Firdaus Kharas is a renowned social innovator, speaker, humanitarian, and founder of Chocolate Moose Media.
Since 1995, he has been using his background in international issues to create communications and use media to better the human condition. His work has been seen in 198 countries by over 1 billion people.
He was named one of the World’s 50 Most Talented Social Innovators and has received many awards, including the prestigious Peabody Award.
His latest book, Creativity: The Key to a Remarkable Life, aims to help people unlock their inner creative power to change their lives.
Today, Firdaus shares his journey and how he uses education to help promote change.
He reveals how humour has made his work successful and why communication should be aimed at the individual to be effective.
He shares what creativity is and how you can use it to keep moving forward, especially in challenging times.
He reveals how everyone can tap into their creative side and how the pandemic has enabled more of this in the way we live and do business.
He also shares why you need to embrace failure, how he uses creative thinking in his everyday life and how it helps him deal with days when things don’t go as planned.
“Creativity is not a product; you can’t actually see creativity. You can see the result of creativity in a product.” Firdaus Kharas
This week on The Power to Live More Podcast:
The journey that led Firdaus to become a social innovatorWhy Firdaus chose education and creativity to help othersHow Firdaus has found humour useful in his creations to promote changeWhy it’s important to talk to one person instead of aiming at a broad audience in your marketingWhat is creativity and how you can apply it to your businessHow creative thinking is an individual processThe positive impact COVID-19 has had on business processesWhy a unique approach to communication is essentialHow you can discover what people want so you can tailor your communicationHow you can encourage creativity and keep moving forwardExamples of how we are all individuals and creative thinkersHow the pandemic has enabled creative thinking in the way we do businessWhy you need to embrace failureHow Firdaus uses creative thinking in his business and everyday lifeHow Firdaus uses his creativity to deal with days when things go wrong
Connect with Firdaus Kharas:
Chocolate Moose Media WebsiteChocolate Moose Media on FacebookChocolate Moose Media on TwitterChocolate Moose Media on LinkedInFirdaus Kharas on LinkedInFirdaus Kharas on InstagramFirdaus Kharas on Twitter
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#194 Firdaus Kharas Interview
Today I'm interviewing Firdaus Kharas of chocolate mousse media. Welcome for those lovely to meet you. Thank you, Jo. It's a pleasure to be here. So start by telling us a bit about who you are what you do, and crucially, where you do it.
00:16
Well, where I do, it is all around the world, quite literally, my work is being used in 198 countries, it's been seen by over a billion people. And essentially, what I do is use media to better the human condition. So I've been working on COVID-19. And before that, I did a video on how to interact with the police in the United States. And I worked on a lot of disease prevention, not human rights and other issues like that. I use creativity to better the human condition through Mass Communications called behavior change communications. And then we do that for the last 25 years, based out of Canada, I was based out of Switzerland as well.
01:03
Wow. It feels like it's a big topic, and we've not even started.
01:10
So my first question is usually in very sort of person in here, sort of how did that all happen? Because it's not the sort of thing you probably, you know, left college saying that
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai you wanted to do or left school saying what you thought you wanted to do? How did how did it all come about? Oh, I blamed Mother Teresa.
01:28
When I was quite small, about eight years old, I met Mother Teresa several times, because my mother was the head of a national NGO in India, where I was born and grew up in Calcutta. And Mother Teresa was not famous at that point. This was in the early 60s. And
01:49
I remember the image of Mother Teresa working in a huge room with the poorest of the poor, dying on cots, as if it were just yesterday.
01:59
And I realized, looking back that I think I got my first day. So working outside of one's comfort zone for the benefit of others. And that time, we can imagine that an eight year old walking into Rome have very sick and dying people has a lasting impression. Yeah. And so I can draw a straight line from my early socialization in India, to all my university schooling and through my other earlier work in international affairs, particularly in the Government of Canada on refugee affairs, and I headed the United Nations Association Canada for a while.
