Adam Torres and Aaron Ableman discuss creativity.
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Show Notes:
What can the public & private sector do to learn from and prioritize the role of culture or creative leadership in solving major global challenges? In this episode, Adam Torres and Aaron Ableman, Award-winning rapper/producer & Bestselling author & Peaceprenuer, explore culture and creative leadership and its role in the workplace.
About Aaron Ableman
As an award-winning author, artist/actor and producer, Ableman has dedicated his life to serving families and the planet. He has worked with the likes of U2, Joan Baez, Sadghuru, Mos Def, KRS One, Rev Michael Bernard Beckwith and is a United Nations award-winning artist. From India to Haiti, he has inspired over 2 million children through award-winning “edutainment”. His life and work have been heralded in publications such as the LA Times, Forbes, CNN, MTV and New York Times. Aaron is a viral video maker/filmmaker and a producer/storytelling strategist for numerous impact-driven companies. His last book, Pacha’s Pajamas, published by Morgan James Kids, was an immediate Amazon bestseller in 4 categories.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Aaron Abelman, and he is an award winning rapper, producer, best selling author, and a piecepreneur.
Aaron, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Man, I’m so excited to have you on. what a great topic, the art and science of loving kindness. First time I ever got to use the word piecepreneur on the show for sure, maybe ever, so we’re going to get into all of that, but Aaron, every episode, we start the same with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So Aaron at mission matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do. Aaron, what mission matters to you? Well, to me, mission is, is a foundational premise for everything that I do. I am always thinking about the why behind , every connection, every collaboration, every partnership.
Essentially, everything that I do is in service to the next seven generations and beyond. I’m here as part of a continuum of the gifts and blessings and sacrifices that my ancestors made and all of the you know, those that are yet to come the future. My daughter’s generation, she’s seven, and she’s probably the most visceral.
Mission that I carry in terms of why I do the work that I do. Amazing. love bringing mission based individuals on the line to share why they do what they do. And just let’s, let’s get into it. So first off, Peacepreneur, where’d you come up with that title, that, that moniker? I love it. Yeah, well, you know, I think.
Entrepreneurship and the private sector is really leading right now in impact, and, you know, we’re now seeing the purpose economy bigger than the digital economy. It is a massive sort of see change the way in which businesses are operating you know, from, Every aspect of what they’re, doing.
And I think that using business as a force for good is really something that I’ve always been very passionate about. I think that you know, everything from the, the climate crisis to you know, I mean really any issue that you could look at entrepreneurs using their innovation and. Approach to solving those problems with their businesses is something that I’m really inspired by and given the, the state of the world right now with wars and rumors of wars going on and the impacts of destabilized, regressive and extremist policies.
Politics. We need to center the importance of peace of it’s not even as much just piece it to me. It’s about human values. It’s about having a kind of basic decency and ethic and ethical framework for how we do business, how we govern. So, yeah, whether it’s the public or the private sector. I think we do need, we need more peacepreneurs, we need more ecopreneurs, we need, you know folks of, you know, any area of focus really leveraging their platform for, for good.
That’s great. I want to jump around a little bit here rapper, producer, music, authors, like, what fuels your creativity? Yeah, well, know, I fancy myself a polymath, so I see everything as having art and science embedded in it whether it’s explicitly in artistic craft.
You know, I grew up. Studying, particularly, \ and was passionate about storytelling. And as I, You know, was a teenager and seeing just a lot of the, the challenges in my community the struggles that we had as, young kids growing up in, in America one of the things that I, I really found.
Helpful was, was the power of the arts and creativity as a way to express myself and talk about the state of things and you know, and, and I got into deeply into hip hop. I got really into reading books. I was obsessed with you know, the street and the library simultaneously. And I think that.
It was a lot of that formative passion for, you know, the stories of the world, whether they are expressed in books or in paintings or in music, or, you know, in the fashion or the cultures that, you know, the, many ways in which culture is expressed. And I think, yeah, that ultimately, Our cultures of the world are the carriers of our consciousness, our human consciousness, and ultimately Yeah, I, I just love that Creativity can carry you into almost any dimension of life as a, you know, as a framework for how to see and, and how to you know, express life itself.
I love this and I want to go further. So what, like when we think about creativity, when we think about like, and that’s why I kind of led with some of the things you’ve done in the arts. But I feel like in the past. There was like this divide or the separation where your creativity or otherwise wasn’t necessarily supposed to like seep into your business I feel like as beings we were like kind of compartmentalized a little bit more like in previous generations And maybe it was necessary.
Maybe it wasn’t I don’t know, but who knows i’m not judging or commenting on that, but I feel like that was a general consensus, but now I feel like this whole concept of creativity and like being able to bring that into the business world and otherwise and it being acceptable and fueling business and being good for business, not just somebody’s ego or an outlet or not that I’m against either of those, by the way, egos are fine by whatever, not judging outlets.
Great. We all need them. I’m not, not even judging that when I say that, I just mean like now it’s even just possible. Yeah. Cool. Like, and people are more open to that. Like, what do you think that that the business community or like the private sector can learn from when we think about like this concept of adding creativity or even creative leadership to the equation?
