James Whittaker on Creativity & Storytelling

Creative leaders are iconoclasts. They walk to the beat of their own drum and influence their innate vision, gifts, and talents. They craft poetry in a world that is content with prose,  and art where there is only architecture. They help us view the world in a new dimension. 

James Whittaker provides perspective about his quest to save the world from boredom through creativity and storytelling. 

From academia, startups and tech companies, such as trustworthy computing, Visual Studio and development leader with a big platform on Cortana, before becoming the company's first distinguished technical evangelist at Microsoft.  Engineering Director of. Chrome Maps and Google Plus at Google. He is now the CTO of Biscuit Labs - the most important ambient computing company you've never heard of! He is also the author of eight books. Two of them have been jolt award finalists and to our best sellers.

Web: www.unknownorigins.com
Twitter: UnknownOrigins9
Instagram: unknownoriginsuo77

Transcript

Roy Sharples: 0:09

Hello and welcome to the unknown origins podcast series, the purpose of which is to deliver inspirational conversations with creative industry personalities on entrepreneurship, pop culture, art, music, film and fashion. Today's focus is on creativity in evangelism, storytelling and technology innovation, for which I have the pleasure of chatting with James Whittaker. Creative leaders are iconic lists, they walk to the beat of their own drum, and influence through their innate vision, gifts and talents. They craft poetry, and a world that is content with prose and art, where there is only architecture, and they help us view the world in a new dimension. James Whittaker epitomizes this, as you will experience, whilst he shares his unique perspective and story about his quest to save the world from boredom. from academia, startups and tech companies, such as trustworthy computing, Visual Studio and development leader with a big platform on Cortana, before becoming the company's first distinguished technical evangelist at Microsoft engineering director for Chrome Maps and Google Plus at Google and to know where he is the CTO of biscuit labs, the most important ambient computing company you've never heard of. He is also author of eight books. Two of them have been jolt award finalists and to our best sellers. Hello, and welcome, James.

James Whittaker: 1:39

Thanks, Roy. Good to be here.

Roy Sharples: 1:41

What inspired and attracted you to being a creative,

Unknown: 1:45

being a creative, maybe it's a choice. I realized my creative streak when I was very young, I was different than my family different than my cousins, different than my friends, I spent a lot more time inside my own head. And, you know, my father was always telling me I was dreaming and head in the clouds and all these things and, and I don't know how old I was, when I finally realized I prefer being inside my own head to being with other people. And always made up games and, you know, change sports to make them more interesting and, and gravitated away from the things that you know, had no creative elements and toward things that that did. And you know, for example, sports, you know, there wasn't much creative about football, you know, NFL football, he just, you know, bigger, faster, stronger than everybody else. And that wasn't me. And you know, I kept trying all the sports and baseball you know, I was a daydreamer, I got hit, I was playing shortstop one time I got hit by line drive right in the head because I had drifted off because I found the game so utterly dull. And whatever was going on inside my head was far better. And and my coach switched me to pitcher. And all of a sudden, I became a good athlete, because pitching had that, that variation, that creative sort of thing to it, you know, I could, I could vary my fingers on the ball, I could, I could release it at different points, I could turn my hand one way or the other, grip it harder or softer or all of these little variations that I got to play with and and and and that drove me to being you know, for skinny, lanky kid, you know, I could throw a fastball pass most people in the league, I could throw a curveball, I could do all these things it but then once I mastered it, I got bored as fuck, I mean, let's just face it the America sport is not the most interesting thing. And so throughout my life, there are always these things where if there was a creative element, I would tear it apart and concentrate on it for for some period of time and then fall out of love with it because you know, the creativity was expended and and so that was me growing up this kid who spent time in his own head and preferred the company of his of his own neurons to other people. And, and I think that, you know, that is driven out of a lot of children. My inability to focus in school you know, if I had been born in these days, I would have probably been pumped full of you know, ADHD drugs and, and all this stuff and maybe it would have believed my my creative senses. But I didn't allow that and then I turned it into I think this is key. Something I did that I do. Don't think a lot of creatives do to young ages, when the real world began creeping in to my frontal lobe. The idea that I needed to go to college the idea that I needed to be gainfully employed the idea that I needed to get the fuck out of Kentucky where I was born, right, I began to apply all of the, you know, creative variances and thought processes that I come up with as a, as a kid to, to the real world. And, you know, it drove me into majoring into computer science rather than, you know, where my high school guidance counselors were driving me toward things like accounting and, and psychology and sociology and all these things where, you know, there was more demand for for work, none of them even knew what computer science was. But I saw the potential to be creative. And, and that's made me a huge difference in my life, you know, both monetarily and, and just, you know, fed my creative juices to, you know, into my 50s. Now,

