Creator Jam 2.0: Turn Ideas into Realities
Resistance as the Enemy
Steven Pressfield mentioned that most of us have two lives, the life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands resistance, the enemy that’s preventing a writer from writing, a painter from painting, and a creator from creating.
At Own Your Story, we noticed the resistance that’s stopping our community members from sharing their gift to the world comes in the form of inertia, perfectionism, and the fear of judgment and uncertainties.
The voice that the unconscious mind whisper: “What if there is no one wants what I created?”, “What if I am not able to live up to the expectation I had in my mind?”, “What if I am just not good enough?”, …
How might we tackle resistance together as a community and turn the fear of creation into joy we can all experience together?
To overcome Resistance, we created Creator Jam v2.0, a space to bring meaningful projects to life by leveraging the strength of the community. Below, we will share the underlying mechanism, creations, experience, process and lessons learned from Creator Jam v2.0.
Creator Jam v2.0: Turn Ideas into Realities through Collective Effort
At Creator Jam v2.0, we empowered like-minded individuals who share the same values with us to co-create 3 projects: Co-Living Movement, Financial Learning, and a Creative Process that inspired participants with new perspective and learning.
After our 2 hours creation sharing ended, almost all of our participants stayed 1 hour+ after even when it’s late at night (10 pm). They came as a stranger but left as friends.
In return, we received support from our participants’ money to fund for our future creations; our creators gained insights on the desirability of their creation through activities, brand exposure, and expression of interest, and the creators get to share their passion, knowledge, and experiences to help us launch meaningful projects together.
OYS Experience: Engage with our Heart, Hand, and Mind
In the process of bringing these 3 creations to life, we realized that our creators have different goals and objectives in mind, and for our participants to receive high quality and consistent experiences from Own Your Story, we have to re-define what “Experience” means.
Through observation from our past creations, we found that there are 3 pillars of experiences that are important for us:
In Creator Jam v2.0,
Storytelling
Lok shared with us his stories of meeting Robert Kiyosaki, the time of realization that financial investment is important to him and the lessons he took from spending years in learning and making mistakes in investing in the stock market, property, etc.
Activities
Frankie got us to fill in circles with drawings to help us warm up our creative muscle and get creative together in a group. It’s amazing to see diverse ideas came out, from drawing snowman, traffic light, to a pancake, show us we can all be creative through collaboration and getting inspired by others!
Discussion
Kevin shared the challenges millennials faced today: the high cost of living and unaffordable property prices and his passion for empowering people to live an affordable housing solution through co-living movement. We also had a discussion and brainstorming on how we might be able to tackle these challenges together.
Our Process to bring Community Creations to Life
1. Envision
We ask our creators, what creation do you want to bring to the world? What makes you come alive? What are you curious to learn more? What are the things you are afraid of doing? These questions serve as a direction to start imagine and visualize a creation they want to share with our community in 30 minutes+ sharing session.
2. Explore
We started exploring various possibilities to bring our creators’ vision to life through collective effort. Our creators openly share their expertise, perspective, and experience with one another to help each other succeed and we also gained inspiration to ideate further from our past creations and curated content.
3. Execute
We co-create together through an iterative approach of individual and group work. After deciding on the direction and idea we want to execute, we work individually on the story, slides, activities, and experience, but come together after to get feedback from one another and then improve it through learning from a safe space.
4. Enlighten
After our creators share their creation to the community, we can see their eyes widen, resistance is replaced by a huge smile on their face, and they develop the creative confidence to bring their creation forward.
LESSONS LEARNED: What we did right?
Constraints are Liberating
Instead of giving our creator 1–2 months to prepare and create, we set a deadline which is 7 days after they were told to be part of the creator jam and they were given 30 minutes+ each to share. This gets our creators to sprint forward into actions and builds a minimum viable experience that’s essential to their vision and launch it to the participants’ hand.
“Instead of planning in the starting line, we sprint forward into actions”
Launch Rapidly to Learn
Instead of having everything fully ready and well prepared, we shared one of the activities to our participants even though the concept were still in refinement, facilitators weren’t briefed, and materials are still under-prepared. Turn out that the activity was rated as one of the most engaging and they were really glad to have experienced it.
Our bias towards action helps us prevent the risk of having “Good Ideas Go Unexpressed”.
Playground Model
Instead of charging our participants a certain amount of “fees”, we use a contribution fund model to have our participants pay as they like after they experienced the creators’ sharing, this put off the expectation and pressure to deliver based on the promised value (price) and allows experimentations, mistakes, and failure to happen.
What are the things we could work better next time?
Foster the Right Amount of Collaborations
Now, we realized that at the different stages of the process, we should create the right amount of collaborations for optimal creations,
- Envision: 2 creators to have deep and meaningful 1 to 1 conversation
- Explore: 3–4 creators to leverage others’ perspectives to inspire & ideate
- Execute: 1 creator to build things individually and share them for feedback
- Enlighten: All creators and participants to inspire and gather insights
Ongoing Impact
The process of co-creation and creative collaboration helped us turn over 34 creations such as food and wine club, movie screening, nature retreat, artistic creation, and Co-Living movement, etc. into realities with 340+ people discovered the joy of living and formed authentic connection.
This will continue to be part of our journey to transforming spaces into fertile grounds that foster a community of conscious creators through creation, service, and connection.
One experience at a time!
About Us
Own Your Story (OYS) is a community-run platform that bridges creators and spaces through ‘fun, experiential & explorative’ experiences in urban centres, fostering a conscious community through connection and creation.
This story is written by Frankie Kok who co-created Creator Jam v2.0 with our community members on 10 Jan 2019.