Like, like, how do you feel about that? Yeah, that’s, I think it’s so important because creativity. And the so called creatives of our world are those that you know, that we would call creative. First of all, I think everyone has an innate creativity built in. it’s an ability to make connections between, first and foremost, you know, between the right and left hemisphere of the brain.
And you know, I think creative. Do you have an ability to to make unique connections You know, something we often talk about is intersectionality the notion that every issue is actually a part of every other issue. So, for example, let’s say you’re working in the food business.
Okay. So food is connected to energy because of having to distribute that food and transported, et cetera. It’s also connected to labor. Right, because there’s whole supply chain of work that’s required. It’s also connected to biodiversity and the climate and water. And so all of a sudden, something that seems so and very much its own vertical, it’s actually a part of a much larger circle of connection.
And to me, I think this is the necessary jump. That industries need to make in order to be resilient to the speed of change that our planet is going through right now, particularly, I would say, not just you know socially, in terms of, you know, You know, the complexities of you know, advancements in technology and AI, et cetera, things of that nature, but also environmentally, because, you know, ultimately every industry depends on the planet, even though we’ve externalized Externalized a lot of those, those measurements and that data has now just starting to be integrated into triple bottom line businesses.
But I think creativity is a major force for resilience. It’s a way to actually, approach challenges and problems by making connections and, you know, also bringing people together. I think it’s one of the great most powerful ways we can communicate and market. Obviously, we’re seeing that in the influencer explosion on social media, but again, creativity has application across almost every aspect of life.
Yeah. Yeah. I see it too. And I think, I think for me, the, the concept of, you know, what the creator or creatives it’s just that definition has like with social media or otherwise, like the amount of outlets and ways that people can express themselves. I mean, I feel like it pushes us all forward, really.
Absolutely. I mean, you think about a lot of the ways in which you know, certain aspects of academia, right? That the things that we study are, have become so segmented. That, you know, you can have somebody engineering for one thing, but causing 15 other unseen problems as a result of being so myopic and specialized.
And I think that it’s okay to master and focus on. You know, a very specific vertical or specific you know, design, but we have to really start to, see the whole circle and the ways in which everything is impacting each other. Otherwise we’re going to like whack a mole, you know, Oh, there’s a problem here and then bam, then 10 more.
You know, appear somewhere else. So we have to actually have a more cohesive and holistic approach, which is, I think what the creative mind really serves and why creatives do have you know, this is, they’ll look at the same problem through an entirely different lens, and that is very important you know, when you’re looking at innovating or, you know, approaching new demographics and new markets or you know, Tackling absolutely unprecedented challenges with regards to, I mean, we’re facing, we are facing such an extraordinary collapse of biodiversity.
This is calling it the 7th mass extinction and we have to, You know, not just be innovative, but radically imaginative to meet the demand of change in this era. That’s great. Well, Aaron I just want to say, first off, it has been a lot of fun having you on the show learning more, even just the, I mean, just the concept and having the conversation about like how creativity plays into business and otherwise.
I mean, it’s, it’s a lot of fun. It’s something that I think is, freeing for many that were put in a box, whether it was by themselves or, you know, they did it themselves, somebody else said, who cares? I don’t care. All I say is just like, you know, live your life, right? Like it’s all good. But that being said how do people follow you?
How do they follow your work? Whether it’s your music, your writing, your, your entrepreneurial projects, how do people follow you? How do they connect? Yeah. Well, I’d love to stay in touch with this community. I know Mission Matters has an extraordinary. library of content and just an extraordinary global ecosystem of leaders in business and, and across, you know, across the world.
So I’d love to explore how we can help each other. I think that this is a time of coming together, even despite how many challenges we’re facing. I think we can’t tackle them unless we can come together. And so, yeah, I’d love to stay in touch. You can find me at Aaron Abelman dot com.
That’s A A R O N A B L E M A N dot com. I am actually an ambassador for a number of global initiatives. I do a lot of brand ambassadorship you know working with A great initiative called Forest Nation, which is doing regenerative agroforestry and reforestation work really extraordinarily ethical tree planting work in partnership with indigenous communities around the world.
That’s forestnation. com. You can check out Global Peace Yes. Global Peace Yes is a, a very exciting global campaign that is setting out to, to inspire one billion people to vote yes for global peace, to walk one billion kilometers for global peace. There’s a really ambitious initiative there.
Global Peace. Yes. Dot org. And I’ve been, I was involved with Sod Guru’s Safe Soil Initiative, which I would encourage everyone to check out Safe soil.org. Also a great campaign called Gen zero action.com. So there’s a whole litany of and yeah, I just published my, my fourth book last year. I’ve got.
More coming. I’ve got music on Spotify. I’m on social media at Aaron. ableman. And again, thank you so much for the opportunity to, you know, to, to come on and, and connect. Amazing. and for everybody listening, we’ll definitely put some of those links in the show notes so that you can just connect with, with Aaron.
And speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with us, Hey, this is a daily show each and every day we’re releasing new episodes, new entrepreneurs, new thought leaders new individuals that we can all learn from. from. So hit that subscribe button because we don’t want you to miss anything.
We want you to get those notifications. And Aaron, again, thank you so much for making some time for us. Appreciate you coming on. It’s an honor. Yeah. Blessings to everybody.