02:40
So I use media, but I make media where the difference I don't do commercial programs, I do media that essentially uses my background in international issues. And I use the media to better the human condition by making people change their behavior, either directly by the viewer watching what I'm producing, or indirectly, by creating a conversation about a particular topic like sexual violence that they want to create a topic on and and therefore create an influence on the person whose behavior I need to change. Hmm. And how did you know that that was the way to do that. So you knew very clearly that it was about helping other people and but obviously, there are so many routes that you could have chosen, how did I act, it was the education and the creativity piece. I actually started with UNICEF. We some time ago in the 1990s, we did what was then a very new convention, which is called the convention rights of children, we took every right in it and we animated it using studios around the world. And in those days, we had to send broadcast quality
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai tapes to broadcasters, and over 2200 broadcasters played them around the world, they became the most watched, maybe on human rights ever created. And then I came up, I thought that this is a good way of mass communications to get people to focus on a particular subject and to change their behavior. And the work that I'm probably most famous for grading or co grading is called the three amigos which was three funny animated condoms to stop the spread of HIV AIDS. And that became very famous and was used in over 150 countries in one way or the other during the height of the HIV AIDS crisis. And I think I've used the approach of using humor, because I don't believe in bashing people over the head. I mean, if you think of most of behavior change communication
05:00
They don't use much creativity. They simply, you know, they might show you, for example, an image of a battered woman that they're dealing with domestic violence, and say, basically don't do this. Well, I don't think that does anything except publicize domestic violence, I don't think it addresses the person whose behavior you want to change in that example. And that is the person who is doing the abuse, not the victim. And so, I think that I use humor, to bring a person to the serious point I want to make at the end of the spot, because I think that the person has to internalize the message as he and we have to use rather creativity in reaching people. So I always say that I have an audience of one person, just one, I don't group people together. And we can get into that if you want this, why but I essentially just have an audience of one person, each individual person that has behavior needs to change, I think that would be a really good thing to explore on the basis that many people in business people, coaches and consultants that I work with, don't understand the importance of sort of niching what they do, and finding that one person to speak to in terms of their marketing. And in fact, I only had that very debate this week, in a networking group that I ran, where, where somebody was trying to say, Oh, you know, I can sell to all of these different people. And what and I was trying to say, you know, you've got to pick one person. And in this case, it was one group of people, not even just one person. And that was a struggle. And so talk a talk a bit about how important it is to speak to that one person. It's extremely important. In business, people misunderstand what creativity is. So let me start with what creativity is, in my definition, Greg cavity is the ability to train differently by mental process of original thoughts, that leads to the creation of new ideas. So in my book, for example, I go into what creativity is not. And the first thing I say is creativity is not a product, you can actually see creativity, you can see the result of creativity in a product. But it's not a product. It's a mental process. And the second thing is creativity is not innovation. A lot of people I think coaches and so on misunderstand what innovation is they would you know, five people from a company into room for a couple of days and say, Okay, now we're going to brainstorm and we're going to come up with new ideas. It hardly ever works. It might work. But it'll be an accident. If it
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai does work. That is not the best way to get creativity out of people. Innovation is also like a product is the result of applying creative thinking, of coming up with new ideas. And then you you you can use it in a group. I don't mean to suggest that groups have nothing to do with creativity. But individuals are great people groups are not, you can take an idea and you can you can enhance it, you can decide how to implement it, you can create the product and so on in the group. So you can take a creative idea and then come up with something that is a group that comes best out of a group. But the original creative thought is never a group process. It's an individual's whole process. If you think about the most great person in the world in history, who would you think of to meet Leonardo da Vinci? It was It is a creative genius. Now, he you know, he came up, for example, with the fun the idea of a modern helicopter, some pilot years ago. So if you think of Leonardo da Vinci, imagine if he had put his ideas through a group process. I mean, we wouldn't know his name today. And we probably wouldn't notice ideas today. Because everybody in that group would have laughed at him in liat. He was an absolute creative genius, and move the world forward. And I think that, that that is a good example of how great your thinking is an individual process and that groups actually can be detrimental to the group process. And the best known proponent of that was Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs often said that it is really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Yeah, I think I think that's absolutely true. Yes, that was that was following the Henry Ford thing, wasn't it about people would have invented faster horses, not the car or something like that. Yet the thread that that's exactly what Henry Ford said. If I ask people what they want
