Doug Patton | Conquering the Chaos of Creativity

Srini Rao

 Doug welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Doug Patton

And thank you for welcoming me to your podcast. It is an honor and I look forward to some vivacious and fun conversation.

Srini Rao

Well, it is my pleasure to have you here. I found out about your work by way of your publicist who told me about your book, Conquering the Chaos of Creativity, which we will get into in depth because in my mind, all creativity is just chaos. But before we get into all that, I wanted to start asking you, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping and influencing the choices that you ended up making throughout your life and career?

Doug Patton

Well, you warned me that this would be not the typical interview and I love it.

My dad was an entrepreneur. He had a grading and paving company that he started in his late 20s. My goal was always to start my business before him. He was always someone that, you might say, did it his way. He had a pretty successful grading and paving company in the Bay Area, San Jose area.

Doug Patton

just the sight of a saint. She up until almost a year before she went to heaven, she was still working in the emergency ward because she said she liked the energy. So here I have this, my father who was basically a construction guy and

Doug Patton

typical, typical tough guy and my mom who was this giving wonderful nurse and that was the environment I grew up in.

Srini Rao

So, I mean, your dad being a construction guy, what elements of creativity did he infuse in you and what are the lessons that he passed onto you from his own work that you later applied to yours?

Doug Patton

Well, you know, there's a story I tell people about my dad.

He had his own creativity. And it was exemplified to me is that when we...

and he would have to estimate how many yards of dirt, how much rock, the asphalt, and blah, blah, blah. And we would walk, and he would just walk around, and he would say, this is probably gonna take about 2,000 yards of rock. And I said, Dad, how do you know? He goes, I just know.

So he developed, he had this insight, this creative thing, but you would never call it creativity. It was just an intuition for his work. And I actually talk about that in my book.

that intuition can be built, it can be trained based upon what you do. So, yeah, he wasn't formally what people would call creative in any way. The only other thing for my mom was she came from a very poor family and always loved to play the piano and always wanted to be a concert pianist. And...

Doug Patton

I started taking piano when I was seven against my will. My dad had promised me as a very tough guy. My dad was about six two and my mom was about five two. And big guy and he goes, Doug Patton, I got your back. You'll never have to take piano. And I came home from the best baseball practice of my life almost when I was seven. I could hit anything. And my mom said, Doug Patton, I want you to meet your new piano teacher. And I looked at my dad.

Dad, you love it. And I took my bat, I hit it on the ground, and I said, I'll never take piano lessons. Next week, I was doing scales, seven years of classical piano. And how that affected my creativity, well, about the sixth year, I started, my mom tried to keep me interested, and I started taking jazz piano lessons. And when I was 13, 12 or 13, I got into a band in junior high.

And then it became really fun. We would have like 50, 60 people in the front yard. I'd be playing rock. Everyone in the band was in high school and college except me. And it was during the hippie era. You can kind of imagine that. And we started playing at parties all around. So that, in a way, started my creativity rolling from the musical side. But I had always been.

Doug Patton

were very supportive and I was always an artist. And I won a national art contest when I was six for Converse Tennis Shoes that just come out. And I won it in a large van about

50 feet long, pulled into my house, and then loaded about 10 pieces of playground equipment. We had a big yard. That was my first incline that if you're creative, you're rewarded. My mom always supported my science. I love science. I was always dissecting brains.

and doing a lot of science research from when I was in first grade because my mom maybe had a vision I'd be a doctor or something. So it wasn't the traditional support of what

grows but as everyone has seen the the beautiful flower growing

Doug Patton

asphalt. You never know where creativity can roll from. So that's always been my philosophy.

Srini Rao

So it's funny because I also was a musician, not because my parents forced me to be. When you play the tuba and you live in a small park and your parents basically are annoyed as shit that you're as dedicated as you are to it because it drives everybody crazy. But this is something that I've been thinking a lot about and it's something that I found in common with a lot of very creative people, particularly writers who have very lyric gifts often are piano players. There's just something about the way they write. And I always say that writers who are musicians make music with words.

