Recently I was sitting down having a cup of hot chocolate with my good friend Kellie and we were both talking about our future plans. As it turns out, not everyone is aware of what it is they would like to do with their life in the future. In addition, many will achieve or reach a point in their life in which they consider their dreams to have “come true.” But what happens beyond that? What happens if you have no dreams? People often do not have a solid direction all of the time during their young adult life. It becomes important, after so long, to realize that a focused, concentrated direction can help give basis to motivation and intensity, or passion. Passion cannot exist without the factor of intensity. But how is such a thing really created, from scratch?

At first glimpse, it might not seem like a difficult question to answer, but upon further examination of the entire idea, it begins to feel remarkably hard to come up with a concrete, one-size-fits-all solution to the problem – what creates intensity? What creates passion? Is it our surroundings and environment? Is it something we’re born with? Is it our own emotional choice? Is it something else other than all of these things entirely?

I spend most of my free time working on this website, writing music, making films, creating pictures, designing clothes – all very creative activities. And the website’s coined tagline, where creativity is destiny may or may not be spot on accurate; I’ve been creative since a small child, but to say that it was entirely my doing would be discrediting my older brothers and his friends. I spent most of my childhood creating stories using action figures as the actors, and my eyes were the simple camera lens. I’d spend Halloween or times shortly before then dressing up as comic book heroes and would seriously worry about the details of every saga when creating my own stories. Before I was even out of elementary school I had written my first story over 100 pages long. All of this happened, I think, because I was surrounded by an intellectually creative environment.

Creativity is not something central to just the activities of creation. Creativity can happen in the mind, and it can happen in the body. Perhaps not a coincidence, I was interested in tap dancing during ages 8-11, a more physical form of creativity. In deciding what to do after high school, it has not been much of a challenge to determine the course of my desired path – I’d like to pursue something creative, and part of me even feels that it may not even matter what it is, so long as I have the freedom to make it the way I see it. I’ve thought about degrees that are geared toward game design, business administration, computer programming, but I ultimately decided on psychology. All of those topics, you notice, can be very interrelated. So in this self analysis – it seems sort of obvious to me that I’m an individual that has been oriented toward a certain direction for years at a time, even since early childhood.

Here are some things we do know about environment and about inheritance, or genetics. We know that while genetics create the basis for certain characteristics we experience from the day we are born, environment is the catalyst for determining how those genetics will interact with the self. Your environment can create the bulk of your personality in what you do, say, and even think. If a young girl is surrounded with a dancing community from the day she is born, whether she is designed for dancing or not genetically she is at least probably going to take a long, prolific attempt at it.

But there is a problem with simply pointing the finger at how a person has grown up. It just does not fit the place of every individual, or maybe not even close to every individual.

In the conversation I mentioned having with Kellie at the beginning: Kellie had little idea of why it is she has decided, “I’d like to be a personal trainer.” She has been in kickboxing and has been doing physical activities for five years, but has also said she does not feel that strongly about it. It is a situation where she may like the path, but she is not in love with it. Instead, she describes it simply as something she largely feels comfortable doing.

Kelly exhibits a lot of common traits of an intelligent person. She stays completely focused and dedicated to making excellent grades in college, and was of course the same way through high school. She takes good care of her body through kickboxing, and exercises every single day. She goes to bed at a reasonable hour, and all in all plays life safe. Heck, on the personal development front, she seems to have a splendid blend of balance, harmony, success, and happiness in her life. Love, money, and general prosperity are, with little doubt, soon to follow.

But is every person who is successful so calm and mellow? Does harmony and balance necessarily mean the lack of stronger feelings? Of course not! We also know that highly successful (and smart) people come from all walks of life, and we also know that even those who are not, in their habits, successful they still manage to stumble onto riches. The passionate are often the most dedicated, and this is mainly why passion is so important.