Roy Sharples: 6:07

you're totally awareness and quest to find true originality and authenticity. And the pleasure that brings within yourself resonates strongly. Your point about creativity, being stifled in education is spot on. There's an unspoken unwritten understanding that creative pursuits are not productive, you're not going to be an artist, you're not going to be a dancer, you're not going to be an actress, you're not going to be a musician, because they won't earn you enough dough and blah, blah, blah, soul destroying advice, and so, so wrong. Academic systems are still fundamentally designed for a bygone industrial age than the modern age. That being the age of creativity, at least specialization, traditional formulaic and uniformed educational methods, grounded in recall, over teaching and testing, as opposed to critical thinking, applied practical, problem solving, and true leadership, and given time, and space for creativity, in an unstructured way, which is, in essence, the enemies of free thought, self expression, and innovation. In parallel, James, your storytelling progress, specifically, your voice tone, and style is very engaging and soothing. You'd make reading the Yellow Pages sound interesting. How do you do that?

James Whittaker: 7:39

So it there's, I tell it I teach course on storytelling, so you know, pitch and cadence and, and timing, comedic timing and the ability to, you know, add some staccato you know, it's like a guitar riff. Why is it guitar riff sounds so damn good. So I've thought about this. And I put a lot of time into, you know, voice training, singing lessons and, and just the ability to use this instrument that I've been given. And, you know, I did a podcast this morning on on artificial intelligence and voice assistants, you know, I started Cortana at Microsoft. And, you know, all those comments were, oh my god, this guy's so interesting. And it's because I've studied being interesting. And and I understand what it takes, right? I've applied my creativity to being interesting. And part of being interesting, frankly, is just the voice. This is not the voice I was. I was, I mean, it's the voice I was born with, but, you know, it's a piece of work to, you know, to labor of love the speaking of voices, bloody lovely Irish accent you a funny guy. I know. I said that on purpose. You know, that's it. That's a tough one for us Americans is I can tell the kiwi from an Ozzy I can tell, you know, Northern Brit from a southern Brit. But you Scots in new Irish, it's close. You got to admit it's close. Kind of Kentucky or Tennessee kind of

Roy Sharples: 9:12

the longer you know, we transatlantic speech patterns of marriage. However, I'm typically confronted by four Are you are you Scottish? Are you Irish? Or EU Australian? Are you new zealand? The lots are two is baffling. Which to me? I am quite essentially are Sean Connery. And it's so obvious.

James Whittaker: 9:35

My LinkedIn photo I had a Scottish kid on That's right. Yeah, absolutely. And and that was what drew you to me

Roy Sharples: 9:41

to the point of what to make as well. James was about how quickly you pull in an audience within your keynotes use evangelism or storytelling. As sessions it's really

James Whittaker: 9:53

magnetic that first 30 to 60 seconds is crucial, particularly for younger audiences. You know, the attention spans have gone down over the years. I'm Gen X. And our attention span is about six minutes until the Alright, I can take six minutes of boredom. But you know, the younger millennials and Gen Z it's it's down under a minute, you know, they don't have time for you they've got phones and they have, you know, things going on inside their head, they've got social media and you know, the first 630 30 to 60 seconds really important. If you lose them, then you're probably not going to get them by

Roy Sharples: 10:27

how do you make the invisible visible in terms of your creative process? How do you come up with ideas? How do you convert those ideas into concepts? Bring those comp concepts to implementation, and actualization?

