Enhancing Your Creativity: Out of Time pt. 2

This blog is the fourth in a five-part series on Enhancing Your Creativity. Hub LA is reposting with permission from Jana’s blog.

“Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.” - Julia Cameron

Last week we talked about time and how we can use time as an excuse or a limitation to prevent ourselves from accessing our greater creative capacities. Which leads us to this week’s topic, how can you use time to serve you and enhance your creativity?

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Out of Time - Part 1

This blog is the third in a five-part series on Enhancing Your Creativity. Hub LA is reposting with permission from Jana’s blog.

We can be pretty sneaky in how we use time as an excuse to prevent ourselves from accessing our greater creative capacities.

Time can be a vehicle in which we give away our power to others or as a perceived barrier for not engaging in the things that truly matter to us (such as always saying “yes” to “meh” plans instead of actually working on our passion project). We can also use time as a measuring stick for where we believe we are falling short of where we “should” be in life compared to others.

Usually it all comes back to fear-based scarcity thinking: that we don’t have enough and that we are not enough. All untruths we’ve been programmed to tell ourselves.

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Enhance Your Creativity: It Isn’t Always Pretty

Guest post by Hub LA member Jana Carey.

This blog is the second in a five-part series on Enhancing Your Creativity. Hub LA is reposting with permission from Jana’s blog.

“I always get it perfect the first time,” said no one ever.

I’ve said it before, chances are if you are reading this post you are an artist, writer, entrepreneur, visionary, innovator and/or global game changer. Maybe its’ still just a yearning in your heart or maybe you are already boldly creating in the world. Wherever you are on your path, there is still part of you that may get stuck in needing to “get it right.” This post is for those smaller, less confident parts of you that speak up at 3am. (Boy, do I know those parts of me!) Those parts of us that are still terrified of failing and all the vulnerability that innovating and creating kicks up.

Ponder this for a moment:

Do you need to be the finished product of what you’re creating when you start creating it?

No. You couldn’t be. Life doesn’t work that way. We don’t just vision something in our head one day and then bam! tomorrow we’ve made it a reality. Creativity is a continual growth and expansion process. There is a messiness in experimentation. It involves taking steps and stumbles forward. Rarely does it work out in a linear fashion. Sometimes we go in one direction only to realize it wasn’t quite right but through that experience we learn something valuable that shows us what we need for the next step. It’s a series of small course corrections or iterations.

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Enhance Your Creativity: Imagination is Key to Your Success

Guest post by Hub LA member Jana Carey.

This blog is the first in a five-part series on Enhancing Your Creativity. Hub LA is reposting with permission from Jana’s blog.

“One of humanity’s most precious resources is imagination. Our ability to overcome the constraints of the present environment and travel to distant places and hopeful futures all in the mind is a skill that is hugely neglected in today’s society. With our intense focus on enabling students and employees to master what is, we are missing out on the huge opportunity for them to also imagine what could be,” Scott Kauffman, Scientific Director of The Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

If you are reading this blog, chances are you are an innovator, artist, creator, imagineer, educator, or visionary at heart and you get the importance of imagination. But do you ever have times when you feel like your imagination has gone on vacation? You may have been creating like crazy, putting out new content, launching new programs, writing consistently and WHAM! it feels like your innovation reserves are running drier than a California reservoir? (Too early for drought jokes?)

Here are 5 practical and easy tips to help you re-engage your imagination: (BS-FREE BONUS: They don’t take require a huge investment of time or money. Time and Money are the most common excuses I get from most students and clients about why they can’t do something.)

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Hotel Hack Brings Social Innovation to Hospitality Industry

After months of planning with the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, we designed Hotel Hack, a special, curated weekend event that builds off the intentional community at Hub LA and the collaborartive relationships among a group of talented, insanely different people who care about making an impact.

The Hotel Hack on October 17-18 brought together a small group of Social Innovators for an immersive “micro-residency,” with the goal of providing fresh insights for the hospitality industry on how to use their resources for good.

Our Hotel Hack turned thirteen hand-selected Hub LA members and LA social innovators into experts in residence, consultants to the hospitality industry at this pivotal moment. The economy is changing, the climate is changing, and well, hotels are due for a refresh.

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‘Give Half’ Twice: Matthew Manos Returns with More Pro Bono Practices

It’s pro bono week right now, and if anyone knows a thing or two about doing work for free, it’s Matthew Manos, Founder and Managing Partner of verynice. Verynice is a design, branding, and innovation consultancy that, through its unique business model, dedicates 50% of its efforts pro bono to nonprofits. In the past year, verynice has expanded to three offices across the country, including one at Hub LA, one in New York, and one in Austin, TX. The company is on track to donate $10 million in pro bono efforts.

In late 2013, Matt published a book about his business model called How to Give Half Your Work Away For Free, which he quite fittingly gave away for free. The book has since been downloaded in 400+ cities across the globe. How to Give Half Your Work Away for Free is back this week in a second edition printing featuring new materials and contributions from other pro bono leaders. He answered some questions about what he’s learned since we last caught up with him about his publishing efforts and about the new version of the book. You can download Give Half here.

You’ve toured all over the country for the first edition of your book, How to Give Half Your Work Away for Free. What are some of the stories or responses you’ve heard from people, whether they’ve given half, are the beneficiaries of the model, or are just curious? How did that inform your choices for this edition of the book?
The growth and success of verynice as a company has always been thanks to its willingness to share and collaborate. The approach to writing “How to Give Half of Your Work Away for Free”, and growing the subsequent #givehalf movement is absolutely the same. For the first book, much of the content was actually derived through candid conversations with others who were facing a wall in their pro-bono projects as well as businesses who were interested in giving half, or giving any, but didn’t know the best way to go about it. With this second edition, those stories have grown exponentially, and I’m really excited to have been able to collect hundreds of perspectives, concerns, and critiques which directly informed the new content. I’ve always seen business books as being limited in that they come from only one voice – my goal from this book, thanks to having been so fortunate to have a platform to share, is to broaden that voice even more in the interest of growing the pro-bono marketplace.

