PP 136: Wide Eyed and Creative with Bob Stromberg

Quick Show Notes: Bob Stromberg

Bob Stromberg shares his “G.I.T.” creative process, which he teaches to those who want to develop and expand their creativity. He also shares the entertaining story of his 40 year career as an entrepreneur.

Listen as @thekimsutton & @BobStromberg chat about #creativity & #entrepreneurship: https://thekimsutton.com/pp136Click To Tweet

Connect with Bob Stromberg

Episode Transcription

Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. I am so happy you are here to join me and I’m so happy that you are also here to join our guest Bob Stromberg, the Master of Creativity and the host of the Wide Eyed Creative podcast. Bob, thank you for joining us today.

Bob Stromberg: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kim Sutton: From his home in St. Paul, Bob travels continually, performing his unique blend of original stories, stand up and schtick.

Bob. I’m reading that, which is obvious. But schtick. I never know if I’m saying that properly.

Bob Stromberg: That is the right. That’s the right way to say,

Kim Sutton: I would love for you to share more about you because I’m sure you can say it so much better than me reading it from your bio.

Bob Stromberg: Well, I’m a comedian and I have done it for 40 years. I… My creative expression has found several different mediums. I’m a comic, I’m a playwright. I’ve written several books, lots of short stories. And that’s, that’s what I that’s what I do.

Bob Stromberg: Oh, and I’ve done theater for probably half of my career doing two different plays that I wrote one, which I co wrote with a couple buddies, and one that I wrote myself and those plays have run continually now for oh my goodness, over over 20 years around the country and around the world.

Bob Stromberg: So that’s what I do. And I really think I feel like I’m one of the fortunate few in this profession of writing and performing, who have actually been able to do what I love doing and what I really feel that I was created to do. I’ve been able to do it for 40 full years as a self employed person, and I think that’s a pretty remarkable thing.

Bob Stromberg: I began thinking back several years ago, people started saying to me, you know, “Bob, you need to, you need to start thinking about passing the baton on to a younger generation.” And my first thought was, I have a baton. I didn’t, I didn’t realize I had a baton. I don’t remember anybody giving me a baton to pass on. No, you need to think about passing on the next generation. And I realized, well, I really can’t teach lots of things that I do.

Bob Stromberg: Part of my shtick. As you said, part of my shtick is I do hand shadow so that’s become sort of a calling card for me in my in my comedy work, I make shadow on a screen, and they’re very funny and pretty amazing shadows, very difficult to teach. I can’t teach people how to move the way that I do or have the kind of facial expressions that I do. It’s my face off all of what I do is uniquely me.

Bob Stromberg: I kind of began to reverse engineer what I’ve been doing for 40 years. And I realized that the element that has always been there has been creativity, I’ve always utilized creativity. And that got me really going deep into trying to figure out well, what is it? I’m creating creativity that is, what is it? How does it work? And how have I used it, and I I’m rambling on here, you just interrupt me if you if you want to. But I realized that creativity is with their two words, to use to talk about creativity that really help us to understand what it is and how it works.

Bob Stromberg: The first word is gift. And the second word is craft.

People often think of creativity as being a gift. And it is, in as much as something of creativity is woven right into our genes. We’re born with it. We were but but we aren’t born creative. What we’re born with is a capacity and a desire to experience creativity. And we all and we start using it really early on, we opened up that gift really early as very small children.

Bob Stromberg: You know, there was a time when people say to me, I’m not creative. And I say, well, you you may not be. You’re probably not if you say you’re not, but you used to be. There was a time when you got up on your knees and you rocked back and forth. And that was exciting. And you learn that you could scrunch up your nose in that way and your parents would laugh out loud and you learn that you could take a Crayon and put it on that white paper and make those those things pretty colors and you learned that you could stack up those blocks and then you could knock them over.

Bob Stromberg: Or as an as was the case in my family, you learned that you could take the pink magic marker, and you could color in all of the little white flowers on mom and dad’s brand new couch. That was, that was a very exciting moment in our family. By the way that that young boy is now in a remarkable artist now as a grown man.

Bob Stromberg: But… But we began opening up that gift of creativity very, very early on in our life, and we loved doing it. We were experiencing creativity through the medium of play. That’s what we did. We were playing all of our play as children was remarkably creative.