10:00
They would have said faster horses. Yes, you know, if you can, you'll be a great thinker. And in business, you have to not just think outside the box, but really far outside the box. And I think that's an important point that many business leaders fail to understand. And they do so at their great detriment, specially now in the era of COVID. In 2020. I think if there's one lining silver lining that's come out of this year, is the fact that we all had to rethink everything. And we mean, few think of it from a company's perspective. You know, they've had to look at the supply lines, they've had to think about other greater products, they've had to rethink about how they reshape existing customers, they've had to rethink what how they, how they reach new customers. So everything is said to be rethought. I mean, everything from you know, where we work from, to, to how we move products, how we get products, to, to our customers, and so on. Everything is said to be rethought, we've had to apply a lot of creative thinking. And if you don't apply creative thinking, for example, if you don't have an online presence as a company, and you've been waiting for people to walk into your store, for example, you're going to go out of business, it may take longer, it may take sooner may already have happened this year. But if you have not
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai thought creatively, you will simply go out of business. Yes, yeah, absolutely. So thinking back to the website talking to one person, and how does that get connect up? Well, that connects up because in the age of internet of the internet, we are all individuals,
11:53
you know, big data is created on on our individual preferences and choices. So, you know, in the old days, a marketer might have said, Okay, I'm an educated Canadian, and so on. And, you know, and given me a certain product, because he thinks that he can group me in those kinds of characteristics. It's not true anymore. Nobody really should be marketing, because I'm a group of a certain age or a certain ethnicity, or a certain nationality or, but no affluent, or whatever. I think that
12:34
every time we go on the internet nowadays, where we're tracked, everything we look at every product we buy, an individual profile is being created of us. And I do think that that is the right way to do it. I've been advocating that role individuals for the last many, many years, many more years than the Internet has been in existence. Yeah. And the and the reason for that is that, I think that if you think about my work, which has to go around the world, it has to have so much creativity, that they have to get around the various barriers that all of us carry around in ourselves to effective communications. And I will give some examples, our belief system, our culture, education is necessarily our intolerances. The language we speak our morals, our re you know, stereotypes in our hands, racism in our heads and our values. So we're all different. We're all individuals, no two particular, no two people are so aligned to each other thinking that, that, you know, we can, we can put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, you know, that there's a there's a saying that you don't understand me until you walked a mile in my shoes, or whatever that thing is, I think that's, you know, just complete nonsense. Nobody else can walk in anybody else's shoes, but you're all individuals. And I do think that that has profound implications for companies, particularly for marketing, because
14:18
if you think of us as one particular person,
14:23
#194 Firdaus Kharas Interview
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai you know, every we all carry around such a myriad of factors in our brains and our personalities, that we see the world in a totally different way. So, for example, I'm not particularly religious person, but other people might be very religious. So the way they see something will be affected by that. Some people might have a bias against women, for example. I hope I don't have one. You know, somebody who who's has a bias against women. Then when a professional woman is
15:00
Then in the context of business context is talking to that person, that person will be influenced, even if it's subconsciously, will be influenced by that factor because that factor has importance in their brain. And so until, because we have all these factors have a list of over 50 of them,
15:21
that we we all carry around in ourselves, we, no two people are alike, because the importance that any particular factor has in our brains is different than everybody else's. So the possible combination, we'd like 50 factors runs into trillions and trillions. So there's no way that somebody else's thinks like, exactly like I owe exactly like, you know, my exactly, it's funny I did, I've been doing some video,
15:51
podcasts and conversations with a colleague about employee engagement, a couple of colleagues over the Hall of lockdown. And I'm, there's a bit of a joke that my constant mantra is the bit about treating people as individuals. And when, when my daughter was young, her school, her school head teacher used to sort of banging on about the fact that you should treat people as you would like to be treated yourself. And I was used to tell Ellie that that was wrong. And she used to get an order to me, because to her, you know, the head teacher was God. And I always used to say, well, it's not about how you want to be treated, going back to your thing about walking in somebody else's shoes, it is actually how they want to be treated, not how you think they want to or how you want to, it's got to be about that person. But how do we how do we get to know what those people want? You know, when it's not as and we can't tell? And as you say, everyone is so different?