Why do you think that music has that sort of impact on creative thinking that it does? What are the benefits of a musical instrument that most of us don't really understand if we never played one?

Doug Patton

I think that's a really wonderful jumping off point to discuss creativity a little bit more. And one of the quotes I use in my book about Albert Einstein, one of my favorite thinkers, is that he would always talk about these.

ways that he invented E equals MC squared and all his advanced theories. And what he would say that he uses architectures of thought or he plays the piano and he thinks in a way of symbols. And then after he...

creates this construct, this vision, then he brings it into the culturalized linguistics and mathematics. So the point here is that there are...

There is a kind of a higher level type of thinking process that is available to us. It's not taught, but everyone innately has it. I try to teach it in the book. The process is that one has to get beyond the...

linguistic view of the world. There's a scientific theory called the Saffir-Whorf theory where it's stated that you can never think beyond the semantics of your culture. And so when you're inventing something new, you have to, because your culture really may not support the creative exercise or what your...

Doug Patton

considering and it's it would be analogous to let's say like like

caveman who has maybe 10 words, like primary words like eat, sleep, whatever, and is trying to envision multiplication. You can't. You have to go outside that. So I think music supports or can connect you to a dialectic of thought, of symbology that is not semantically and culturally based. And so that's probably why.

tool, if you know how to use it and expand upon it, it can become very powerful. So that's my response.

Srini Rao

No.

Well, you brought up this idea of something not being taught. And this is something that I've, you know, often had conversations with people about is the role of creativity in our education system and why it's not prioritized. And I think the place where this became very obvious to me was walking through a Barnes and Noble. If you go to the kids section in a Barnes and Noble where they have, you know, books for teaching, you know, kids who are being homeschooled and you look at the curriculum as it goes from first grade to 12th.

It's like they're just sucking the creativity out of you, and you know, with each year that goes by. Why do you think that is and what would you change about that given your background and your experience?

Doug Patton

Well, this has been a matter of a great deal of thought as of late with a lot of educators.

Doug Patton

I, uh...

Our society is not focused on expanding one's imagination and creativity. It's focused on learning and us kind of fitting into the appropriate boxes in life. As you get older, it almost is...

non-consideration to invent, to think of new ideas, you know, you have, there's a certain pragmatism that takes over, right, where it's called being mature, an adult, and unfortunately that obfuscates creativity and imagination for many, many people. And so the process starts very early, and I think...

It is at its most basic level a beautiful beginning when kids are drawing and thinking and doing things in grade school, but that kind of goes away. And the main issue is that we...

Doug Patton

expand our imagination, how to improve our innate abilities to think. So as that moves forward, we all more or less become non-human beings.

Doug Patton

but it is simply not taught. Now, I have done a couple podcasts lately with some principals at schools, and they've been so excited that they have.

continuing podcast where We will get kids in their school and there's something I call the 15 minute creative exercise And what is always the complaint from the principals and the teachers? Well, there's not enough time in the curriculum to even teach what we have, you know, so this is something for parents where

Doug Patton

kind of creative exercises with the kids and this one school district is actually starting to try to institute it and it goes it's probably a much longer conversation than we have right now.

Doug Patton

But in a short synopsis, I lead some kids through the process of inventing and it could be quite wild. I think one kid invented a pizza that was a telephone and the pepperoni was doing something and blah blah blah.