Bob Stromberg: But then something happened to all of us. And it happened around… Oh, certainly an elementary school, young, younger years to maybe middle element. preschool years, we discovered that we had to take those tests. And you had to have the right answer, you had to have the one right word with that you filled in that multiple choice with, or you had to circle the, the, I mean, the fill in the blank. I’ll say that again. And they can edit that to make it cleaner. You had to have you had to write the one right word in the fill in the blank. And you or you had to circle the one right answer in the multiple choice, or you had to have the exact right number at the bottom of that math problem. And I mean, right down to the digit you couldn’t even have that, that. That… you had to have, you had to have the right number at the bottom of that mathematical problem there and you couldn’t have one digit office. Had they all had to be right? And the problem is creativity. It doesn’t work that way. And you know, this came as a creative person. It doesn’t work that way.

Bob Stromberg: Creativity is not about finding the one right answer to anything. It’s about looking at many, many possible answers. And then playfully experimented to find out which one of those might work best. And sometimes it’s a matter of putting those those answers together to find the best way to do something.

Kim Sutton: (?) I am the one out of the four who went to art school. Yeah, and I was the one who was decorating mom’s accounting textbooks when she was going back for MBA. That was me.

Bob Stromberg: Yeah.

Kim Sutton: But what you have said like I’m so I’m thinking about the parallels that I’ve seen, especially when you said that some people say they’re not creative. I’ve seen entrepreneurs in my community saying, you know, I don’t have a product, what do I sell? You know, I’m not creative. How can I make something well, just by composing an email you’re creating, or just by cooking your dinner, even if it comes out of box you’re creating, because you can create it differently if you burn it, which is

Bob Stromberg: That’s right. That’s right. No, no, that’s right. So creativity, Kim, is it’s it is a gift in that we’re born with the desire to experiencing it and the ability to experience it. But it’s much more helpful to think of creativity as being a craft, or rather a skill or a process that we can practice and get better and better and better at, but to do that, of course, we have to understand what what it what are you going to practice.

Bob Stromberg: How do you practice creativity? Well, like any other skill, you practice the fundamentals of have that skill. And in this case, I’ve identified three fundamentals in creativity, which are really helpful to the very people that you were talking about who go, I don’t know how to do this. I’m not, I’m not creative.

Bob Stromberg: They are and I’ve put this in an acronym…  G.I.T. I say, this is how you can get your masters of creativity.

G is you grab anything that grabs you emotionally. So as you’re going through your day, if you see something that moves you in any way, if it tickles you a little bit or that makes you smile, or it makes you angry, or you hear something that makes you concerned or worried about some, that’s that is an emotional response. You grab it, you write it down. It’s not an idea.

Bob Stromberg: You find yourself going “Why am I even writing this down?” The only real reason you’re writing it down is because it touched you emotionally. And neuroscientists tell us that every thought that we have has an emotional component.

Bob Stromberg: But the truth is that we…  we are we’re dead to it because we’re we aren’t experienced creativity in our own lives as part of our emotional life that has has gotten dumbed down or numbed down, so we don’t feel it.

Bob Stromberg: So you write down this thought or this experience or maybe it’s a memory, you write it down just enough to remember it. I don’t actually write it down. I speak it in my phone on my little note thing on my iPhone. And I you get this long list in a very short time of things. They don’t do not ideas. They don’t seem to mean anything.

(Transcription still being cleaned up. Thanks for checking it out!)