Perhaps passion, in its definition, can be described in different varying degrees. The definition as it stands right now is an interesting one. The word, “passion,” is often used in two different kinds of scenarios during conversation. 1.) It is used to describe general emotions and feelings. 2.) It is used to describe love, lust, or personal desire for another person. In Christianity, “the Passion,” is used to describe Jesus’ suffering leading up to his crucifixion. However, passion is a common use word when it comes to personal development, and it is considered a vital key to virtually anything you are talking about in terms of goal setting/achieving, self manifestation, self actualization, and so on. Passion can make anything easier to face, if you can develop passion for whatever it is.

What is interesting to note is that most definitions of the word center around feelings that, when it comes to an emotional perspective, are all very unstable, risky, dangerous, or even at times harmful. Passion can refer to the emotional state of love or hate, the two extremes on two opposite poles of the emotional spectrum. Love can easily be lost under the right conditions, hate can ruin the self and whoever is receiving hatred. Love can lead to broken hearts, and in traditional American society(and other places), love is even often associated with a sort of romantic obsessive posessiveness. In order for passion to be a positive thing, it often will have to be oriented toward something positive by nature. To say one has a “passion for taxes” might also mean one will lead an unstable, shaky, and at times miserable life.

So in thinking about trying to answer this original question, I cannot reach any solid conclusion as to, ‘what creates passion,’ but what I can conclude is the practicality of passion in everyday life. In some places, passion is vital. In other places, passion is perhaps best left out. In terms of balance, harmony, and leading a happy life, passion can easily be described as something that is arbitrary; sometimes feeling calm and comfortable while accepting events that unfold is simply the best solution; no obsession or intensity required.

Perhaps among that mix of nature versus nurture, or genetics versus environment, we can say that some are born and simultaneously conditioned to be rigid in their emotional, passionate structure, while others are similarly without that quality. The new question becomes: is passion necessary for you?

<< Continued from part 1.

Scott: What do you think the public education system could do to improve its students’ experience and success?

Win: 1) An incentive reward system for teachers, tested and administered by third parties from outside the school system. The better that students gain across a broad spectrum of measures in the teacher’s areas of responsibility with that teacher, the better his or her reward. A BROAD spectrum of measures, reflecting many areas of human as well as many areas of intellectual and performance gain. – - Measure where the student is when he starts with that teacher, and where he is later. If the teacher feels some quality has been left out, aid him or her to find or create an instrument to measure it and include that in the incentive contract.

The program should center on the very values left out of the present “teach-to-the-test” nightmare which now prevails in most schools, and be too broad to make teaching to THE test possible. In almost every community can be found corporations, large and small, willing to fund such an incentive program. It MUST be administered carefully by outsiders, as has been demonstrated in testing phases of existing aid-to-education programs. Under such an incentive program, teachers must be encouraged to experiment with better methods of teaching, but should not be constrained into one particular method however attractive. With sufficient incentive, teachers will evolve what for them IS the best method.

2) Every human being has within him much more and further insight about most things, streams of thought and perception which never make it into the center of his focus of consciousness. All sorts of things go through your head which it never occurs to you to express, and some of these are answers and insights you’ve been looking for. Nearly everything that one struggles to learn, in a classroom or out of it, he already knows from previous experience but never consciously linked. Schools would discover this and obtain profoundly better educational results by all types of measure, if they were to employ certain open-ended, modern forms of Socratic Method.

You may want to take a look at http://www.winwenger.com/dynform.htm

The easy technique featured there does more than tell you how to give an intense but open-ended, flowing Socratic experience to a whole roomful of people, even hundreds at a time. (The older, classical, Socratic method could be used effectively only on one or two at a time, and drove toward single right answers instead of being open-ended and exploratory.) The technique, Dynamic Format, shows you part of an easy way to turn that whole roomful of people into being Socrates to each other and to themselves, drawing themselves and each other out AT LENGTH, in depth, in detail, on their respective deepest and subtlest awarenesses on topic after topic in your course or in the curriculum.