Doug Patton

capability, but the fact that they're taking steps to expand their mind and realize that anything is possible. And by doing that every minute, every day, is something I do. I wake up every morning and I'm challenging creativity from the morning to night. But just that 15 minute exercise that teachers and kids are really excited about. So it is teachable. And I'm actually, Cal State Long Beach.

the Dean of Science Education has invited me to teach a class based upon my book to STEM majors on how to think creatively. So now I'm kind of going to the two extremes. I'm working with grade school kids to expand their creativity and in the future I'll be teaching a class for a college student. So I...

kind of entered into the world of education. And that's kind of why I wrote the book. I wanted to start.

teaching what I have learned over the decades of invention.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, you know, it sounds to me like your career and your trajectory predates sort of the era of social media, the Internet. And, you know, like I ended up writing a book called An Audience of One, reclaiming creativity for its own sake. And it's kind of funny because like even for me, the message of that book was challenging because I run a business. And one of the things that I think has been a very sort of unfortunate byproduct of, you know, the Internet, even though it

facilitates creativity, it paradoxically inhibits it as well, because I think there's this sort of huge narrative or this dominant cultural narrative that if you don't build an audience of millions of people, if you don't get paid to do it, or if it doesn't make you rich or famous, then it's not worth doing. And the funny thing is I've found that often my most rewarding projects, the ones that ironically ended up reaching the biggest number of people, were the ones I did out of just

you know, morbid curiosity and given, you know, you sort of started and building a, you know, creative career long before this era. What is your view on all that?

Doug Patton

Well, let me ask a question to your question, if I may. So are you trying to focus on the origins of more of my intrinsic, let's say, appetite to write about creativity and imagination and explore it, or the more societal view of

so I need a little more specificity.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I think that that's a fair question. Well, I think that the overarching narrative, societally, is that you have to be extrinsically motivated to do this thing. And I think, in a lot of ways, social media and the internet have played a big role in that, because they give you these sort of artificial vanity metrics, followers and fans and all this other nonsense that people get really obsessed with, and they overlook craft because of it.

Doug Patton

Well, I think one could just go back to Maslow's hierarchical needs. I think a lot of

Doug Patton

real creativity and imagination exist at the top level of self-actualization. And that is based upon a more intrinsic process of

Now, if I go back to my humble beginnings, I was always very inventive, I was always very creative, and it just was innate in me, this interest to buck the status quo in every way. It was just like hardwired into me. And I think the process for me,

to write and explore is something that started when I started my company almost right out of college. It was even peppered a little bit by my first instructor in college, Mike Kammermeyer, who taught methodology. His view was, you know...

life is too complex, it has to always be methodically considered and understood. And one of the other teachers in our department had a totally different view. He goes, my intuition is all I need, and I would listen to them argue. And it is these kind of beginning to listen to these different philosophies of how you can be creative, how you can invent. And I.

was propelled mentally into recording how I did something. And to me, it was always a fascination of when I would invent something.

Doug Patton

product.

Doug Patton

And for me, it was not the accomplishment, necessarily the financial accomplishment as much as training my brain to think outside the box, to use these different techniques I developed to be more creative. And for me, I call them creative weapons of survival almost, because when you are pushing

to the limit and your creative capability. And you need techniques to allow you to invent a new idea and be successful. And when you're paid for it, there's nothing. There's no, let's say,

Hey, I'm sorry, Doug Patton. We're still going to pay you, even though you failed. It's only success. And so at times, I would have 10 projects at once I'm working on with everyone. And it was, I have to say, a real imagination and creative high. I loved it. And as the years progressed, I kept writing in lab books all my techniques.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Doug Patton

And I started being called to say, Doug Patton, speak about how you do this, how you do that. And so about, I would say, 10 years ago, I decided to start writing a book. And it became something of, oh, later on, I would pick it up and put it down and be thinking about it. But then about three years ago, I was kind of...

really focusing on it and it became the rather large compilation of ideas that you see in Conquering the Chaos of Creativity. And what is most important is that it is really a journey. It is a construct for you to explore because it's going to be impossible for anybody to not impossible but rare people that I've talked to have gone through and read the whole book.

Usually you go through based upon what you need at the time and it's kind of a place to explore rather than an endpoint. So rather long-winded explanation for why I intrinsically have always been motivated to let's say be creative, but like I say with me it was always hardwired. I would always...