Bob Stromberg: But then you take the step, second step you practice that you interrogate what you have grabbed, an interrogator does what interrogator does in order to find the truth. So you say why did you move me? Why do I keep thinking about you? Why did I Why did that memory come from way way back then? But I hadn’t thought about it years, how could I use you? Could you be a character in this book I’m writing? Could you be an illustration in this talk that I’m preparing? Could I paint you? Could you be a part of the choreography in this piece? I’m doing whatever, whatever it is, how could I use you? Then every creative knows this moment. It’s the we describe it as the aha moment. The aha moment actually is the moment that that thought, or memory or experience that you’ve grabbed, becomes an idea. And you the thought the feeling is, oh, there it is. I know what I can do with that. I can do this. And once you understand what this is, whether it’s a painting or a character or a book, or a play, or a song or a lyric or one line here or there, whatever it is you’re working on, once you understand what that is, then you can transform it t you can transform it into whatever it’s supposed to be So that you grab, that’s cheap, interrogate it, you grab, it grabs you emotionally, you interrogate it, that interrogation process. By the way, it might be only seconds, or minutes, or days, or weeks or months or years, I actually have had, I actually had something on my, in my grab file for 20 years before I knew what it was. And when I did, it became this huge thing in my act that I’ve been doing now for, I’ve probably done 1000 times eight minutes story that I tell it’s just it’s a gem. So you grab, you interrogate once you know what the truth is, once you have that aha moment, when that thought becomes an idea, then you transform it into what it should be. That’s the creative process. Lots of people. Yeah, lots of people don’t. Lots of creative people are creative without knowing what that process is. Because they’re, but they’re still doing it. except they’re doing it just in case Typically, they don’t understand it. They’re just doing it because it comes natural to them. Of course, the problem is that you can then run into a wall and where you can’t create anything and you don’t know why I heard Sting, talking in a TED talk about how he couldn’t. He couldn’t write for eight years. He didn’t write. He didn’t write one song for eight years. And this is a guy who’s won 17 Grammys and been nominated 37 times one of the most popular musical artists and songwriters of the last hundred years, and he couldn’t write a song for eight years. He said, the way he phrased it is He said, The Muse went away. my muse went away. And I heard that and I thought to myself sting. There’s no there’s no muse. It’s it’s not a muse. It’s a process. If you understand the process, if you had understood the process staying if you had been grabbing continually, because it’s become a habit for you, you wouldn’t run up against a wall and not know what to write about. Because it would be right that you’d have ideas just shouting at you know, transform me Next, I want to be next. I want to be next I want to be next. That’s what this process and this habit that we created for in creativity does for us. We never run into a wall where we’re dry. It’s always the reservoirs always full. It’s pretty exciting. What

I am not a debating type of person. However, I do have to ask you, what about people who are trying to force creativity using or do you think that’s even possible? And the reason why I asked if I read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and she was talking about how she had gotten an idea about a book, but she loved it, too. But she wasn’t getting inspired to write it. And she finally decided to let it go. So I guess she would be missing the tea right out of your equation. And when she was later speaking with a friend, her friend had gotten the same inspiration and had actually developed the story, which I think went on and won awards or became a best seller, of course. But, you know, I’ve been at the point, as have so many other entrepreneurs where we’re grasping and we’re grasping, and, you know, we might get that little glimmer, I’m gonna morph some of your equation into other where we get the glimmer, and we’re inspired. Well, listen to me, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to create your get into something else. But, you know, we don’t necessarily take it to where it needs to go or we try to take it too fast. It’s

Or maybe I’m just looking at it wrong.

Why not use creative? glimmer? inspiration and take?

Okay, so as an entrepreneur I have many times, well, I went through a whole period where I was chasing income rather than impact. So I was always watching what other people were doing. And I ended up using my creative pneus to actually not try to build my own products that really resonated with me, but to follow in the footsteps of other people who had been who I had seen be successful, right. What I ended up with was a totally unprofessional uninspired piece of work that I just really couldn’t do anything with. But after I turned that around, and they started following impact and Chasing impact and really trying to make an impact with my work. Then it was like, that was my aha moment. So maybe that is my creativity.

Well, I also wonder if if when you started following impact, I’m guessing the the emotional excitement that you were feeling about, all of that was much higher than it was when you were when you were following in somebody else’s footsteps.

Kim Sutton: Oh, absolutely. Have you seen Disney movie Ratatouille?

Bob Stromberg: Yes, I have.

Kim Sutton: So when he’s introducing his brother to how different foods tastes when, when he puts them in the mouth, and I think he gives him like a berry and a piece of cheese and he starts seeing the colors in his head. That’s what it was like that was you know, all the pieces of my own creativity puzzle came together. quintessentially, I can’t even imagine how you said you had your little nugget in your in your reservoir for 20 years. I Had a little glimmer of a product I wanted to create six months ago and I had my graphic designer create a logo for it. But it was only a month ago that all those little pieces came together. But I mean, that’s six months, not 20 years.