16:44
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai Well, I think that we ultimately come back to the fact that we're one human family,
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you know, that COVID has taught us has reminded us of that little, you know, I can't think of a better example, I mean, you would have to go all the way back perhaps to World War Two, to think when you know what happens, somewhere in a faraway place impacts us no matter who we are where we are. And that is simply because we're all living together on this one fragile planet. And I think that that we have come back to this notion, we have to come back to this notion on big issues or non small issues, that there are issues that that no matter and pandemics have good example, that no matter where we are, we are affected by them, there literally isn't a person on this planet that hasn't been affected by COVID-19. In 2020, no matter where you live, no matter what language you are, speak, no matter what religion you are, and so on. So, so I think that that that idea, that notion, that there are some things that affect us as a human species, is, is a very critical and important one. So when you create a global company, and you keep thinking about the global companies, they're the biggest in the world, but the biggest company in the world that I'm aware of right now by market capital is Apple. And Apple is probably one of the most creative companies in the world as well, if not the most creative company, I have a great deal of respect for Apple. And it started by two people in the garage, that's all and they kept applying their creativity. And you know, if you think of Apple as an example, the first company that had the idea of creating a mobile phone wasn't Apple, it was a company called Motorola. Yeah. Motorola is obviously nowhere the mobile phone business. And that's because they had the original creative idea. But then they didn't keep applying their creative thinking. And so then Apple and Samsung, and Nokia, and so on, all came along and took market away from from the company that came up with the original idea. Yeah. So it, applying creative thinking in the business is not a one off thing. You have to do it continuously. It's a continuous process. And I go in my book through through the various
19:23
things that you need the kind of eight aspects of applying creativity that you need,
19:30
that that you need in a business to succeed. And I can go through those if you wish, but but you need certain things in order to be able to apply creative thinking. I think it'll be interesting to hear what they are in, sort of, through the lens, if you like of the pandemic because one of the things that's been frustrating me around the narrative around sort of
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai moving forwards as a world is that is that there seems to be so
20:00
Talk about getting back to how things were. And you know, things like even, you know, when the UK came out of lockdown, the first thing the government did was tell everyone to sort of go back to the office as if that was the only way to run a business. And you know, some people did, because that's what they think is the only way to run a business and others, you know, there's a friend of mine who works for a big company with like, 55,000 employees, and they're still working from home, and they have all the way through and they're still doing really well. And they've made it, you know, work, they've got a new way of working now. But how do we, how do we encourage creativity and how we move forward rather than sort of end up trying to snap back into what we're used to and keep things sort of as normal as possible? Because it's such an upheaval? How do we encourage those changes and encourage people to take the opportunity of the trauma that we're going through, if you like to come out differently at the end of it, the first thing I would say is that we all have to accept that we are creative thinkers, the the ability of us to apply creative thinking is different. And
21:07
some of us are narrow minded thinkers, and some of us are very large, creative thinkers. But we are all creative thinkers. And and people sometimes quite often tell me, Well, you know, I am not a painter, or I'm not an artist, or I'm not a writer. So I'm not a creative person. That's completely nonsense. Every single person, no matter who you are, you are a great thinker. And if you don't think you are just think back to your childhood, and if you are in adulthood now. And you say, okay, maybe I was a creative thinker when I was a child, because you know, I sang a dance and so on. But now I don't do that. Well just take a piece of paper and take a pen or pencil.
21:54
Sorry, and draw a squiggly line.