I don't see how someone cannot be. Let me put it that way.

Srini Rao

So before we get in the book, there's one.

sort of thing I want to cover. You've worked with some of the most iconic brands on the planet, you know, Apple, Mercedes, all of them. I mean, what goes into the process of creating products that end up with the quality of, you know, like an Apple iPhone or like an iPad? I mean, I've read Johnny Ive's books. I've read, you know, Leander Kenney's books about Steve Jobs. Um, I mean, I know it's an, like an insane level of obsessive, you know, compulsive, almost attention to detail, but what else goes into, you know, products of that caliber?

Doug Patton

Well, I think the thing that if I was to just do a broad brush stroke of a lot of the CEOs I've worked with, from jobs to gates to other top people in corporations, in movies and so forth, there must be a visionary. A visionary who...

to synthesize and understand all the variety of disciplines that goes into whatever it is their company is creating. It is the most important aspect that that visionary guy.

is pulling everyone together to get to that idea. And when it's not there, it becomes a tragedy. You can have the most talented workforce, the most amazing history of a company.

But without that visionary leader, it all is lost. And it is something that I can tell many stories of CEOs that failed, that didn't have that vision, and others that do. And that is the fulcrum point. So when I'm involved,

Within my area of expertise, I've learned that I need to be the visionary leader and guide. And sometimes I don't have all the information, so I have to empower and connect other visionary people in their own discipline in a way that broadens their scope.

Doug Patton

and kind of like a butterfly, allows them to fly freely. And it is a, maybe that could be another book someday. It is a big challenge to work in these big organizations.

Srini Rao

Hahaha.

Srini Rao

Well, let's get into the book. I mean, to your point, like you said, I mean, this thing is like an encyclopedia. And, you know, it seems like one of those books that, like you said, you pick up, you know, off the shelf when you need it, when you need an area to cover. And so I thought the best way to actually go through this was rather than go through every little detail was to kind of go through the sort of five, you know, overarching categories that you have here, uh, which are inspirational creativity, analytical creativity, psychological.

creativity, spiritual and philosophical creativity, and invention creativity. But I want to start with analytical creativity because I think that a lot of creatives skip that part. They don't really think very much about creativity from a problem solving perspective. They're just like, oh, I'm going to make this thing. And then they wonder why nobody is interested in what they've done because every

book I've read on branding, every book I've read on copywriting, every course I've taken on copywriting is like ultimately why anybody pays you for your work is because you've solved some sort of problem for them.

Doug Patton

Yeah, I think this is probably a...

to retrogress for just a second. Sometimes people are being creative not to solve a problem, but just to engender a process of happiness for them. You know, that they're going to do something and the goal is not to solve a problem, the goal is kind of an intrinsic experience, right? And that is important.

But when you are motivated to actually solve a problem, when there's something that is an obstacle, and I just call the status quo always an obstacle. The status quo is like a, like a, the, let's say the metaphor of a body with white blood cells. Anything you do to change the status quo, it wants to reject, even if it's good. And you have to be chastened and very,

strong to change the status quo of society when you're trying to improve human lives. It's just kind of a fact of life. So I think that the point here is that I've worked, as I said, with hundreds and hundreds of different inventions and people and the top companies throughout the globe. I've started my own companies. And...

One thing, I've actually even worked on political systems, too, for the government, which I've solved some rather, seemed like unsolvable problems. But what I see is that most people are unclear about what they're even trying to solve. You'll ask someone and say, well, OK, well, tell me what it is you're solving. They tell me a solution. And I said, well, no. Just tell me the.

Doug Patton

what exact problem are you trying to solve. And I do this with a lot of college students, and even with professionals. And no one is trained to have problem awareness. And in my book, I take a...

people through one of the foundations of creativity, which is problem and solution awareness. Where you, like with a problem, you have to ask every question you could possibly ask. And then you learn how, after you ask 100 questions of your questions, on how to start putting those together into some sort of a relevant hierarchy. And that then is your guiding light, because the solution is always contained in an aware problem statement.

