TALE: Find 100 People’s Life Stories and Creative Themes

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TALE500

9 min readJan 6, 2023

Change Life and Culture one theme at a time

TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. TALE was launched as a new knowledge center for the Thematic Engagement project.

Thematic Engagement refers to the “Person — Theme” relationship and interaction.

As a knowledge center, TALE considers the “Person — Theme” relationship and interaction as its primary object.

Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed a theoretical concept called “cultural themes” for studying culture. Career counseling therapists and psychologists also developed a theoretical concept called “life themes”.

The Thematic Engagement Project uses the “Themes of Practice” approach and the “Project Engagement” approach to connect “Life Themes” and “Cultural Themes”.

A Creative Theme is developed by a creative person. The theme is both a sign and a tool for life change and cultural change.

TALE aims to tell the story of innovation, thematically. We want to share 100 people’s creative themes.

What a Creative Theme looks like?

From the perspective of “Themes of Practice”, we make a distinction between Fictional Creative Themes and Non-fictional Creative Themes.

Fictional Creative Themes can be found in literature and the field of entertainment. Novels and films often share some similar creative themes. According to Wikipedia, some common themes in literature are “love,” “war,” “revenge,” “betrayal,” “patriotism,” “grace,” “isolation,” “motherhood,” “forgiveness,” “wartime loss,” “treachery,” “rich versus poor,” “appearance versus reality,” and “help from other-worldly powers."

TALE doesn’t pay attention to Fictional Creative Themes unless a real person is behind a Fictional Creative theme. For example, a writer invents a new creative theme.

We only care about Non-fictional Creative Themes such as 1) real people’s life themes, and 2) actional cultural themes.

Let’s see some examples of Non-fictional Creative Themes.

Matt Cuts: Try Something New for 30 Days

For example, “Try something new for 30 days” is a creative theme initiated by Matt Cuts who is a Google engineer. You can watch his 2011 TED talk and find his story behind the theme.

Many people followed this theme and took real action. Matt didn’t point to a particular type of action, instead suggesting a theme.

We have noticed that Matt Cuts is a software engineer. According to his personal website, he “wrote the first version of SafeSearch, which is Google’s family filter, and worked as the head of Google’s webspam team for many years.”

From January 2017 until April 2021, he served as the administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, which is the group of geeks that helped rescue healthcare.gov.

From his short bio, we can find a career theme from Matt Cuts’ career: Digital Security.

A person can have many creative life themes. While “Try Something New for 30 Days” is a creative theme in Matt Cuts’ life, “Digital Security” is a career theme of his work. Both two themes are Non-fictional Creative Themes.

Tricia Wang: Thick Data

Tricia Wang is a global tech ethnographer and sociologist. She applies ethnographical methods to research social behavior and user experience for tech companies such as Nokia and other companies. In order to encourage companies to embrace both quantitative data and qualitative data, she coined a new term called Thick Data in 2013.

In 2016, she gave a talk about Thick Data at a local TEDx event: TEDxCambridge. Later, her talk was featured on TED.com the official website of TED.

The term “Thick Data” is a nickname for qualitative data. It was inspired by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s term “Thick Description”.

According to Tricia Wang, “Lacking the conceptual words to quickly position the value of ethnographic work in the context of Big Data, I have begun, over the last year, to employ the term Thick Data (with a nod to Clifford Geertz!) to advocate for integrative approaches to research. ”

Thick Data is data brought to light using qualitative, ethnographic research methods that uncover people’s emotions, stories, and models of their world.
It’s the sticky stuff that’s difficult to quantify. It comes to us in the form of a small sample size and in return we get an incredible depth of meanings and stories.
Thick Data is the opposite of Big Data, which is quantitative data at a large scale that involves new technologies around capturing, storing, and analyzing.
For Big Data to be analyzable, it must use normalizing, standardizing, defining, clustering, all processes that strips the the data set of context, meaning, and stories. Thick Data can rescue Big Data from the context-loss that comes with the processes of making it usable.

Tricia Wang founded several online communities such as Ethnography Matters. She also gave speeches at various conferences and used the theme of “Thick Data” to raise a knowledge movement against quantification bias.

The term “Thick Data” is both a sign and a tool for the applied ethnographical research community. It’s a sign for highlighting the value and meaning of qualitative, ethnographic research methods for business activity. It’s a tool for applied ethnographical professionals to establish their unique identity in the world of business.

We can say that it is also a creative theme of Tricia Wang’s creative life.

Moreover, we can find another creative theme called “Elastic Self” on her website. While “Thick Data” refers to a general method, “Elastic Self” is about a theoretical innovation. According to Tricia Wang, “The Elastic Self is the feeling that one’s identity is malleable and involves the trying on of different identities that are beyond the realm of what would be considered normal displays of one’s prescribed self. The Elastic Self flourishes in semi-anonymous interactions with unknown people — essentially, strangers.”

