John Williams: The Sounds of My Childhood

John Williams is widely regarded as one of the best and most influential composers in Hollywood. He has composed the scores for films such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Jaws, Schindler's List, and Harry Potter. He did not exclusively make movie scores. He also composed symphonies and concertos. Considering all these scores are easily recognizable, it is no doubt that he is a greatly influential creative.

John Williams' father was a musician.  He no doubt inspired, supported, and motivated his son in becoming a musician.  In fact, Williams started taking piano lessons at a very young age because his father wanted him to learn, understand, and appreciate music.  Just like many other creatives, we learned about how his father nurtured his love for music in his childhood, paving the way for him to accomplish great things.

John Williams has done music mainly because he loves what he does.  He is certainly intrinsically motivated.  Ever since he was a child he chased after his goal of becoming a concert pianist.  After serving in the military for three years, he returned to New York and worked as a jazz pianist because he knew and loved music.  The sheer fact that John Williams is 87 years old and is still writing and 

composing music illustrates his intense intrinsic motivation.  Even after all of his accomplishments he does not take complete pleasure in anything he has made because, like Frank Gehry, he always sees things that can improve.  This shows his love and respect for what he does.  Those feelings motivate him towards perfecting his craft.

Williams has a very interesting creative process.  When questioned on if he ever gets writer's block he replies by saying, "I never experienced anything like a block. For me if I’m ever blocked or I feel like I don’t quite know where to go at the next turn, the best thing for me is to keep writing, to write something. It could be absolute nonsense, but it will project me into the next phase of thinking. And I think if we ourselves as writers get out of the way and let the flow happen and not get uptight about it, so to speak, the muses will carry us along".  He believes that an external force drives his creativity which is why he just writes everything that goes through his head down.  I find it profoundly interesting how he enters a creative flow and then he reviews it and keeps what is good and removes what is bad.  In the same interview he is asked about if he writes with a pen and paper.  He responds by saying he works with "antique tools".  He says, "And I find that at least for me pencil and paper introduces a process of working that’s as much part of it, it becomes part of the conceptual routine or process of working. It’s tangible. It feels good to hold a pen or pencil in your hand and dirty up paper".  To me it appears that he uses a pen and paper for three reasons.  The first is he does not want to break his creative routine.  The second is that he wants to feel intimate with his creative product.  The third is that it allows him to write something down anytime his muse inspires him.  He also acknowledges that the creative process can cause him to neglect his family like many other creatives we have discussed.

I would also like to quickly talk about the field's thoughts on his work.  I think famous director Steven Spielberg explains this relationship perfectly when he says, "I have to say, without question, John Williams has been the single most significant contributor to my success as a filmmaker".  This shows how highly the people in the field view Williams' scores and composition.  That quote also suggests that his work also has a profound positive influence in storytelling done in movies.  But if you don't want to take Spielberg's word for it just look at his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, 5 Academy Awards, 51 Academy Award Nominations, 20 Grammy Awards, and 64 Grammy Award Nominations.  

John Williams is truly a creative genius and I am humbled and inspired by doing research on him.  I strongly recommend that you watch the interview (link bellow) it gave me chills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skh9N2UH1Fo

https://www.biography.com/musician/john-williams

http://www.teemingbrain.com/2012/12/02/the-muses-will-carry-us-along-john-williams-on-composing-music-and-the-creative-process/

Bend It Like Beckham

Whether or not you’re a fan of soccer, you’ve probably heard the name David Beckham before. As a famous soccer player who has done some modeling, is married to Victoria Beckham who is known for being one of the Spice Girls and owning her own fashion line, and is a philanthropist, it’s a little hard to avoid hearing his name.

David Beckham has played for various soccer teams both in Europe and the United States. The more prominent teams include Manchester United, Real Madrid, LA Galaxy, Paris Saint-Germain, and England. Any google search of top soccer players over the ages will feature David Beckham somewhere on them. Beckham is a renowned soccer player, but one of the most prominent things people remember about him is his ability to curve the ball during a free kick.  