One of my other famous quotes from Einstein is that, he says that if someone gives me only an hour to find a solution to an issue, I'll spend 55 minutes focusing on the problem statement or the problem awareness and five minutes on the solution. Because the guiding light to a solution is becoming aware of every, every, every.

detail of a problem. And it is rather liberating when you do that, because then you can always go back to this problem statement, rather comprehensive one, and as you generate myriads of solutions, you can always go back to that and say, oh, does that fit? It's kind of like creating a puzzle without

pieces. And so the solution part is when you start creating the puzzle pieces and you kind of say, does that fit, does that fit? So that is kind of a brief overview. In my book, I teach this with great detail. And actually, I use this every day at work.

Doug Patton

and even people that work for me, I'm teaching this. You know, it creates a need to have a keen sense of awareness. You must have kind of a certain amount of vigilance and passion. Because the other point is that, you know, when I talk about my foundations of creativity, you know, like when we talk about, let's say, the analytical part for problem solving, and then we look at the inspirational part.

The act of analysis is not just cerebral. To engage everything that you are as a human being, which is spirit, your emotions, your psychology, you, one must realize that even in the analytical process, it has basis in passion, a driving force that can break you through the...

So here is a very important point I'm making, that analytical processes are not just analytical. And every time that you're being creative, there's a connection of all these other facets of who you are that must be engaged to empower your full ability as a person. So that's just a little taste of where my book.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So let's see, you know, just for the sake of a practical example, we look at, you know, this sort of idea of analytical creativity and apply it to something like the process of writing. What does that look like?

Doug Patton

Um.

Well, uh...

Doug Patton

That is a rather open-ended question of how creativity can be used in the process of writing. I'd say that...

Srini Rao

Well, I don't mean creativity broadly, but sort of what you call analytical creativity, like this idea of problem solving and looking at it through the lens of solving a problem.

Doug Patton

Well, I think that the most important part of getting back to the idea of trying to create a guide for yourself to explore solutions and how do you do that? Well, think of a building. If you don't have a good foundation and you try to build a skyscraper, it will ultimately fall over, right?

And a problem statement is the foundation of all your creativity. It has to be well considered and it has to be comprehensive and you have to really think it through. And that in just a short synopsis is a very important thing. I'll bring up another.

It's a solution and a problem are very much a yin and yang kind of thing. If people don't know what yin and yang is, it's basically you see these two kind of paisley symbols, black and white, with a little dot in each one. And basically the...

philosophical context is that you always have a solution contained within a problem, and you always have a problem contained within a solution. It is an interrelated process of creativity, and it goes much even further than that. It involves your subconscious and your conscious.

A lot of people think this is a conscious process in problem solving, but what it also really is is that your subconscious is a very, very powerful force, and I teach this in some of my chapters called Subconscious Cloud and Methodical Intuition, where you can train your subconscious to be a powerful force in problem solving, if and only if you have a clear, clear question to ask.

Doug Patton

And that is something I also teach in terms of how to gain awareness by asking all the possible questions. And it's really important to understand that a great problem statement calls everything into question. And that is a process of curiosity and passion that have to be connected to the analytical process.

Srini Rao

Well, let's talk specifically about sort of inspirational and psychological creativity because I think that there are two sort of things that I often hear from our readers or people who talk to me. One is just an absolute lack of confidence. The second is a lack of clarity. The lack of clarity makes sense because I've seen answers in surveys where when I ask somebody

you know, ultimate goal would be I'll get something as vague as a meaningful business that needs creativity. And I started writing this article about why you're not accomplishing your goals. And it was like a meaningful business that needs creativity is so vague that, you know, Pablo Escobar was incredibly creative and his business was meaningful to cocaine addicts.

