Just Another Mindful Monday - Comedy Creativity & Keeping Your Job

Canada's Keynote Humorist

Creativity, Comedy and Keeping Your Job from the Robots The robots are coming. The robots are coming. Everyone is aware that Artificial Intelligence is playing a bigger part of our lives every day. In fact, how do you know that I’m not a robot speaking to your right now??? You don’t do you?? Initially the numbers are staggering in terms of the number of jobs that could be replaced by AI over the next 15 years. According to studies at Oxford University and the World Economic Forum -up to 50 percent! So how do you protect YOUR job? Well, that’s where clowns like me come in. That’s right, everybody laughed at the clowns in the classroom (no really, I killed every recess) but there is something to be said about creativity and how we slowly lose it over time. In the 1960’s and 70’s, an American psychologist by the name of George Land tested the creativity of 1600 children. He discovered that 98 percent of five-year-olds displayed genius levels of creativity. When he retested those same children five years later, only one third of the children displayed genius levels of creativity. By the time the children were fifteen years old, the percentage had dropped to twelve percent. Now here’s the good news. We can get our creativity back! We can stimulate our creativity by learning an instrument, taking a drawing class or hey (shameless plug) learning how to write stand-up comedy with Judy Croon and her #1 bestseller Stand Up in Ten Steps https://judycroon.com/books/stand-up-in-10-steps/ Humour is a GREAT tool to keep your content and customers from drifting off in a world where the average attention span is now 8 seconds. That’s right, according to researchers at Microsoft, since the mobile internet was introduced, the average attention span has dropped from 12 to 8 seconds. We need all of our creative tools on board! The other good news is that AI is really good at doing routine tasks and pursuing specific goals that we program it to do. However, humans excel at making connections and forming new ideas from previously learned material whether those ideas are related or not. This is known as as divergent thinking. Penicillin, x-rays, electricity, radioactivity and America were all ‘accidentally’ discovered by people who were looking for something else! Luckily, they were all able to circle back and find the connection. For example, In 1901 French physicist Henri Becquerel left a piece of radium in his vest pocket. When he noticed that he had burnt by it, he made the connection between radioactivity and medicine. He developed the first steps towards radiotherapy which is still being used to treat cancer. In 1492, Christopher Columbus 'accidentally' discovered America when he left Spain looking for a direct route between Europe and Asia. The point is yes, AI is here to stay. We can benefit from all of its fantastic capabilities but it’s the wonderful combination of creative humans with AI that makes our future look that much brighter – and hopefully, a little funnier too. Until next time, laugh long and prosper. If you like to catch up on all of our Laugh Long and Prosper episodes, check me out Judy Croon On Spotify and/OR Soundcloud or you can go to my website www.JudyCroon.com Judy Croon is Canada’s Keynote Humorist, Tedx motivational speaker, comedian and stand-up coach at Second City. She has worked with many celebrities including; John Cleese, Jon Stewart, and Joan Rivers. Her specials have appeared on NBC, CBS, CTV and The Comedy Network. She is a co-author of ‘From the Stage to the Page: Life Lessons from Four Funny Ladies!” Judy draws from her standup performance and coaching experience to entertain, inform and inspire in her dynamic keynote entitled, ‘Relieving Work Related Stress with Humour’. Judy is the creator/host of ‘Laughlines’ and ‘Stand Up For The Girls’ which have both helped raise over $650,000 for breast cancer research.