            The phrase “bend it like Beckham” refers to the technique Beckham uses when taking free kicks. Before him, players used techniques like the “knuckleball”, “which prompts the ball to deviate unpredictably in the air and leaves goalkeepers guessing where it will end up”, or the “dead leaf”, which was seen as the act “of curling the ball, presumably like a leaf picked up by a gust of wind.” Beckham studied and altered these techniques, resulting in him stumbling “upon something new. His dead-ball technique marries the curled placement of Zico and Platini with the "dead leaf" dip of Didi and Meazza. What you get is a fizzing missile, struck at almost a right angle with Beckham's foot exerting side- and topspin at the same time.” This new technique altered the way players took free kicks. The new technique consisted of Beckham aligning himself at a 45-degree angle to the ball. As he bends backwards slightly to lift the ball off the ground, he strikes the ball with the side of his big toe, causing the ball to roll across his foot and adding extra spin to the ball so it dips and bends towards the goal. By doing this, the goal keeper and the defenders could not predict where the ball would end up, usually resulting in a successful goal for the Englishman.

                                                                                   

  How did this new technique come about? Lots and lots of practice. David Beckham’s manager while with Manchester United, Alex Ferguson, said that David Beckham “practiced with a discipline to achieve an accuracy that other players wouldn’t care about” and even though he was very talented, the hard work is what made him great: “David Beckham is Britain’s finest striker of a football not because of God-given talent but because he practices with a relentless application that the vast majority of less gifted players wouldn’t contemplate.” For the most part, he was intrinsically motivated, indirectly resulting in creating and perfecting his new technique. When asked in numerous interviews how he wants to be remembered or what motivated him, Beckham has said, “I just want people to see me as a hardworking footballer, someone that’s passionate about the game, someone that – every time I stepped on the pitch – I’ve given everything that I have, because that’s how I feel” or that he personally measures success by whether or not he had “had a good time, had fun, had reached the goals that I wanted to reach that I had when I was eight, nine-years-old.” He would practice nonstop because he wanted to become better and fulfill his childhood goals. When David Beckham was asked what his main motivation was for playing soccer, he said it “remains performing well on the pitch, rather than looking after his personal ‘brand’.” There are some extrinsic motivators in his life, but for the most part Beckham created his new technique through intrinsic motivation.

            Overall, I think David Beckham would fall in the Pro-C category. He created a new free kick technique, but he combined and adapted old ones to make his own even better. He was not the first person to make the ball drastically drop at the last second when kicked and he will not be the last person to perfect the technique. His intrinsic motivation helped him to continuously work on his skills and eventually led to the new form. This is why he is only a Pro-C instead of a Big-C creative.

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1584379-pele-to-zico-to-beckham-to-ronaldo-evolution-of-the-free-kick-masters
https://www.sportsrec.com/460113-david-beckhams-freekick-technique.html
https://www.bbc.com/sport/av/football/15616558
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/david-beckham-reveals-secret-of-his-success-i-stayed-in-to-watch-match-of-the-day-rather-than-go-out-10224905.html
david beckham free kick

The Truth Behind the Iceman

A little less than a year ago, I came across a video of this man that was featured on a YouTube channel I subscribe to. I clicked on the video because I was curious how these YouTubers “became superhuman like the Iceman.” Not only that, but I was really curious as to who the Iceman was. After watching this 45-minute documentary, my perspective on so much was changed because of one man, Wim Hof.

Wim Hof is known as “The Iceman” because of the 20 plus Guinness World Records he has broken including climbing up Mt. Everest in only shorts and shoes (2007), running a full marathon in the Arctic circle in nothing but shorts in -20°C (2009), and even surpassing his own record of standing in a container of ice cubes for extended periods of time (2011). These aren’t the only unbelievable feats of nature the iceman has conquered though. Wim Hof has also run a marathon in the Namib desert without any training or water and broke a record for hanging 2,000 meters in the air by one finger. Wim Hof claims that he has tapped into a way to regulate his heart rate and blood pressure and even his immune systems and autonomic nervous system, once commonly believed to not be able to be controlled but rather an involuntary system. The big question you may be wondering amongst all this bewildering information though is “How on Earth can he do these things?” Well, according to Wim, anyone can do these things through a process he now calls the Wim Hof Method.