In fact, the theme “Elastic Self” was born from her PhD dissertation titled Talking to Strangers: Chinese Youth and Social Media. Her research project is a 7-year journey. You can find more details in her note and the PDF file.

Candy Chang: Before I Die …

“Before I die I want to…”, a public art made by artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang, is very popular within the global TEDx community. Many local TEDx curators made the “Before I die I want to…” giant chalkboard in their venues.

In 2019, Candy Chang lost someone she loved very much. This unexpected event inspired her to think about a big question: What is the true meaning of life? As an artist, she used an abandoned house in her neighborhood in New Orleans to launch a public art movement. You can find more details of the story in her TEDx talk.

“Before I Die…” or “Before I die I want to…” is a creative theme. It refers to a simple but significant concrete action, writing a short answer to a big question on a chalkboard. It refers to a collaborative project in a local neighborhood and a global community. Over 5,000 Before I Die walls have been created by communities in over 75 counties, and The Atlantic called it “one of the most creative community projects ever.”

We can find more participatory public artwork on Candy Chang’s website. For example, “After struggling with grief and depression, she used this medium to reflect on the state of our psyches. She has created a monument of over 50,000 anxieties and hopes, secular spaces for confessions, and electrified shrines on emotional barriers. Her ritual on loss was a 2021 New York Times Critic’s Pick.”

We can say that both “Before I Die” and “Participatory Public Art” are her creative themes. While “Before I Die” refers to a project, “Participatory Public Art” refers to a category and many projects.

Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle

The above examples highlight several Career-related Creative Themes. We also see different levels of themes.

In The “Experience — Theme” Ladder and Meaning, I discussed the hierarchy of life. Thematic Engagement echoes this issue too. There are different abstract levels of themes.

From the perspective of life themes, we can find a three-level hierarchy too. For example, Yale management professor Amy Wrzesniewski discovers that there are three types of work views:

a job (“I view my job as just a necessity of life, much like breathing or sleeping”),
a career (“I view my job primarily as a stepping-stone to other jobs”), or
a calling (“My work is one of the most important things in my life”).

We can consider the above typology as a hierarchy of work. In 2016, I developed a similar hierarchy:

Category: a person considers job positions as her or his career themes.
Experience: a person considers job experiences as her or his career themes.
Principle: a person considers abstract principles as her or his career themes.

The Experience level refers to a person’s subjective feelings about working on some things. Several job positions may share the same subjective feelings. Thus, the Experience level (subjective feelings) is more abstract than the Category level (job position).

The Principle level is the highest abstract level of career themes. A person jumps from her or his own subjective feelings to objective laws of the world. It is not Ray Dalio’s Principles that refer to rules of work and life. Many great creators tend to find principles for their creative life. However, it is a long journey to search for a unique principle.

In the above speech, Bret Victor who is an interface designer and computer scientist, talks about the Principle, “As you approach your career, you’ll hear a lot about following your passion or doing something you love. I’m going to talk about something kind of different. I’m going to talk about following a principle — finding a guiding principle for your work, something you believe is important and necessary, and right, and using that to guide what you do…As a technologist, you can recognize a wrong in the world. You can have a vision of what a better world could be. And you can dedicate yourself to fighting for a principle. Social activists typically fight by organizing but you can fight by inventing.”

Bret Victor spent almost ten years discovering his career principle:

Here’s something I’ve come to believe: Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating. That’s my principle.

I watched Bret Victor’s speech in 2016. Then, I discovered my own principle “Curativity” in 2018 and wrote a book about it in 2019.

We need to pay attention to Bret Victor’s creative theme because he uses a sentence to describe it.

Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.

You also find the Dynamicland project on Bret Victor’s website. The mission of Dynamic Land is “to incubate a human dynamic medium whose full power is accessible to all people”.

From this project, we can find a creative theme for Bret Victor: Human Dynamic Medium.

Creative Themes are Meaningful Keywords

What are Creative Themes?

What we can learn from the above examples is very simple: Creative Themes are Meaningful Keywords of a person’s work, career, or life.

A person can use many keywords to highlight his/her work, career, or life. However, he/she may not claim that all keywords are Meaningful Keywords. Only a few keywords are perceived as Meaningful keywords.

If we write a biography for a person, then the title of the biography is a creative theme. A book’s title can be a phrase or a sentence. Moreover, many authors also use sub-titles for their books. What we can learn from publishing is that we can use both Phrases and Sentences for creative themes.

The above examples also highlight two major categories of creative themes: Life and Work. While the “Life” category refers to general cultural activities and Cultural Engagement, the “Work” category refers to professional knowledge activities and Knowledge Engagement.

We can also use the above “Category — Experience — Principle” schema as a typology of creative themes. For example, “Try something new for 30 days” is an Experience while “Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating” is a Principle.

Help me find 100 people’s Life Stories and Creative Themes

TALE aims to build a list of 100 people’s life stories and creative themes.

We can find these stories and themes in biographies, talks, interviews, and blog posts.

If you find interesting life stories and creative themes, you can leave a comment or DM me on Linkedin.