creativity

February’s Man of the Month is:

Paul LeBlanc

Here’s a little bit about him:
In junior high school I had an English class where I was the star writer. Every week or two we would be assigned a creative writing assignment and I seemed to have the knack for it. Generally I would find a way to twist the teacher’s request into a science fiction story of some sort. I only failed once in that class: when I was asked to write a true anecdote about my own life. So now when I am asked to talk about myself I start by telling a story about how I have failed to write about myself from an early age.

I was outwardly a pretty normal teenager, but when my divorced mother was diagnosed with ALS I had to skip a few years in a hurry. I went from 18 to 35 in a few months, and stayed there for about 25 years.

I had some good bosses in my early business career, but despite this, never really liked working for other people. I owned an electronics store when I was 22, which failed in spectacular fashion. (We specialized in Beta video. I never forgave Sony). Ten years later I went into business for myself again, and haven’t had a boss since.

My dad is a great piano player, but never made his living from music. He encouraged my show business aspirations to the extent that they did not threaten to become a career. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had gone on the road with that rock band that called when I was finishing high school. But I don’t regret much. It’s pointless, and I don’t think I wanted it enough. And I still play keyboards, doing the occasional musical (most recently Pink Floyd’s The Wall at the Rio) and casino gigs in a Brit-rock cover band: The Tabloids.

Something else I got from my dad — the T-ball principle. The notion that if something is broken you can’t wait for someone else to fix it. When I was learning to play baseball the coaches were — not good. They missed the reason we were there – that we wanted to learn the game, and to have fun, that winning was secondary. He became a coach, not because he had any intense desire to coach 7 year olds, but because he wanted to create that reality for us. And he didn’t want to wait for anyone else to make that happen. There are obviously lots of things in the world that are broken. I have lived a lot of life so far without doing as much to help as I would like. As I hurl towards 50 that has to change.

And here’s how he answered my 6 questions about creativity:

What does it mean to you to be creative?
It means I don’t want to answer the question the same way everyone else does. It means a deep fear of ever being boring, even at the risk of being obscure and impenetrable. Some days it means a crazy screaming synth solo in my band’s version of Mike Myer’s “BBC”. And in my business’ more challenging years it meant finding a clever way to pay the bills.

What triggers your creativity?
A crowd. I am never as at home as when I am in front of a group. Whether it be 10, 50 or a thousand, a crowd does something strange to my brain. I feel smarter, funnier and cleverer than I really am.

What hinders your creativity?
The mayhem of everyday work. It’s a killer. Once a new employee described his first day with us thusly: “Hi, we’re a juggling company. Catch!” (Hopefully that anecdote works without the juggling mime that normally accompanies it.)

Nothing hinders creativity more than a crushing to do list. I have a plan to fix this that starts this Wednesday. I am hoping for the best.

What’s the wildest journey your venturesome spirit has taken you on?
Being a musical director of A Chorus Line and Jesus Christ Superstar while simultaneously driving a video store into the ground made for a pretty interesting year. Being a donor dad for a lesbian couple seemed a little wild when I did it, but now is just wonderful.

I’ll go with this: In June of 2010, at the G20 in Toronto, 10,000 police sat on their hands while a few idiots smashed windows and burned police cars. Shortly afterwards they used that as a pretext to arrest over 1,000 peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders. A few weeks later I helped organize a protest of these mass arrests in Vancouver. And I used my experience as an emcee of corporate and tourism events to lead the Victory Square protest, introducing speakers who were either in Toronto at the time or who had a much more intimate knowledge of the situation than I did. Not sure if it helped, but glad I did it.

What does being bold and provocative mean to you?
I don’t like to do it for the sake of it. I’m conservative in that way. People with a naturally bold and provocative nature are fascinating to me. But if the mission calls for it, or if it happens naturally, that’s okay.

What’s next for you?
A podcast. And sometime in the next year or two — a T-ball team that needs a new coach. That last part was a metaphor. Just to be clear.

And here’s what inspires Paul’s creativity:

I’m inspired by big ideas. I’m inspired by the Universe. I was in South America late last year, and one of my goals was to see Alpha Centauri for the first time. It’s our nearest stellar neighbour. (Unfortunately it’s still really, really far). The fact that it looked just like all the other stars mattered not a bit — I knew what I was looking at.

Given its scale, the task of learning anything significant about the Universe is impossible. But we try anyway, and we do anyway. We do what we can. I’m inspired by the idea of making a small difference in an impossible task.

Thank you Paul for working the crowd!

FASTSIGNS…the company where Paul is his own boss.

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