Above, I proposed an incentive system to encourage teachers to innovate and use better methods. With sufficient and well-enough designed incentive, they will. There are MANY different ways to profoundly improve learning over the results now obtaining in America’s classrooms. Eventually with appropriate incentives, teachers or other researchers will discover even far better ways than these but for now, I pick modern Socratic Method as the best, easiest, most accessible, and most consequential way presently available to improve “students’ experience and success.”

Scott: What is Project Renaissance?

We are a non-profit education and research firm, incorporated in Maryland, determined by IRS to be a 501(C)(3). We incorporated in January, 1970 in an effort to start a new college, but when that was destroyed we continued on in researching learning techniques and problem-solving methods and publishing on what we found. We changed to our present name in the 1990s. We are still smitten by the college-building bug, and have published some notes toward possible eventual creation of Renaissance University, at http://www.winwenger.com/prospect.htm with some further thoughts at http://www.winwenger.com/part87.htm

Scott: What steps did you take to build the ImageStreaming community, get the word out on it, and out of all the things you did in educating people on the method, which way worked best? Who have been the fastest learners?

Win: By most criteria, what worked best have been the audio courses, relatively easy for us to create and remunerative to sell. Two out of the three audio courses I created for outside publishers have been best-sellers. However, I like to write books and teach workshops, and believe that in the long run books have the wider circulation as “ambassadors” on behalf of the program and of the knowledge developed therein. Even more, I love to teach, but don’t love to promote, so I have only taught workshops on a few of the topics and subjects that I would like to. Only now am I working the basic workshops into a replicable formal structure that our trainers can all teach well, freeing myself to teach a wider range of events. Fortunate nowadays to have a quick understanding, I think I can easily turn any topic or skill into something immediately, easily and richly teachable and learnable.

Our programs and publications have been serving a very wide variety of people, about one quarter each professionals, businesspeople, educators and students, and laymen. We’ve involved only a few scientists so far and very much would like to involve many more – because of my personal interests; because we have much to offer that can facilitate the scientific progress of researchers, and because if we can improve the progress of science the benefits spill over into the lives of us all. No absolute pattern has yet formed as to who learns the best and fastest – the “stars” have arisen from all ages and backgrounds thus far.

Scott: Another really popular point of interest many people know about is the development of the Genius Code course from Learning Strategies Corporation. I have to ask, what was it like working with Paul Scheele on the project? I recall a long while back on the LSC forum, Pete had mentioned what it was like seeing the two of you work together, locked in a room with mind maps being drawn all over the place and ideas popping up everywhere.

Win: It is an exquisite – and far too rare – privilege to work with people who know what they are doing, who do their work well, and who have a great deal to contribute to a joint project. Working with Paul Scheele is all that and more, for he has brought together a good many people who also know what they are doing, who do their work well, and who have much to contribute. This was a highly stimulating experience, to say the least. Further, Paul Scheele himself is a national treasure, both for what he has created and as a human being. We hope, and I, Win Wenger, very much hope to work very closely with Paul on a good many future such projects – not only for personal enjoyment and growth, but because there is so much needing to be done and it might as well be done as well as possible.

Scott: What are some of the other projects you’re working on? Things you would like people to know about?

Win: Top of my list: finding methods so easy to use that the widest possible range of human beings will have full and easy access to their higher resources. I think we are approaching that with DEAM (Double-Entry A-ha Method) and the Evoked Sidebands Method for discovering understandings and answers (see http://www.winwenger.com/deam.htm and http://www.winwenger.com/evoked.htm, respectively). We hope to put up free on the web, self-taught step-by-step directions for a hundred of the best methods in the world for problem-solving, for creating, for discovering, and for learning-with-understanding. I believe that when it becomes generally known that such a source exists, free on the web where anyone can access it from anywhere for their own situation, many situations in the world will start to change for the better.