21:59
Just take a piece of paper and draw a squiggly line in any way you want. Just another straight line is squiggly line, no matter what squiggly line you come up with, that is your
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai creative thinking. Because no other person because number of pixels, for example, on a on a paper, the no other person has probably ever drawn that squiggly line exactly the way that you just drew it. It is your individualism that is coming out in the way that you draw a squiggly line. Now, that's just a simple example of how we are all individuals and how we're all creative thinkers. Because nobody will tell you, well, you know, I can't draw a squiggly line that you can and that's an expression of your creative thinking. Yes, yeah. So I do think that the first thing we need to do is understand that we're all creative thinking except that we're all creative thinkers, that creative thinking is not the same as artistry. It's quite different. And, and greater thinking is what we need in our both our personal lives and our professional lives, you know, and there's an annual survey done of the workflow in the largest platform of the world of employers and employees. And they ask the employers, what is the one characteristic, the top characteristic that you're looking for in a potential employee? And for the last five years, it has been creativity. And the last five years even before COVID, it has been great with DNS, absolutely, no doubt, it's going to be great to be going forward in the post COVID period. So the first thing is we are creative thinkers, except that the second thing is, the status quo is never static. Nothing is stays the same. And you know, we talked about Apple and Motorola as an example. But they have many, many other examples. No company absolutely needs to have all this employees go back into an office none. It doesn't matter what they do. For example, they are companies that are actually creating widgets, and they need people in their in their plant, for example, and you're going to tell me, Well, you know, this is a plan. Well, let me tell you that if you're doing something that repetitive and the plan, AI and automation robots are going to take over your job Pretty soon, so if they haven't already, so don't think that just because you're grading something in a plan, that that's the only way to do it. In every other aspect of professional life, you know, goods and services that we can think of, I can't think of any other place that needs to meet
25:00
Have people in an office? I haven't been to an office meeting.
25:06
I mean, perhaps one or two, but I haven't been to an office meeting in since March in Canada. And you know, I haven't lost anything. Because I've been doing all my work online for years anyway. And it hasn't changed anything. And I think that every company can do that. Why can't a bank average advisors or investment sitting at home, you know, professionally dressed and whatever, but still sitting at home and advising that clients? Why can't a manufacturing company, CEO directors, employees by sitting at home and
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai meeting with them on on one of the platforms like zoom and Skype and so on? To Do you know, manage employees? Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody needs to go in. There's some employees that obviously you can do with not going in. So for example, the bus driver is a good example, when a bus driver just simply can't function if it doesn't go and drive the bus. So, you know, there are some things that that are going to be necessidade. Yeah. going in, but for the vast majority of employees, I think that's not going to be necessary in the future.
26:33
No, no, yes. And it's interesting, because companies are all doing the same thing. So there are companies where you would think, oh, it might be quite difficult for them to work from home, but they're making it work. And others are just saying it's too hard when it's easier for them, then, you know, company a sort of thing. So it's interesting. I mean, I, you know, accept that
26:55
the economy in city centers is affected if people aren't in the offices, but other than that, to me, it just feels like the the economy will go out to the sort of towns and the villages and the back a bit, a bit like the, you know, 19th century, you know, 18th century or whatever, or the sort of local artisan type
27:17
situations, because people will be working from home and shopping from home in a different way, I guess. They will be, they'll be on an individual basis. And so I'm not sure I agree with the analogy of going back to the kind of 18th century
27:36
because I think that they will be online more than anything else. And there's no, there's no better example than Amazon and the share price. So we're 25 it's obviously gone up considerably, and zoom and all these other platforms that have been affected by COVID-19.
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai Yeah, yeah, that trend is going to continue and accelerate. There is absolutely no end in sight, I think, too, for a company that that produces and sells online, and then the shipping and everything that's involved, that trend is going to continue and accelerate in the next few years. I think that one of the things that COVID-19 in 2020 is done is that it has forced companies to greatly accelerate the online presence. Yes. So a company might have had a plan and you know, okay, well, you have some kind of website and get online and so on, in the next three, five years, whatever they bang, they will have to do it in 2020. their choice. I also think that retail, for example, I think that tourism, for example. These are huge industries that are going to change forever. If any CEO of a retail organization, or or any CEO of a airline or a tourism related organization thinks that things are just gonna go back to normal. They're completely mistaken. Yes, yes, will not go back to normal. I think that demand is going to be changing considerably. I think, for example, that, you know, it's going to take several years later, even if whoever vaccines were on which, by the way, I'm not very hopeful on I've been working on HIV AIDS, for example, for 30 years, and we don't have a vaccine for HIV, yet just a virus. We have antiretroviral drugs that keep you alive. But that doesn't prevent you from getting HIV in the first place. No. So I do I do think this is, you know, yes, there are companies that don't succeed. By the way. That's a good example of what I say in my book, which is that great thinkers have to embrace failure. If you if you don't embrace failure, you can't be 100
30:00
creative thinker. And in to give me an example of a vaccine, there are over 100 companies are saying, in various stages of trying to come up with a vaccine, well, 98% of them are not going to succeed. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing it. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be trying it. They should certainly we trying it, but they they, though, that the odds, the mathematical odds against them. So I sent my book that the best,
30:29
best and most knowledgeable people of failure are people like sports men and research scientists.