Yeah, mine was 20 years. And I knew that I had a wonderful story. And it was something that had actually happened to me as a small boy, I knew it was a wonderful story. I could not figure out how I could use it or what it would mean or what the purpose of the story would be, other than to tell the story there didn’t seem to be there was no, there wasn’t the kind of application that I wanted to feel and that I wanted others to make the jump to in their own minds. And it just wasn’t there until and this is the way that the process works as long as you’re continuing to go back to that, that grab, list and interrogate those things. They’re working inside the mind somehow. They’re trying to make the connection all the time, even though you’re not thinking about them. There’s stuff going on it’s non conscious thought. As you know, our brains can be thinking about all kinds of things. And at the very same time, we can’t be aware of everything that’s going on in our minds. But there’s non conscious stuff happening all the time. And something happened in my life. When I went, there it is, I, oh, my goodness, I know what I can do with that story. And then I wrote the story, created the application that fit with it. And it’s just been, it’s been a gem for me. But that’s the process of grabbing and interrogating something and then transforming into what it should be. And you’re grabbing things. When you were grabbing. When you were going after income instead of impact you’re grabbing. You just weren’t grabbing stuff that really did emotionally grab you. You are grabbing stuff that you thought you should grab or you were getting grabbing something so that you might be successful, but they My guess is that they weren’t things that were grabbing you emotional.

Oh, they absolutely were. Yeah, it’s the act of creating them was almost torture. It was like going back to work in a job that I’ve just really dusted. Yeah. What brought you into this line of work 40 years ago? Would you mind sharing a little bit of your story, your backstory?

Bob Stromberg: I’d love to. Yeah, here’s here’s what happened. The very first moment I realized that there was something different about me. Now, listen, I don’t really think I’m different than anybody else. The whole point of what we’re doing here is for me to say, we’re all the same. We’re all creative, but I was in third grade. And our music teacher, Miss Nago came into the room and she she was a very large woman and she sat on this tiny musical stool with her back to us, of course, which was comical. And she said students open your music To page 14, and it was a new song in my mind, I could still see the picture on page 14 little thin little picture at the top of the page looked like an Amish fellow walking across a late summer meadow. There were storm clouds in the background little splash of Blue River in the foreground. And she began pounding out the the notes the courts to this new song and we began to say now, Kim, you can hardly imagine how badly this must have sounded. If you had been listening to 33 Kids singing song they really don’t know. And Miss Nagel just pounding on this out of tune piano. But we sang the song, Shenandoah, oh, Shenandoah long to see you got away you all and never. I never heard the sun. Yeah, I

have to confess I have a 14 year old who has been in choir for the last four years. Yeah, yeah.

I hope he doesn’t. Listen to this episode.

But even when they’re sixth graders, and they’ve been rehearsing it for six months, sometimes they can still sound that same way.