James Whittaker: 10:42

Well, I am firmly convinced that creativity doesn't exist without some level of expertise. Right? ignoramuses don't come up with good ideas, you've got to know something. And the more you know, there's some magic that goes on inside your head as you learn and master subject. You know, when I started looking into storytelling, I was pretty good at it already started looking at the techniques watching, you know, people better than me, stand up comedy is probably where I learned most of my techniques rather than TED talks or anything else. I mean, you don't get to be a stand up comic, unless you're pretty damn good at words. And so, you know, steadily and slowly getting better and better. And then the crazy some of the creative insights where, you know, Ron Wyden, who is a comedian that love him or hate him, has influenced me a lot, because his delivery made sense. And when I delivered a joke, like he delivered a joke, it worked better than if I was trying to, you know, imitate Eddie Murphy or someone like that. And so, you know, the first creative insight was just kind of merging other experts, I was good enough that I could see through their jokes down to their individual technique. And and so you know, if my first creative insight was storytelling was there's three parts of the delivery. It's, it's what you say the words matter how you say it, and what you do while you're saying and I'm, and then it sounds simple. And when I tell you that you're like, Oh, yeah, that's obviously what it is. But no one had ever said it before. It was an obvious and so if you're always trying to be so profound, that you're going to miss the low hanging fruit and what you say how you say what you do, by you're saying it, there's nothing more lower hanging than that. But I was the first one that said that. And when I teach that class, and utter those words, what you say how you say it, what you do, while you're saying it, light bulbs go off in people's head. And so that's the other part of being a creative is watching. One of the reasons I teach is because I like to practice delivering, you know, really tough idea, or one of the things I think I'm good at, or people tell me I'm good at is taking a complicated subject and making it quite simple. Yeah. And, and so you don't do that unless you really understand that subject. And so there's level of expertise is really crucial. And so, you know, I surround myself and then once you get good, don't stop. A lot of people go Alright, now I'm going to be a consultant on storytelling, hang up my shingle and go start getting work and start teaching the same shit over and over and over again, and it gets stale. I never did that. Instead, I challenged myself and And generally, I would match myself up with people who were opposite of me. Yeah, it's the diversity element and expertise. You know, the first time I co taught a class was actually in in New Zealand in Auckland with Michelle Dickinson you know, she's younger than me she's female, she's she's part Asian. And and we're different right? The things that she says and the way she delivers them completely different than me, but she's really good. And then Donna Sarkar me or Mary Rodriguez, I've worked with a bunch of just really good storytellers. And, and so when you get, the funny thing is when you get to be an expert. Really, the only people you can learn from are other experts, you're not going to learn from somebody who's not as good as you at these things. And so, you know, I learned a lot from from those three women and, and the next time I do it will probably be with you know, I'd love to share the stage with, with somebody with different sexual orientation in mind or trans person and just, you know, learn absorb all these things. Don't Don't be Don't be afraid of these. So, you know, in a nutshell, it's just trying to make, find what you're you're good at and just double down, triple down, quadruple down. And, and, you know, that has served me a lot. And then the other part of it is there's a lot of science around this by the way to the All the links are in my book, the seven stages of creativity. The other is is a routine, you know, all the creative, the most creative people of all time. You know, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, George Washington Carver, and all the people who were considered by everyone to be really creative buckers had a routine. And it's uncanny that they all had this, right, they built their day around their creativity. And so you have to be really observant as a creative because that's your job to observe the world and then tweak it in some way right back to when I was a kid, I, my whole entire extended family was perfectly happy with their lot in life, they were perfectly happy with taking whatever job was in front of them and doing it until they could retire when they were 16. And I wasn't never happy with the way the world was ordered. I always wanted to reorder it. And, and so you know, pay attention to, to, to those things and pay attention to the problems that you're interested in. Pay attention to your creative moments, and I'm more creative in the morning many people are and and so you know, I, I designed my entire morning around my creative processes. I'm not creative at all, from the hours of, you know, say 11am to three or four drinking hours up to drinking hours. And so I agree to do things is the sorry, you're like, I agree to do things like this. I agree to meetings, I agree to you know, doing the the actual job that I get paid for. And then drinking hours, right? We're we're having this interview, by the way audience in a brewery in a backroom of a brewery. I really like beer, I really like the smell of beer brewing the malts and hops and, and so I find, you know, I've noticed over the years that my creative creativity is peaks in the morning, goes down in the afternoon, and then during drinking hours, and I'm a drinker. I feel sorry for teetotallers. I feel sorry for people who don't like to kind of rearrange their neurons just a little bit to make them a little happy to make them a little excited. And then you never know what's going to happen. In in those moments, and so, you know, I'm a morning and evening creative or mute experience, James, what are the key skills needed? I think it's that ability to watch the world and begin to organize it and catalog and it's funny, I think that I say the word organization, when I describe creativity, because a lot of people say, Oh, you know, be creative. creatives always have messy offices know, they don't, My office is really clean. It's really tidy. And and so it's it's organizing that that chaos of your mind, and noticing, you know, those those patterns? First thing I tried to do, you know, when I was studying artificial intelligence as a graduate student, I just I tried to organize it in my head. Why is this different from software development? What's really going on here? What are the patterns? What are the what are the things that I can explain when and, and I worked on that. And I got to the point that I don't I wasn't the best today I in terms of you know, you look at my graduate school class, I wasn't the best today I. But I understood it at a deeper level than anyone else might not have been as good a coder, I might not have been as good at labeling my data, I might not have been a good at selecting the algorithm based on the data. But I understood it at a fundamental level. And once I did label the data correctly, I knew why. And I could repeat it. Once I did select the right out algorithm for my training data. I knew why. Right? Because it was that attention, that awareness, that consciousness of watching yourself work. I wrote a my medium comm blog, I wrote about my split personality, I can watch myself work, I can be productive and watch the patterns in my productivity at the same time. It sounds a little bit like mental illness, it probably is. I call it I actually have a name for my alter ego. And only my closest friends know what it is. But unless you've read that post, I suppose. And and so it's that there is a an awareness and just an absolute desire to reorganize the world, whatever you mean by the world. And to me it was you know, mostly the tech world, but also the creative world and the storytelling world. I'm not going to go into a field unless I'm intensely interested in it. And it's got problems that need to be fixed, right? I'm a fixer,