Second: I expect this year to complete my major book on modern Socratic Method, and possibly an audio course on the subject as well. The news, night after night, is full of the results of people NOT having been really heard on the matters important to them; I’m afraid the majority of the human race goes to the grave never really having been meaningfully heard on anything. To BE meaningfully heard has profound physiological, psychological, health and even longevity benefits. Modern Socratic Method creates the possibility not only of drawing out in each of us and in all of us those further insights and deeper subtler awarenesses which we all have but few notice. Modern Socratic Method creates the possibility of situations in which we get meaningfully heard. Modern Socratic Method enables situations wherein we each become Socrates to each other and to ourselves.

Third: I intend this year to also complete my book of creativity methods for scientists. Let any scientist who does not think the formal “scientific method” as generally taught cannot be improved upon or surpassed, to USE the scientific method as he understands it ON the question of how to CREATE a better problem-solving method. Take two epiphanies and call me in the morning.

Fourth: We in Project Renaissance have just now brought out the first three of our new CoreBooks series. These include a new handbook for students on better learning methods, and the definitive new book on ImageStreaming. Third is our great new book of creativity methods for writers, guaranteeing that you will never ever have to wait for inspiration for it is already there in you trying to be noticedl guaranteeing that you will never ever have to suffer writer’s block ever again. These CoreBooks are described at http://www.winwenger.com/corebook.htm We hope to bring out a half dozen additional such key CoreBooks before this year of 2007 is done, and perhaps twenty such books altogether over the next several years.

Fifth: I am just beginning to create a new series of audio courses on better and accelerated methods of learning. The first such course will be for career-change adults while other courses will, for the convenience of students, assist in the learning of various subjects in the undergraduate college curriculum. I believe that this, also, will prove to be a highly significant project.

Sixth, with the fruitful example of Project Renaissance’s technologies synergistically interacting with those of Paul Scheele’s Learning Strategies: we want to pursue interdisciplinary work with other disciplines and programs, leading to ever higher syntheses and effects than either program could likely achieve by itself.

Seventh, the present state of the world, in many directions deepeningly serious almost by the minute, needs some address by the responsible parties who need to, after all this time, take up some of the various more successful methods for ingeniously solving problems. The world-wide creativity revolution is more than a half century old now and has yet to penetrate policy-making levels, while millions of human beings have been unnecessarily dying as a result. I have proposed, at http://www.winwenger.com/part90.htm, a possible solution to this meta-problem.

Eighth, I am pursuing the development of a number of invention devices which have health-related implications, including several with potential for affecting human lifespan. One of the more obvious of these I gave away into public domain in an effort to save lives ( http://www.winwenger.com/hyperbar.htm ), but as of this writing at least the medical and medical science establishments have proven unresponsive to contributions from outsiders to their ranks.

Ninth, we have highly promising investigable research leads dangling in all directions. We can get around to only a few of these directly and wish to encourage others to take up the challenge. In one area, though, we now have so many powerhouse methods for effectively solving problems, we are now turning some of our attention from finding yet more problem-solving methods to finding or creating more in the art and science of asking the best questions for any situation. We see this tack as leading most directly to a very bright human future.

Scott: And lastly, perhaps the most pertinent question of all, Boxers or briefs?

Win: As I understand your question, at the beginning of this Q/A we noted that I am very much an ordinary man, who happens to have stumbled into some interesting things. I still pull my pants on one leg at a time. More often than not I wash the dishes. I hope to take time some day soon to upgrade my equipment and make some of my Improvitaped music commercially available – music remains a central mystery for us and has been one of the more important elements in my life. Despite geographic scatter, I’m trying to do a better job as a grandfather than I did as a father, especially with Paul Scheele’s spectacularly fine example to contrast with mine. He is the finest father to his children I have ever seen in action. Getting a bit long in the tooth, I’d like to take it a bit easier than I have been but probably can’t for awhile yet. There are tons of books I want to read and music to create and music to listen to, but probably can’t get to for awhile longer. Compensation is in the further understandings and illuminations my work stumbles me into every day, and in the wonderful people I’m meeting all over the world.

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The guy simply glows with brilliance, what can I say?