Transcription for this great presentation:
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So I'm Alessandra White and, you know,
I'm a founder like many
of you are, which means
we don't really know primarily what we do
because we do all these things, right?
And I always thought that doing all these
things and the
friends and the family were
like, what is wrong with you?
What are you on to now?
And what are you on to now?
What are you, right?
What are you on to now?
I sat in a
psychiatrist's office one afternoon.
She crossed her legs and she looked at me
and she goes, what are you on to now?
I'm like, are you kidding?
I'm paying you to deal with the people
that are asking me that.
So who here, who here has this thing
about you're into, you're
into more than one thing
for your life, for your work.
You're into more than one thing, right?
And Hive is the perfect place for us, but
I don't have to sell
you on that because you're
already here, you're already sold.
So what I'm going to tell you about, um,
we'll come after this
next little break because
we, we sat and we listened and my
listeners are sore and my brain is tired.
And so what we do is we're going to use
the energy that we
need so that we can learn
the next thing.
All right.
So whether you're at the copy maker or if
you're at your chair,
let's everybody get up
on your feet, on your feet.
I know what is she
doing, but on your feet.
Yeah, there we go.
There we go.
Put your drink under
your chair if you have one.
And what we'll do is we're going to
reclaim, we're going to
reclaim the energy that just
kind of started to float out of the room.
Right.
Okay.
So take a nice big stretch and move your
hands up toward the ceiling.
Face your palms to the ceiling.
And give yourself
pumping or pumping for pumping.
Yeah.
And up to the ceiling again, close the
eyes just for a moment
and let the hands drop by
your side and open your eyes.
Okay.
That is a micro, micro, micro meditation.
Have a seat everyone.
And creative work hour is my brain baby.
And when it came along, I didn't know
what it was going to be.
And when it came along, I
was scared out of my mind.
What is it?
It's going on to, I know it's going to
sound God awful, but it's
going on to a live platform with cameras
and microphones where
all of us do creative
work.
Now, creative work can be, you could ask
each of us a hundred
times and we could possibly
give you a different
answer every single time.
But there are clusters of
things that we, that we tend to do.
For instance, I came back to classical
music through creative work hour.
Bitter irony back there at the back.
Hey, bitter, bitter irony has live music
that he has written
being performed in Nashville,
Tennessee tonight.
Crazy stuff has happened to people and
it's not just like, oh,
I'm getting back to my first
love. It's so much bigger than that.
It is so much bigger than that.
We've had someone who walked off the
stage from a classical
music career through this little
group. It's no bigger than us.
He went back to composing classically.
And what happened was this time last
year, bitter irony
and I met him in person.
It was the first time to meet someone
online in real life.
I was like, what am I doing?
Oh my what, what am I doing?
What am I doing?
We're doing this.
And we meet him and the
hotel was so wonderful.
We were in Stockholm's
five five star hotel.
They were so excited
about what we were doing.
This meetup, Andy had composed a
concertino for me and they
gave us a room for rehearsals.
And that's what that's what we did on
that particular weekend is we put this
thing together and we kiss
him goodbye.
We flew to London and I performed that
concertina at the
Grand Ash House in Devon.
So dreams come true and I can give you
story after story after story.
Now, I will not do that.
I will tell you what the group is.
How it works because you may have a best
friend who needs exactly this thing.
We've actually seen creative work hour.
I'm not kidding.
Keep people safe that
we're going to harm themselves.
Now, we are not a
mental health organization.
It just so happens.
I happen to have my own
history of mental health issues.
And so I'm comfortable in that.
I'm comfortable in that.
So let me just take this
little wackadoo and get us going.
It didn't render.
Okay.
But that's kind of my official title.
Founder and squirrel.
So brief history of mental wellness is I
really didn't understand what mental
wellness was until creative
work hour because there was something so
important about creative
work that I didn't understand.
And it wasn't until this crazy brain baby
started happening and
people started coming.
You know, I sat probably for somewhere
getting close to a
hundred sessions where I hosted.
Hello, I'm already
not really, but already.
And no one came.
No one came.
And part of me was like,
Oh my God, that was close.
I thought somebody was going to come.
And when you're shy and introverted,
it's, you know, that's, that's, that's a
tough thing, but slowly, slowly, and now
more than 1,200 sessions later.
See, we hold these spaces on zoom and we
hold them every single day.
Now we're up to four times a day.
And so 120 things a month are going on.
Bitter irony in his music seeking took up
classical guitar, took up electric
guitar, started doing the songwriting and
co-founded the practice not perfect,
which is for musicians and actors and
people who need to practice.
Right.
So what were you talking about before
when we're into a handful or two handfuls
of things, what we love to learn, what
we'd like to practice, how we like to
challenge ourselves.
And sometimes that comes
with, can I get out of bed today?
Sometimes that's the challenge.
And sometimes that's the valid one.
But what we found is
that we had a secret sauce.
And this is how it works.
Rule number one of creative work hour.
We see you when we see you.
So if you're interested in coming and
working on your high posts at creative
work hour, which is typically what people
are doing, but you'll also see pianists.