Roy Sharples: 19:45

James, you're looking into the rear view mirror. If you were 18 again today and know what you know now, what would you do differently if at all anything

James Whittaker: 19:55

Oh, for fuck sake, I wouldn't want to be 18 for no amount of money.

Roy Sharples: 20:00

Do you think youth is wasted on the young?

James Whittaker: 20:02

No, youth is a pathway to a place it's more interesting to many people our age, I think, look back and see all you know, I had stronger i was i was better looking and more hair and, you know, grays and my skin was smoother. And, and and all of that is is just Who cares? Right? I am never gonna, you know, don't like my deathbed. I'm not gonna say I have remember how smooth my skin was? Do you remember how flat my belly was? And how, how? Well, nevermind, I made a gesture is it this is audio only. it you know, it's the things that I remember are, are the really the those creative moments of time I spent in in my own head there is explaining that feeling of coming up with an idea. Putting that two and two together and getting 4.1. You know, even just just that's an insight that you've made, that nobody else has made, is going to change a lot of people's lives. I don't want to be 18 again, but I want to influence people who are 18. Now, maybe even 18 is too tough. You know, I find I find people begin to get really intensely interesting sometime in their 30s. Yeah. And you know, they had they've had some experience and and they've had they've been knocked down a few times they've learned a bunch of stuff that's just wrong. And and reorienting that world is much easier than if you're too young. And now I don't want to generalize here, you know, I I'm, I'm a mentor to a lot of, you know, late teens. And but if you're if you're if you're too young, you often don't question enough, because we must be this way, because this is the first time I've ever encountered this this thing. And so I generally tend to prefer mentoring people who have failed a few times, and and who have thought deeply, you know, those are the best discussions I have

Roy Sharples: 22:06

tilting into the future. What's your vision for the future? What do you see as the key forces that's driving change in industry, social culture, economics, politics and technology? And what do you see the role of creativity playing in society? Well, we need creativity more than ever, you know, we've got some really big societal problems to deal with, you know,