30:41
research scientists know that they are going to fail more often than they do and succeed succeed. They know that right from the start mathematically, that is absolutely the case. It doesn't mean that they don't try it. But it means that you as a great thinker, you accept that you're going to fail, and you get up and get going when you do fail. Yeah. And it's the
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai same with watzmann. You know, if you think that, you know, if you're in the UK, well, if you think of a cricket player, for example, or when when a cricket player goes to bat, he knows that the chances of him batting a century in the test match is probably less much less than not getting to that trigger of 100. If that's his goal, you know. So I mean, in baseball, for example, the you know, if you, if you hit the ball one out of four times, you're doing really well. So, so then they are professionals, and there are people who accept failure, who know that they're going to more likely fail than succeed. And I think we have to all become much more adaptive and accepting failure. Hmm. So taking this sort of very micro in terms of yourself and how you run your business and how you work, how do you use your creativity to ensure that you're successful, and you get done what you need to get done? Well, what I do is, I what I do is very, very difficult that not many people doing that. And I am because you know, when I tell people well, my work is mean to 198 countries and reach well over a billion people are now done. Work, which is when version two 400 plus language versions, people are kind of staggered and said, Well, how do you stop HIV AIDS on a global basis? using three financial aid condoms? Well, that's it, it's precisely because the three funny animated condoms that did work? Yeah, if there weren't, if I didn't apply that kind of creative thinking, there wouldn't have worked about john roll condoms, you know, people would have objected. And it would have been taken off the air in many countries, yet it was seen, even in very conservative countries, like around on national television. So I apply creative thinking in my everyday work all the time, both in my professional life, and in my personal life. And I think all of us have to do that. All of us have had to do that in 2020. And I think that's one of the good things we can take up to this year. You know, people, people often say, this is a terrible year, there's a lot of hardship. I'm not so sure. I think yes, there are aspects of the year that have been unfortunate and very bad, and people have been affected negatively, I have no doubt that a lot of people have gone broke or have lost their savings or have lost their jobs and so on. But the big batches, that think the new thinking that comes out to this year, will make the world a better place. Yeah, I think that that, you know, after this year, when we go forward, we will be stronger, we better we will be richer as a global economy, we will be more dynamic, we will be able to adapt to challenges more easily. And more than anything, we'll be able to apply our creative thinking, yes, that's what is going to be necessary. So I do think I do think that that I'm not just an optimistic person, you know, I deal with some of the world's toughest issues. I mean, that down to luck with rape, and sexual violence I deal with, with diseases that kill a lot of people and things like that. People often say to me, how do you remain optimistic when they deal with these kinds of issues? Very, very simple. I think generally speaking, that world is going in the right direction.
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai 35:00
That we are becoming more creative that, you know, if you take the issues that I deal with, for example,
35:07
you know, I've dealt with malaria for many years, well, number of malaria cases have gone down dramatically. I've dealt with polio for many years, we've almost eradicated polio, it's only prevalent now in two countries in Afghanistan, Pakistan, I think, in the next couple of years, we'll be done with polio, and never come back to the world, and so on and so on. Human rights is much more understood in modern communication to make the world a smaller place, even in something like human rights, and for somebody skilled in some obscure religion, you know, and then in one country, or a police impacts, you know, a police or something in some country, which is not appropriate, tell people to have their cell phone, and the whole world knows about it instantly, they can react to it. So. So I think that the world has changed a lot. And we'll keep changing, we'll keep accelerating. creative thinking doesn't mean that we can forecast the future. We can only deal with what is present, and what we can do at the present time. But greater thinking has changed our world and will continue to change the world rapidly. Yes, yes. So maybe the last couple of questions that and Firstly, what about for yourself those days where things go horribly wrong? How do you deal with those? Oh, I don't have this could go horribly wrong?