You also see all these people.
But the number one rule is
we see you when we see you.
And what that means is we're there every
single day, holidays in or out.
You can depend on it.
We're going to be there.
And by we, I mean me, 90% of the time.
But the secret sauce is so much more than
just, I commit to be there.
Devin commits to be there.
Everybody else.
You have no obligation.
None.
You don't need to say, Oh, I'm going to
challenge myself to 30
days of creative work.
That's not a thing.
Because there's something within us that
attracts us to hive and attracts us to
each other, where we would fly across
seven time zones to get here, to meet
each other, to hug a neck again, or kiss
a friend on a cheek.
That's secret sauce shit right there.
So this community, creative work hour, we
brought it in wholesale to hive.
And what we saw was one person working on
hive posts or illustrations or whatever
has turned into more than half of the
room for two hours a
day, 60 hours a month.
Do the math.
That's a lot of work going on hive.
And if the thing was, Oh, I freaking hate
to write, or I hate to do this by myself.
We're the free solution.
We've never charged a dollar.
We never will.
Another part of the
secret sauce is the music.
We have not used the same playlist twice.
As a musician, I have found bands that
are amazing for flow music that doesn't
bore you or put you to sleep.
If you're trying to write, some of us can
write with a certain type of music.
And if it's not that, forget about it.
Some of us may not be able to write with
music or read with music at all.
So because we've become so good at zoom,
crazy good that we know how to just have,
we know you're going to need
a workroom to yourself today.
So we'll set up a breakout.
That's just for that.
We know that some of you are working on
this challenge over on hive.
So there's a breakout room for that.
So if you don't want the music, you
always get to request a break out.
Always get to request a breakout room.
And I'm over here like a DJ.
And all that's going on.
So people are writing their posts and I'm
like, what am I going to write my post?
Because now the time's up and I'm
bringing everybody back.
This is something that I believe in my
heart of hearts is that a breakthrough in
one's mental wellbeing arises when you
focus on the creative experience.
And it's not about finding yourself.
It's about surprising yourself.
Imagine you were with me.
We leave Stockholm.
We go to London.
We drive to Devon.
Here is this house that makes Downton
Abbey look like a real estate sale.
And we go onto the floor.
In this grand drawing room and
people are seated on velvety.
And I pick up this clarinet.
And I play this
concertina of this returned.
Getting better and better every day.
Composer.
And I bring all of that to life.
And he was like, you know, just blowing
my phone up while I'm
there playing this thing.
And it went. And the panic didn't grip me.
It was like, I want this creative moment.
I want it to happen.
And all of us have this.
All of us have this.
From the time we were kids, it could have
been like when the
Olympics was coming along.
You pick your favorite sport and you would watch them and you had your favorite stars and you would watch them.
And you would watch them. And you would think this.
What would that feel like?
What would that feel like?
So each of you are
part of many communities.
We sitting right here
will forever be a community.
We'll be.
Oh, remember that crazy time that we went
to Hamburg and Tim Fox was like handling everything.
And we were like, so crazy. Remember that we'll have a drink over
that sometime because we're a community.
So there's all kinds
of communities, right?
It's not just on high, but there are
communities with a capital C.
There's things going on on high that you
don't see in our
magical, absolutely magical.
If you're interested in seeing about us.
Yep. There's going to be a little exhibition here. So I'm going to show you a little exhibition here. Yep.
There's going to be a
little exhibition here.
So I'm just getting
through the boring stuff.
Not so boring, but
that's where you find us.
And that's the shorthand link that I've
never given anybody in my life because we
keep things very private.
You see, when people are working on
business plans or they're working on
novels or they're working on music or
they're working on
this, that or the other.
They need to know that this
is a safe group of people.
That will keep their secrets.
And then when that creative work is
finished, it gets posted on to Hive.
It will shall ever be there.
Thank you very much, Hive.
So we've moved many people out of Web 3,
I mean, out of Web 2 onto Web 3 because
one day I had just had it.
I was hosting a space, a Twitter space.
We either did the first Twitter space
about Hive or were one
of the first that did.
And I had two other senior people with me
who really knew Hive.
And I was the kid who
didn't know a damn thing.
I didn't understand it.
And so the whole idea of the show was,
can somebody, dear God, can somebody
explain blockchain to
me and why should I care?
And one woman came along and her name is
Shadows Pub and she's amazing on Hive.
And she was like, are you honestly like
you're live on the air and you're saying,
can somebody explain this to me?
I said, yes, but no mansplaining.
It turned into like this overnight hit.
We did over a hundred programs straight
through until high fest.
And then we took a break because it felt
like something was
shifting, something was changing.
What we wanted to do.
Oh, yeah, here's how
we follow each other.
There's bitter irony.
You take a picture of it if you want.
PYPT is the longest running live curation
show of Hive, and it's held on the
Discord for Dreamport.
And it runs every Thursday.
So the people that are creating in our
spaces each day, once a week, they they
get together with people
from all over the world.
And we we have a show and the whole thing
is recorded and the whole
thing is put on on three speak.
And it is we laugh.
We get to each other's posts, the most
special ones, our
favorites of each other.