Doug Patton

Yeah. Let's see. Well, on the idea of psychological and inspirational creativity, inspirational creativity involves many different parts to harness your belief and free your mind. And...

ways to immerse your point of view. So you see everything in the world as your inspiration. Whereas psychological creativity is, I teach tools that I have created that will basically use the innate neurology, psychology and physiology of your mind.

to become more creative. And the psychological creativity chapter is an incredibly important part of the book. And I document a tremendous amount of scientific studies that support my theories that I've generated over the years that I think are an important documentation that these aren't just the whims of one creative person. These are...

let's say, processes that have been tested and largely undeveloped and unused. To me, they were the tools of creative survival when I'm inventing. The most important part for responding to what you say, where people are trying to be creative and they're not getting to where they need to go.

it really does go back to an unclear problem statement. Most people are walking around kind of in a murky gray view of awareness. Most of the products in our world, if you think about it,

Doug Patton

kind of responding to that murky gray view. Like there's so many things that don't work well. Your computer software, when you get in your car, things aren't easy to operate, even simple products that you have in your kitchen. It adds to frustrations in our life. And those are all a result of whoever invented them wasn't quite thinking clearly about the unmet needs of people and what...

they really need to provide. So what my point is, is that there are different avenues of creativity. If you simply are looking for ways to empower your ability to be more creative, the ideas of methodical intuition,

Doug Patton

where you can train your mind to be intuitive, or the subconscious cloud, where you can train your subconscious to solve problems for you, which is a very beautiful process, and I use it every day. There's all these different techniques that teach this creativity. And I wanna get back to this idea of an interconnected whole of creativity. In my book, I have a...

a graph that shows the analytical, the spiritual, the philosophical, the invention, imagination, and psychological. I talk about them as separate parts, but in reality, they are an interconnected whole. And that when one...

take this journey into creativity, it is a lifetime adventure. And I use the metaphor of martial arts. I've been in martial arts since I was a young kid. And one of the things you observe, when someone first takes a class and they learn an inward block or a punch, they become immediately empowered. And they're feeling like, OK, man.

understanding this and this is getting, you know, this can help me. But in reality, that is like a neat little step, but to become a great martial artist, it requires practicing hours every day for decades, right? And that is the master level of creativity. My book is there for the people that want to attain that master level of creativity that want...

create what I call a creative construct that is their own and I try to teach that. But to really get to that point it takes years and years of work. But the book is also designed for beginners like those people in martial arts that take that first inward block or punch. There's immediate results that can empower you, that can get you going into some steps of creativity. But

Doug Patton

The way I look at this, this should be like, this literally could be a four-year course in college of teaching imagination and creativity, which could be applied to any discipline in life. So that is a rather long-

Srini Rao

No, no, it's all good. Yeah, you know, I think that actually is a perfect segue to kind of wrap up our conversation by talking about sort of what you call the spiritual and philosophical aspects of this. Particularly when we talk about failure and perseverance, right? The very nature of creative work is that it's unpredictable, it's chaotic, and there's always a possibility that...

you're going to fail and nobody's going to like what you've created or that it's just going to be an absolute sort of disaster, which I think does a number on people's psyche and self-esteem. And I think in running a creative business, one of the big things I've learned is just as important as the work is your ability to manage your own psychology.

Srini Rao

So how do people prevent themselves from getting derailed when things don't go according to plan, things don't turn out how they want them to, like projects flop or you take the average blogger who's like, oh, I've been doing this thing for three months and nobody reads my blog. Of course you mentioned this is a lifetime journey, which I think that that's one thing that is also missing is patience.

Doug Patton

Yeah, that's a really good point. I think the most important point here is that philosophically, the journey of creativity is something that should be celebrated. And it is something that is always going to be a hard thing to do because you're basically changing the world.

creating something new. And in that process, and I've learned this with a little bit of perspective, is that it's important never to be depressed by failure. And equally, it's important that one is never intoxicated by success. They're both equal sides of that theory of yin and yang.

you've got to understand that the journey of creativity will always involve both. You will always fail. You will always succeed. And the act of being creative is by far the most important thing. Now, the perseverance and failure, we are all haunted by failure. And...