Oh, yes. Oh, I know. I know. I can’t imagine how bad it was. But here’s the deal. I’ve never heard the song before. And I sang about half of the song maybe we were starting into the second verse, and I started to sob. And this is the kind of thing where a teacher might look at this and go oh, there must be something wrong going badly going on at home or there’s this boy has troubles or something I but I was just crying. And my friends all looked at me like what’s the matter with you? Are you sick or something? And my, my teacher came down the aisle and she asked me what’s wrong but but how does an eight year old explained being overcome by the beauty of art and that is exactly what happened to me. And from that moment on, it was that song became special. But from that moment on, it was what I want to recreate this, I want to experience this again, and I began writing songs, then As a young high schooler, I began singing, playing guitar. I went to college played in coffee houses, I began telling stories in between my songs and people chuckled at the stories. And then, within a year, people were laughing actually hard at the stories I got out of college and I was performing whenever I could, anywhere I could. my guitar didn’t show up off a plane one day, and I stood before a bunch of people and just devastated because I was being paid what kind of maybe back then it would have been four or $500, which have been a huge amount of money. And I had no guitar. And I thought, well, I don’t want to go home without a check. So I just began telling stories. And I see a few songs on Capella. But I begin telling just stringing my stories together and people laughed even harder, and I realized, oh, my goodness, I don’t even need to use my music. I could I could just do this just just telling stories and doing comedy. And that led to my doing more of that I studied, went on and studied mime again, I’m in my early 20s. Now in theater, so I was learning about physical comedy, and how to use my body in my communication. And that led to years of doing early on school assembly programs, I probably did three or 4000 of those in the first 10 years of my career, I shouldn’t say probably, I know I did. And then that led to people saying, could you come and do something for my company, and that led to banquet work. And that led to my sitting down with three of my buddies 25 years ago, and one of them said, you know, we should write a, we should write a play. They’re both comics, my friends. And I said, well, we’ll never write it if we don’t book it first, because we’re also busy. And he said, Well, you could probably book it. And she came back the next day. He said, Hey, we’re booked. 30 days from now, we had no play. We we written a word. And so we took in one month, we wrote a play performed at one night there was a director there who said would you like to bring this to our theater in downtown Minneapolis and create a full two, full two act play with this. And we said, well, if we can wait one year, because we’re all we don’t have any time this year, but if we can wait a year, we’ll do it next year for you, which we did. And that play ended up eventually having six or seven casts in it. And when all around the world I went to the West End of London and we were two years in Dublin, Ireland and ran for 13 years without stopping here in town of Minneapolis, Rylan. It ran for 11 years in San Diego without stopping seven shows a week with another cast and became this really became sort of theater phenomenon. I did it for 10 solid years and then I went back to solo performing. And that led me to figuring out well, how shall I pass the baton on to people coming along, I’m 65 now, and it’s a good time to do that. So and that led to my course mastering the craft of creativity, hope Which I sort of outline some of for you here today.

I have an idea for another solo show for you.

And what is that?

Something with a baton.

So you go, Oh, yeah.

I don’t know. passing the baton. That’s not a bad idea. Yeah,

I can just, if I can just see you right now, Bob.

Well, that would be so sick, wouldn’t it? Yeah.

When you were under the pressure, and I know you had given yourself a year. How did that impact? I mean, I know you said that. The show went on how many years? I mean, over a decade or two? Oh, no,

it will. We started in the spring of 96. We began in the theater in Minneapolis and it ran there for 13 years before it closed out. And it’s still running to this day, not not it’s not open right at the moment, but it still runs seasonally and and it’s there to go. should just be going on today with theaters about about opening up in different cities. So yeah, it’s been an amazing thing.

So that’s, that’s so absolutely amazing. And I love how your co writer is a co writer, co author, co author

went out and sold it. Are

you even before you went?

Yeah, by the way that that that show is called triple espresso, a highly caffeinated comedy and it’s been well, it’s been in over 60 cities in the US, so maybe some of your listeners will have seen it.

Fabulous. Listeners in case I forgot to mention everything that we talked about, including transcription in the show notes you’ll be able to find on my website at thesutton.com/pp136. I mentioned to you before we started recording and I’ve mentioned to listeners before that I’m writing my book chronic idea disorder. And I see a great parallel here that I’ve started writing I was so concerned about reaching out to anybody before it was finished until a great mentor of mine said, No, you really need to get a literary agent. You know, you need to find a publisher. And I was really concerned about doing that before it was finished. But I did, I went out and I looked for a literary agent and found one. And they’re actually helping me keep accountable for my own creativity now and keeping me on task for actually getting this book done. listeners, you know, I’ve been talking about this book for months now. And it will come out eventually, but I love that you gave yourself that type of

push. Oh, yes. And an editor is really a transformer. Really a collaborator with a writer to one degree or the other, but I think that editing is up There’s a wonderful form of creative transformation in a book can’t happen without a good, a good editor.

So, yeah.

Can you share more about mastering the craft of creativity with us?