James Whittaker: 22:32

let's just take the macro level of, you know, global warming and acidifying oceans and, you know, disappearing ecosystems and endangered species are just not to dissolve in danger, they're dying out. And, and even, you know, languages that are dying, and cultures that are dying are there, there's just some big meaty sort of planet wide problems that that we need to get our head around. And we need some creative solutions for those sorts of things. And then you've got artificial intelligence, coming, maybe quantum computing, but definitely artificial intelligence, you know, and the line is being drawn between man and machine, machines learn. Finally, machines are learning like humans learn, and that should frighten the shit out of a lot of people, if they really understood we can do a podcast on AI. So yeah, I can explain that stuff to you. You know, these are some big hairy problems to solve. And then there's a whole bunch of problems that we created, you know, Facebook, and the debate over whether it's good, or whether it's evil. There's clearly a lot of good that comes from socially connecting people across vast distances. And there is also clearly a lot of evil that has that has taken place. And so how do we how do we separate those two, and, and maximize the good and minimize the bad? And this is, you know, back to my, what does it take to be a creative, what it takes to be a creative is to be aware of those things, and to be able to point out, okay, there's something that's good, and it connects to this bad thing. And I've just figured out how to separate one from the other, you know, these sorts of insights, it's going to be a bunch of little insights, that fixes Facebook is going to be a bunch of little insights, that that makes global warming a solvable problem, right. And so, when people think, Oh, I'm naughty on Musk, or I'm not, I don't have the resources of Bill Gates, I don't, Elan musk and Bill Gates are not going to solve this problem. Somebody in their 20s or 30s, some group of people in their 20s or 30s, are going to be the ones that in mass, solve a bunch of these little problems that are going to fix society and they're going to do it by first of all understanding what the problems are getting really smart that said expertise component, talking to a diverse set of, of people who are going to help focus Your view of the world. And then that creative aha moment that happens over a beer in a brewery or that happens over a coffee in the morning, or a cup of tea, the Scottish Cup of tea, those are going to be the ones that that make a difference. And, and so now that, you know a lot of this book learning stuff, you know, this pandemic has accelerated a lot of trends in society. And in one is, you know, we don't need schools, you can learn things outside the classroom, and just as good as you can learn inside the classroom, and I think we're gonna walk away from this pandemic, realizing most of the education in quotes that we give to our kids isn't really necessary, they really need to learn this other stuff. And a lot of this other stuff can be learned with self study, or very small group study. And then there are other things that, you know, need to be done in, in large groups. And that's probably what those big school buildings will be Either that, or those big school buildings will be the next, you know, empty strip malls like they had in the 70s. And so, you know, there's, there's another place for creativity is going to take place where we can, where we can fix things and make people a lot happier. I mean, there's no, there's no greater enemy, to creativity than the organized educational system we have on this planet. So,

Roy Sharples: 26:22

James, what's the importance of storytelling and creativity?

James Whittaker: 26:26

Well, sort of, at the heart of both of those two things is an idea, right? a creative mind conceives of an idea to solve some problem or to to make your world a better place. And and storytelling is the conveying of that idea. And so the the most successful creatives are the ones who are able to explain their creations and the storytelling comes on the explaining side. The best storytellers aren't the ones that just regurgitate someone else's ideas, right? We had Apple's good at this. Johnny, Ive and Steve Jobs are really good at coming up with the ideas. And then they had these storytellers and some of them got famous right Guy Kawasaki got famous for his storytelling. And then he left apple. He's a storyteller but not a creative That's what I'm saying. Sorry, guy, but and so it's the people who are can do both.

Roy Sharples: 27:21

Steve Jobs could conceive of an idea and and tell that story Johnny Ives could only conceive and Guy Kawasaki could only tell. And so were those to merge, creativity and storytelling. That's the sweet spot. That is the spot where you are going to be creative, really pretty much no matter what you put your mind to. insightful and provocative As always, thank you, James. For more information, and to keep in touch with James, follow him on twitter at Dr. James W. Under his website, Doc James w.com. For more inspirational conversations with creative industry personalities on entrepreneurship, pop culture, art, music, film and fashion, please go to the unknown origins website at unknown origins.com