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How Viral Marketing Launched a Successful Startup: REP Interactive

Repost from Hub LA Member CreatorUp’s Blog. See the original post here.

Mike Tringe, Founder of CreatorUp, wrote this blog post after a JuiceUp morning on October 10. JuiceUps are our twice-monthly (every second and fourth Friday) power breakfast and networking event featuring successful entrepreneurs providing insight to their best practices, experiences, and social missions. CreatorUp co-hosts JuiceUps with Hub LA. On October 10, Mike Tringe moderated a Q&A and interview with Steve Gatena, founder of marketing agency REP Interactive.

You’ve heard of using videos to grow a business, but what is viral marketing and how could it help you actually launch your business? Learn from Steve Gatena, CEO of REP Interactive, who launched his startup with a viral video and now works with major corporate clients like Coldwell Banker on their video marketing strategy.

How many times have your heard someone say: just make a viral video? If only it were that easy. But that’s exactly what Steve Gatena, CEO of REP Interactive, a video production and marketing agency did to launch his business.

While Steve was at USC, his final project for his business class was to create a web series that would launch a business. And his concept was to create a video that everyone would want to watch and share. He believed there were certain ingredients – and when he tested his idea, he was right. His pilot “Most Expensive Homes in the World” earned over 1.2M views and launched an entire series on homes from Aspen to Napa.

Here’s the kicker. Steve had no video production experience whatsoever before launching this web series. But what he did have – was the interest to teach himself what to do, and the connections to help him get it done.

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5 Ways to Craft a Powerful Story for Your Business

Guest post by Hub LA Member Michael Kass

As founders and entrepreneurs and generally smart people, you spend countless hours on business plans and market data. But the reality is that investors and supporters won’t care about your data unless you make them care. Unless you get them excited about what you can do for the community and for them. Unless you can connect them to the passion you have for whatever you’re setting out to accomplish, whether it’s solving world hunger or introducing a new dating app.

You have to connect before you convince. And story is the most powerful tool you have to connect with your community, whether it’s potential funders or team members.

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Meet the Wonderful Humans Behind Humanize Health: Christine Carrillo and Helen Lee

Meet Christine Carrillo and Helen Lee. Though they’re relatively new Hub LA members, they jumped into the Hub LA community from the get go. Their consulting firm, Humanize Health, works with healthcare providers to optimize their systems to achieve the best results for their companies and for patients. Now, Christine and Helen are in the midst of developing a new platform from the other side: humanizing the healthcare system for patients as they navigate insurance options.

Christine Carrillo and Helen Lee of Humanize Health.

You run a consulting firm, Humanize Health, which aims to humanize healthcare companies to the patients they serve. How did you get into this space?

Christine: About 9 years ago, I was hired by a healthcare startup that was in need of someone to bring order to a chaotic frat house. The staff was brilliant, but had more clients than they could keep up with. During my time there I ended up overseeing all of our clients, which were health plans, and realized how siloed they were. Even though many of them were experiencing the same challenges, they faced them alone, in almost a secret vessel. Not only were they siloed from each other, but from their patients. They had no clue what people wanted from a health plan, as a matter of fact, they didn’t understand who their patients, the patients, really were. The concept of collaboration between health plans was unheard of. The concept of aligning with your patients to provide them what they really need was completely ridiculous.

I then was recruited by Kaiser Permanente to help them “flip” their Medicare book of business. Being at one of the most innovative and forerunning health plans in the industry was quite an experience. You had a giant of a company who was leading the way in healthcare, and still there was such disparity between any real alignment with their patients. At the same time, I was in awe of how much they got screwed by vendors. Prices for anything always ran in the multimillion dollar range, and no one at KP really questioned the prices. It was sort of accepted that you paid through the roof for software or consulting, and then possibly had to cut the project if the vendors you hired did not come through. I wasn’t yet drinking the kool aid on how the “system” was supposed to work, so I challenged, and negotiated the vendor contract on their behalf from $9 million to $1.5 million. This led me to start our own firm to help health plans better understand their patients, and implement initiatives that align them with patients. I believe if you want to really change healthcare, and you really want to humanize it, it needs to start from the top. Read more on “Meet the Wonderful Humans Behind Humanize Health: Christine Carrillo and Helen Lee” »

NEW Office Hours: Growth Strategies for Product Makers

One of the early jokes of Orange is the New Black is that main character Piper Chapman (played by Taylor Schilling), before going to prison, was just your average WASPy New Yorker, starting an upscale lotion line with her best friend and business partner that they hope to sell at Barney’s. Though she goes to prison before seeing her lotions hit the shelves, she uses her ingenuity to craft soap for Red when she is being “starved” out of her meals.

The point is: product makers are crafty people with a ton of creativity and the business acumen to recognize the unique value and branding of their products on the market. Impending prison sentences aside, there are many considerations and many steps that product makers must take to fully realize the potential of their products.

We’re excited to announce a new office hour hosted by Robert Gonsalves (Customer Farms, Food Centricity) for product makers. Here’s how Robert described the purpose of his office hour:
“If I gave you a magic wand, and you imagine yourself 12 months in the future, what does your future look like? I’m here to help you get obstacles out of the way, to get you to the future faster.” The Product Maker Office Hours will take place the first and third Tuesdays of every month, beginning in October, from 4-6pm at HUB LA in half hour increments. Read more on “NEW Office Hours: Growth Strategies for Product Makers” »