I would, I would love to do that. The course is online. It’s a six module course there are about 15 hours of video. There are interviews with creatives from one of the top drummers in the country, a top Maestro, in the US

cooks, dancers,

theater directors, they’re probably I think there are 19 interviews in there with various creative people who all by the way when I talked to them about the process of grabbing and interrogating transforming to a person they went, Oh my goodness, I wish I’d known about this earlier. I never thought of it that way before. And I was a bit I was a bit tenuous about sharing it. They might say, Oh, no, that’s not the way it works. But to a person they were excited to realize that’s what they had been doing. I’m convinced that’s what that’s what creatives do. They grab and they interrogate and they transform. The course really is in filled with exercises to help creative people, whatever your medium is. That’s not the important thing. Whether you’re a painter or a writer or a dancer. Whatever your medium is, it helps people to become alive emotionally. quick story when I show triple espresso was in Dublin, Ireland, I walked by a on the way home to the theater every night I walked by an art store in the windows lit up beautifully and there was a gorgeous box a large box of pastel paints in there a chalk sticks. It’s not chalk, but they look like chalk sheets beautiful box. And something grabbed me about that. And I want to try that I bought a small box and began experiment not painted for about five years really enjoyed it. And what I discovered was that the process of painting awakened me visually, I began to see the world in ways I had never even noticed before the world hadn’t changed. But the way I saw it had, for example, I discovered that shadows are really gray. Clouds are rarely just white. Chrome is never silver. Unless it’s reflecting silver chrome reflects whatever is in it. So of Chrome is bison bumper, a chrome bumper is parked at the tree. It’s reflecting those green trees in that blue sky. And your red jacket is you stand looking at this chrome bumper. That’s what makes it look like Chrome, not silver. And I had never noticed this before. And the process that discipline of painting awakened to be visually, the practice of grabbing and interrogating, transforming, in other words, the practice of mastering this the craft of creativity, it awakens you emotionally, because we have all numbed down from the time we were young children.

Emotional thoughts are hitting us all the time, but we’re not feeling them. We’re not hearing them. We’re not seeing them. Until we begin practicing the process of grabbing and interrogating what we’ve grabbed, and transforming. That’s where we begin to awaken up. And by the way, this is a habit and this is a this is something that the course really helps with. It helps us to create a habit of creativity habits take and we I’ve heard this my whole life habits take about three weeks to to create and the reason is neuroscience has proven this now that it takes three weeks to create a new neural pathway in your brain. It’s not a strong one, and it will fall apart. But if you unless you repeat this process two or three more cycles, so we’re looking at two or three months, after two or three months of practicing anything intently for four to 15 minutes a day, after two or three months, it is a solid, new neural pathway, which is what we call a habit. Think about this Kim, we don’t even know these habits exists, but we are all creatures of habit. When you wake up in the morning when you take a shower and you’re drying yourself off. It is like choreography. You do it exactly the same every single day. When you put on your shoes in the morning, you put on either the right one to the left one but you put that same one on first, every day and try this try to put the other one on tomorrow if you can, if you think about it, you probably won’t even think about it because it’s such a habit. But if you could think about it, instead of putting your left one out which is the one you always Put on saying, try to put your right one on. If you feel like you’re throwing your whole day off, we’re creatures of habit they are. habits are wonderful things if they’re good habits, they’re wonderful things because they’re so dependable, and so helpful to us. We don’t have to think about them. They just happen and mastering the craft of creativity through the exercises that I’ve devised. They help people to create a creative, creative habits. So it’s not difficult to be creative. It’s just we’re not even thinking about it most of the time, but it’s happening. we’re grabbing without even thinking about it. We’re interrogating all the time. We’re transforming all the time. And we don’t even hardly think about what we do when we get to the transformation process. We’re really thinking about it then because we’re we’re creating something but that’s what that’s what mastering the craft of creativity the online course does. I’m really excited about it’s been so rewarding for me to hear students say this was a life changer for me. I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.

You’ve got me thinking right now about habits and especially I mean, I’m not going to get inappropriate here. But yesterday in the shower, somebody had moved. Somebody had changed the spot of where my shampoo normally is with my face soap. And I didn’t realize how I always do it in the same order until I realized I was about to put face hope in my hair. Yeah. Yeah, I would. I would love to have that daily habit of creativity. Without it seems like our lives can get so I don’t think I don’t know mundane is the right word.