And we're like, this is the one to not
miss by bitter irony this week.
It's like we all go and we're all putting
in the comments and we're all upvoting.
And it's it's like it's real.
It makes it mean something that you took
your time and your energy that you took
the bother to do that when we're ready
for you to drop the link to your post or
your friends post that you love.
We're opening that tab, right?
So we're creating a little mini tab hell,
but that tab hell is all Hive posts.
So we have the show and
we do commercials for.
Bitter irony did this
post, guys, this is so amazing.
This is like his really fast, fast, fast
learning summary of what's been coined
and how does it relate to Hive?
You got to check this out and then your
piece out and then it gets a turn.
That's really fun.
So the discord for creative work hour.
Is kept private, and that's because some
of this creative work is really, really
sensitive and we really
trust each other very much.
So we keep it in a private setting.
But all you have to do is just friend me
on discord and I will I
will send you an invitation.
But it's like one of the things that we
do to honor each other and the creative
work is we keep it quiet until you say I
posted it and we're like, yeah.
Two books I want to mention to you on
which creative work hour is built.
Is one is by Mahai, she sent me hi.
Aren't you glad you didn't have that name
growing up in psychology?
The optimal experience now he
has done so many books in this.
He is the father of of flow.
But what we're after isn't optimal human
experience and that's not fluff.
That's not like a hobby.
Man, this is the stuff that
will keep your blood pumping.
This is what will pull you out of bed in
the morning because when mental health is
like not working as
we hope that it would.
What are you going to do?
One can only have so much treatment and
then you're like, I guess
I'm not going to get well ever.
One can only have so much medication.
Be like, at what
point will this help ever?
Nothing was working that I could count on
having two good days in a row.
Get out of bed two days in a row before
brain baby happened.
And now I see the magic of
creative work could be poetry.
Here's this other one.
I mean, the talk that I did today.
Just wrote it from scratch.
Everybody says, whatever you do, do not
start that thing from scratch.
No, I needed to start it from scratch
because that's where the energy was.
Symphony of Selves is about, oh, there's
the composer guy who was a violist guy
who was literally a gravedigger guy who
had he was a shepherd.
Like we have these different selves in
these different in
these different eras, right?
And to have the freedom to
move between those with freedom.
That is a human experience.
I'm only going to highlight the essence
of the personality of I see them by
converse sneakers that I have designed
with the help of chat and GPT.
I'm a designer.
And so, Ella Stardust has done a lot of
work with Devon on role playing games
that some of their creative work together.
And he's boring as the composer, and he
started off as a writer.
He wrote articles on
medium and he wrote 500 of them.
And on Sunday, he sent his resignation
letter to medium and said, I am a full
time Mo Fo classical composer.
That's who I am.
And we all applauded.
There's Ella.
She's studying. There's Ella.
She's studying library technology.
Oh, that's for me because I love Vespas.
I designed a showroom in London and I
have been in love with them ever since.
There's Dr. Melanie.
She works in New York City with in the
addiction recovery department.
Here's Nate.
Nate is a coder.
He's a gamer.
He's a game developer.
He's also a comedic writer and meets with
bitter irony and and Shirley Rivera.
And they literally have
a comedy writers room.
You're imagined writing
comedy in a writer's room.
We have a room for that
in creative work hour.
This one is rather steampunk.
This one.
Is about a pianist who had an accident
two days before his senior recital.
He could not graduate.
And I said, maybe you can
pitch this idea to your professor.
Will be your audience.
So across eight time zones.
We were his audience.
He played in the concert hall.
His professor was in the front row.
No one else was in there
except Bailey's parents.
He walked out of there.
I graduate all because
of creative work hour.
Shadow's pub my best friend on hive.
This woman is a workhorse.
Starkers calls her a bloody machine.
But she puts play in
everything that she does.
So these were designed with her in mind.
Here's a shy person that never comes on
camera called Purple Diamond.
She's in London.
This is Bobby Wasserman.
She sells multi-million
dollar real estate in LA.
Bitter irony can't talk about anything
else but the having.
Oh.
What was that?
Yeah.
So these were all made
designed expressly for our creators.
Each of these things say something.
This is Wai Ling Fong.
A PhD candidate in Virginia.
Okay, I'm a designer.
There's my designer set.
There's Greg's cloud.
Well, I'm going to tell you a little bit
about Greg in a second at closing
because it's time to go.
Bruce Wiz, some of you
probably know him from from Hive.
He introduced me to Steve Clark.
Bitter irony and I went to went to London
and met up with Steve Clark.
And that was like our our first.
Oh my god, I was so nervous.
Hive party buzz party.
There's Bobby 58.
But see you don't have to have people on
camera and on microphones.
To get to know who they are.
They could be old shoes.
That are poets that never
told a soul for 25 years.
The same person who had the little shoes
that were Peppa Pig.
Well, this is also for her
because she has a dark side.
But bitter irony.
He is a dark horse.
So whether it's there.
Whether it's there.
With creativity killing you.
Or there.
All of these people are within us.
We're all that symphony of selves.
Thank you.