Doug Patton

even people with severe emotional scars, you have a certain dynamic psychologically that you can either use that to be stronger and empower your life or it can eat away at you and it can tear you apart. And that is a decision process that is a very important thing in creativity.

the bigger problem you're solving, the bigger...

And it is really, really, really important to understand that...

Doug Patton

Anyone who tries anything new will always fail, but let me go back to something a little bit more. Let's say Positive in in in that What I call a child's perspective You know innately you have everything you need to overcome failure and you know

As you've grown from a child to an adult, society has taught you that failure should be castigated, should make you feel bad. You need to unlearn this idea about failure.

and embracing the social narrative of failure is most likely the exact thing holding you

Doug Patton

you know the feeling that you have failed is a wall that needs to crumble. The reason I say that is that when you're young, everything you did was trying and failing. You ride a bike and you fall, you get up. You're learning to, like as a baby, you walk and you kind of sit back down. Baby isn't like sitting in a corner depressed out of failure because they tripped a couple times learning to walk.

It is this innate ability of a kid, this unbridled enthusiasm that...

It sounds antithetical, but failure is fun. Failure is a part of learning something new. And again, it is not a bad thing. It is something where we should celebrate our creative perseverance. And the more you do it, the stronger you get. And for me, I have to tell you, I failed more than anybody. And because of that, it has allowed me to succeed more than anybody or most people. So that's my kind of point on that.

Srini Rao

Wow. Well, this has been really eye opening, thought provoking and insightful. I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable? Yeah. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Doug Patton

Can you repeat that please?

Doug Patton

Somebody or something unmistakable you mean unique?

Srini Rao

It's funny because I think there's been numerous answers to this question and you know, it's really up to you as to how you interpret it Yeah, I mean unique is kind of one definition of it, but I've heard every answer you could possibly imagine

Doug Patton

Okay, so I'm absorbing the nature of your question right here, so I'll just repeat it one more time for my mental acuity, is that what makes someone unmistakable? That's the question.

Srini Rao

Yes.

Doug Patton

Um.

Doug Patton

I would say that...

Doug Patton

by finding your personal truth. I think this is part of the creative and imaginative journey is to always, is to find your personal truth. And when you do that, it empowers and connects all the areas of imagination and creativity and psychology and spirituality. And...

You know, say, well, what, you know, what, how do you find your personal truth and how do you even start on that journey? I think it is, it is a process of understanding what is.

your passion at the moment or this year or this decade is you must connect with your passion. People in life that are not connected to their passion that are doing whatever they're doing, it's kind of sad because you don't have your full engagement of a totality of who you are as a person. So I think people that have found their personal truth

that focus on it and every day try to exemplify it. Even if they haven't found it, it's always a revolving door where it changes and it needs to always be a focus of who you are and what do you believe in and connect your passion to it to always pursue it with all the force of your being. So that's my answer.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything else you're up to?

Doug Patton

Okay, well, the book is on Amazon. You could go to books under Amazon and just type in Doug Patton Patton and you'll see it, or the book title, Conquering the Chaos of Creativity. There also is, if you Google Conquering the Chaos of Creativity, you'll see quite a few articles that people have written on the book, and also you will see the website. And there's another website too, Patton Design.

name and the word design. The book is on that website too and it also talks about all the inventions I've done and so forth. So there's a lot of ways to connect it to your goal.

to find creativity and as we sign off, I really hope that some of the listeners will think about finding their passion and connecting to their innate powers of creativity because I think it's the most important innate power we all have. So again, thank you for today. Great questions and really enjoyed it.

Srini Rao

Yeah, my pleasure. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.