Oh, no, it is the right word. I think he gets it things become very mundane, something meaning something is missing in our lives if we’re not finding some sort of creative expression because we are made to be that way. So life is fun day and if we are being if we’re not being what we were intended to be if we’re not living, as we were intended to live, not doing what We are intended to do with our lives and creativity is such an important part of that. And many people have a sense of loss of joy this life is not as fun as it should be. And I believe often is because they have forgotten about their creativity, even as adults, by the way, creativity feels like play. And you know this in the writing process, Kim, I’m sure you do. It’s, of course, it’s difficult. But it’s it’s so fun when things are working and coming together. That’s the play we used to experience when we were children. That’s I mean, that’s the sensation play. We used to exchange one word when we were children. It’s the same sensation we feel when we create today.

I would love to see this in action with my cooking skills. I know that creativity can’t make me you know, a five star chef Bob. I only say that because as I’ve already shared with listeners in past episodes, I can burn mac and cheese out of a box.

Yes,

but there are people Including my husband, who after I burnt those numerous boxes of mac and cheese basically took over the kitchen. But I would love to be able to take creativity in the kitchen and have fun and create something edible.

If you if you’re, if you’re very interested in cooking, then you’re probably familiar with the table with the show Chef’s Table.

Are you familiar with that? I am familiar with it. I haven’t watched it.

I have not heard of it. And and it’s been around for a while I think already there. As we’re talking. There are four or five seasons. I hadn’t heard about it till this summer. The course had been out for easily a year at that point. And I turned on Chef’s Table. And I could not believe how tied in it was to everything that I’ve been teaching in my course. Very often this Chef’s Table. Each episode is written about one of the 50 top chefs in the world. world and how probably 80% of them ended up going to Paris to learn how to to

cook in the,

in the pattern of the in the in the mastery of the French masters, they learned that process, and then they they become famous cooks and they’re unhappy. They’re dissatisfied they they are. They’re so miserable, and the best chefs in the world and their success and making all this money, lots of income, and maybe even impact, but it’s dissatisfying to them. And so to a person on these shows, they end up saying, what is it that used to move me as a child, and they grab that and they interrogate it, and very often end up moving back home or moving to a different place starting their own restaurant, not as a French master now, but using the skills they learned as a French master. To do what is uniquely their own art, and it’s so exciting to see that, as I’ve watched those that what we’ll look at there, I hadn’t even thought I don’t think the whole course I don’t think I mentioned cooking once. But that is indeed a truly creative and essential creative activity

that plays right back into what I was discussing earlier, too, about how so many entrepreneurs are following the paths of others and are completely uninspired and lose that grand allure. envision of what they saw when they first became an entrepreneur and we’re so excited to work for themselves.

That’s right, you You must watch these you just love them. Yeah, I’m in trouble tonight. Just so you know.

I’ll be watching. Bob, this has been an amazing conversation with you where can listeners learn more about the course and also connect with you online.

Yes, Bob stromberg.com Stromberg is spelled with a B e RG at the end Buster number.com. And I’m going to put together a put together a page just for your listeners, it will be Bob Stromberg comm forward slash positive. So that’s an easy one to remember Bob strummer.com forward slash positive and on that page I’ll have there several fun resources. One is a creativity quiz entitled, are you as creative as Steve Martin, which I realize most of you, most of your listeners think they already know the answer to that question. But it’s quite a revealing little test. It takes it takes literally one minute. It’s three questions, multiple choice, and you can vary the answer to that question. It’s kind of fun. And then there’s a 30 minute training video there on creativity. It’s really an introduction to my class. And that’s free 30 minutes. I packed it with content. So there’s even if people just watch that it would be really, really valuable. And other courses there as well. They can check that out too. And I would love to come. If you have any, if anybody who’s listening who has a company wants to have me come and talk about creativity or if you’re just looking for a great night of comedy, I would be thrilled to come to your place as well.

Awesome. listeners. Again, all the links that we’ve talked about and all the resources will be on my website at KIM SUTTON comm forward slash p p 136. Bob, again, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for being here. Do you have a closing piece of inspiration or advice that you’d love to share with listeners?

Yes, I learned this important lesson as a young man when I bought a fixer upper, a very large Victorian fixer upper in New England and was always overwhelmed with how can I ever get this place? backed away? It was how can I ever restore this house and save it from falling down? And the advice that somebody gave me is just fix something every day, make something better every day. And I began doing that and it worked with with that home. But I also realized that is a bit of advice that is pretty great for our lives as well. If we were all to do that the world would indeed be a better place if we just made something better just fix something every day.