuals, businesses, whole communities want to support Art?
In the words of Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On?”
Have we opened our eyes and looked around lately?
Because we are in mixed company, I will refrain from lighting the powder keg of politics or social justice
So, let’s find a common denominator:
If you are like 99% of us, you are stressed.
Stress is the #1 epidemic in most of the world, costing us billions in both hard costs and human consequences. We have traded false formulations of success (counterfeit correlation) for our happiness, wellbeing, and fulfillment both as individuals and as a community. It is almost as if we have forgotten what it means to be human. Have we really lost touch with our humanity?
What is going on?
“Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure!”
Artists find their inspiration in this dynamic tension…
The Case for America’s Finest City:
We talk about creating the 21st Century Innovation Economy. Some are starting to call it the Impact Economy.
Today, let’s consider the Imagination Economy
Our imagination is a preview of coming attractions
What does your imagination hold for you and for our community?
What is YOUR craft?
“Creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status” says Sir Ken Robinson
We want creativity, from ourselves, from our teams from our kids, yet most of the time we don’t create the conditions for it.
Whether its craft beer locally with over 100 craft-brewers, (and Ballast Point recently selling for $1B) or whatever your craft, to foster a vibrant, colorful imagination economy we need he-Artists!
Any way you look at it, convention is in dire need of an intervention!
Bring in the He-Artists…
It is time to Re-Imagine His-tory and Her-story
It is time to get real, find your smile, and rekindle our humanness perhaps by learning, if not from each other then from another species: the dolphins
We think we are the smartest creatures on the planet, but I think it is the dolphins and here is why:
Let’s use POD to capture their genius…
P: Play more. They play! Play is a prescription that has equal efficacy to antidepressants or other medicines, yet we don’t make time for play
What kind of play am I talking about?
Lego of old v. Lego of new (unstructured, open, free v. proscribed)
Here is the thought experiment:
If you were a lego set, what is the picture on the cover of the box you are trying to craft and create?
Do the puzzle pieces in your box line up with the picture on the cover?
Are there any pieces missing?
Art creates the space for play to matter, & can answer these existential questions- as well, if not better, than science
O: Others are important. Make connectedness count. We are social creatures. Loneliness is today’s smoking when it comes to health risks. Are you a pack a day isolate? Enough me, me, me already- enough selfies. How about WE? What happened to WE?
Art connects us to our most humane and universal essence.
D: Downtime matters. Our lives are way too fast-paced and just like elite athletes, for peak performance we need the oscillation of intense activity with periods of rest and stretching- you do too. Take more breaks and experience more breakthroughs!
We say we are too busy for downtime. Busy is a false indicator of us doing work of importance, just as sleep deprivation is a lousy indicator or your amazing ambition. If you can’t make time for down time, what you are really saying is you can’t make time for creativity, what you are really saying is you can’t make time for be your best self.
So now let’s apply this to our kids…
Children learn what they live
Sadly, you are only a kid, for just a short time, and then relegated to adult status for the rest of your life. Yet instead of celebrating childhood, we lament that “youth is wasted on the young”, then do our best to steal it from them with developmentally inappropriate expectations, forcing them to grow up, catch-up, over-extend, over-schedule, all over-tired.
Play, Downtime, Creativity, Art. We’ve got no time for that. No child left behind, resulted in no child LEFT!
Time steals our youth fast enough. Why are we buying into and contributing to this forced acceleration? What if the opposite reality became the norm and you were only an adult-in-training for just a short time, and then rightly trained and equipped, your youthful attitude, zest for life, belief in the impossible, & focus on the positive were the longest season of your life cycle during your short time here on earth?
Kindness is NOT weakness.
Busy-ness is not Fulfillment
“Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure!”
My plea to you:
Enliven your P.O.D. , live in color and find your craft.
As this is Martin Luther King week, I must end with some MLK quotes:
“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends!”
Please don’t be silent about art- live loud, proud and in color.
You are brilliant, powerful, creative, limitless, and boundless.
Like Dolphins: Shoulder to shoulder, not face to face- we can change our world
Take time through your craft to celebrate the moments no one will ever know when you best self-showed up!
As MLK said, “The time is always right to do what is right”
Blessings….
Living With and ON Purpose:
Virtuous purpose, as David French writes, is rooted in sacrifice.
It ennobles the individual because it serves the common good.
Please play and pay it forward on purpose!
Love,
Neville
Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nevillebillimoria
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nbillimoria
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
—Oscar Wilde
Happy Soul Food Friday! 