36:34
No, in fact, how do I deal with that, it's because I'm a creative person. I, you know, we all have different ways of dealing with stress, somebody will take long showers and we will go into the bathtub, some people drink too much, whatever. I certainly don't drink too much. But
36:55
there are ways of coping but I think the best way of coping is simply to, to daydream, which is one of the best ways to cope with stress. and implement your creative thinking, Daydream that take yourself out of what you're presently experiencing, and what the stimuli is in front of you. You know, physically what you're seeing and what you're hearing, take yourself out of it and let your mind wander to some other place. And daydreaming is a is a highly creative process. It is it is essential to creative thinking, to expanding your
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai creative mind because daydreaming means that you are being creative, because you're not physically in wherever the places that you're daydreaming about. Yeah. So. So I think that that, that that's a good mechanism that I use quite often, to stress assembly to deal with stress, or simply stand out to the window, stare out my window. And I daydream, therefore, have a great emphasis, for example, on my views, in my offices, I want to very good view because I quite often stand there and just, you know, Daydream. Yeah, I do think I do think that we have different mechanisms, and all of us will deal with that. But I don't actually have many horrible days, literally, because I have, I have faith in myself. And I think that one of the things that I say in my book about what you need to be a highly creative thinker, is ultimately you need passion, you need passion, you need to believe in yourself, you need passion for what you do. If you are a passionate person, and you believe in what your work is, and believe in yourself, and they believe in their personal and professional life as it is now. You will not have terrible days, huh? Thank you. I really like that answer. And then the last question on those days where you get to live more. And that's where I talk about getting to do more of the things that you want to do and less of the stuff that you don't want to do. What do those days look like for you?
39:08
Well, what I would like to do is put every doctor out of business, because there's no more diseases. And what I would like to do is stop all human rights abuses around the world. What I would like to do is have better governments in the world, much more cooperation in the world, and so on and so on. So yeah, we all have dreams that we want, and we work towards those dreams in it doesn't matter whether you're working give out to change the world in a kind of global basis, like I am, or you deal just very in this very small environment with your family. And you're trying to bring up your children the best way you can and that's really your dream
39:53
that you define your own success. There is no universal definition of success. Some people say well, if
40:00
They look at a billionaire. And they think, Oh my gosh, that's a successful man, I'm not so sure that's true, I certainly don't want to be a billionaire ever. If I had a billion dollars, I'd probably give it away. I don't think I want to ever be super rich. Some people have scrapped that, that's fine. If that's what your dream is, that's what your definition of
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai success is, it's fine. But there are many other people who have different definitions of successes, including me. And I think that, I think that if you define your own definition, you know, come up with your own definition of success, and then work towards it. And then and apply your creative thinking to actually design your own life. Don't just live it, don't go with the flow, don't let others decide it. Just decide, you know, use your creative thinking as much as you can to actually design your own life to create your own life, to create the best possible life that you can have on your in this short time that we all have on this planet. And then that that is absolutely the best way to do to use your creative thinking, lovely way back to that whole individual thing again, on my
41:19
lovely.
41:21
You and I agree on that completely, you know that, that that actually has very profound implications. Because if you think through this, this notion that you know, that we are, you know, I'm a Canadian, and I speak English and so on, it really doesn't matter, and absolutely doesn't matter. It's It's who I am. It's, you know, for us, Christ, one person.
41:49
That's the important part. And I think, if everybody thinks that way, you know, it, it changes your perspective completely, in terms of how you see the world and how you interact with people, and how you treat other people. Yes, yeah, exactly. Thank you. For Jason, it's been so lovely speaking to you today, tell people how they can find out more about you and get in touch. Well, they can contact me through my website, which is chocolate and loose media, but it's moose, the animal that loose the desert.
42:25
That's a Canadian, but the moose
42:28
and you can order my book on Amazon or any of the major platforms. You can also go to my website and order it and if you do order it, from my website, there's the same cost to
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai get a personalized signed copy from me. And you get much faster than Amazon prints. There's
42:47
what's the actual title? The title is, is creativity, the key to a remarkable life. Lovely.
42:57
Brilliant, thank you so much for your time today. Really enjoyed it. Thank you, Joe. Thanks for having me on your show.
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai
The post Firdaus Kharas on Show #194 : Embracing Your Inner Creative Power appeared first on POWER to Live More.