The Wim Hof Method is based on the concept that our bodies can “adapt to extreme temperature and survive within our natural environment,” according to Wim Hof. This can be achieved through three pillars: cold therapy, breathing, and commitment. Cold exposure therapy is a practice that results in tons of health benefits including, but not limited to, growth in brown adipose tissue which leads to fat loss, improvements in sleep quality, and helps with the production of endorphins which uplift your mood. Proper breathing exercises have the potential to increase your energy levels, decrease stress levels, and uncover what Hof refers to as “an augmented immune response that swiftly deals with pathogens.” The final pillar being commitment basically says that with a dedication to these two practices, mastery over one’s own body is achievable by anyone. Some of the overall benefits that Hof claims his Method produces are improved focus, quickened recovery, enhanced creativity, and a stronger immune system. Unsurprisingly, Wim Hof’s strong advocacy for these practices’ abilities to help control a person’s body raises much speculation and criticism in the scientific community. 

Having faced backlash from so many scientists, Wim Hof decided to pursue his beliefs in his method and hoped it would eventually be recognized as a solution to curing many diseases, disorders, and even cancers in a wholly holistic manner. When sharing these practices with the world, he wanted to be honest about the Method’s benefits and have “evidence-based” support backing him. To do so, Wim had scientists from around the world run various tests on his body. The results turned skeptics into believers, to say the least. The biggest scientific breakthrough was discovering that through Wim’s Method, practiced by Wim Hof and twelve other volunteers, humans can voluntarily influence the autonomic nervous system. This experiment, conducted by the University Medical Center St. Radboud in Nijmegen, Netherlands, consisted of 24 participants and Wim. Half of the participants were trained by Wim to be able to effectively practice the Method and then all were injected with a dead strain of Escherichia coli, a bacteria that would make them feel very sick for several days. When the experiment was conducted, Wim Hof and his trainees were able to completely resist the effects of the bacteria by consciously controlling their immune systems. While this is a huge breakthrough, completely changing the scientific understanding of our involuntary systems, much more research needs to be conducted for the Wim Hof Method to considered accepted by the scientific community and evidence-based. This research on his methods credibility is just one of the many things Wim is continuing to pursue now while also spreading his method around the world through his books, social media platforms, website, and various interviews and events he’s been a part of. 

So why does the Ice Man do what he does? Wim Hof first began practicing the breathing exercises and cold therapy after his late wife died from suicide in 1995. While raising his four kids alone, Wim was forced to cope with the grief he held onto while trying to understand why his wife would do what she did. This is when he began the search to understand how to control the human body, pain, and what moves us through the practices seen in his method. This type of motivation would be considered extrinsic since his mission began after his wife’s death, almost as a way to seek closure. As time went on though, Wim can be seen as intrinsically motivated as well since he received nothing for his work initially and had to persevere through much criticism before even being considered an effective method. Additionally, relating to other course material, Wim can be seen as a true leader due to his extremely charismatic personality. This man advocates against fear and encourages people to push themselves to be open to new experiences as well. If it wasn’t for the optimism, charisma, and hopefulness that Wim brings to practicing his method, there’s no way he would’ve grown the immense following he has now. These types of breathing techniques and cold therapies have been around forever, but it was not until Wim Hof decided to change the game and make people believers not just by word of mouth but also through science. By meshing the world of meditation seen as very spiritual with the world of science and hard facts, Wim may have opened up the door to powerful holistic methods of healing and living. I would say his push for scientific proof in his very unscientific field qualifies him as a creative, potentially pro-c even due to the evolutionary change he is moving forward with and continues to advocate for in terms of the power of his method. 

Sources

Yes Theory documentary https://youtu.be/8cvhwquPqJ0

Vice documentary https://youtu.be/VaMjhwFE1Z

https://www.wimhofmethod.com/practice-the-method

https://www.wimhofmethod.com/science

https://www.wimhofmethod.com/iceman-wim-hof

https://mpora.com/wellbeing/wim-hof-interview-happiness

https://highexistence.com/the-wim-hof-method-revealed-how-to-consciously-control-your-immune-system/

https://highexistence.com/consciously-control-immune-system-wim-hof-method-system-wim-hof-meth

https://highexistence.com/13-crazy-facts-iceman-wim-hof/od/