Song Writing at Thunder Rock School - Day 1.

We all come to a point in our lives when we ask ourselves, what's next ?

Until this question can be answered more concisely, it helps to do things to break the pattern. I've always attended classes where the agenda was clear - it should always help with my income flow or career.

As it turns out doing the opposite can also be useful in one's personal development.

I chose Songwriting as my first class in this Lunar New Year because it is the least obvious thing for a money-minded technocrat to do. It forces me to break my own patterns in my life and re-examine a skill from the position of a beginner.

Local talent Inch Chua is offering a course in Songwriting at Upper Thomson Road. You can access the link below.

Thunder Rock School

In today's class, we used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to define a creative process that suits our characters. As a strong ESTJ, Inch called me Phoenix and Unicorn Boy several times in class which is a great compliment. Highly quantitative engineering types are rare in a song writing class, so I exist as a Thorn amongst the Roses ( I'm also possibly the oldest dude in class ). I don't really expect another ESTJ attending song-writing class in Singapore- they'd be too busy learning options trading with SGX.

So extreme left-brained people, song-writing is a very ordered process involving a lot of research and constant references to a thesaurus to figure out words which rhyme. This methodology made a lot of sense to me. It's not really different from the SDLC process for software development.

More importantly, from a management perspective is that I could interact with Gen-Y and Millenials on equal footing and expose myself to people in the Intuitive-Feeling-Perception axis and I learnt that their creative thinking process is very different from mine and requires a lot of incubation and meditation to getting the process right.

So Inch took a personality framework and ensured that a each different personality type had a different means of achieving their artistic goals. This can be applied to any endeavour.

I'm pretty sure it applies directly to fiction writing as well.

My only disappointment came from my initiative to delve deeply into Psychology at an academic level. The MBTI framework is heavily criticised within the Psychology community because it's not backed strongly by empirical research.

Perhaps instead of the following the business world blindly and using their ancient personality frameworks, artists use the OCEAN framework and create a system around the concept of personality traits like Openness to new Experiences, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

This could be a better model for activating the creative impulse in the Arts.