Your Creative Self: Where do you rank yourself?
Your creative self: Where do you rank yourself?
You are more creative than you give yourself credit for.
What have you put together recently? Maybe it was a presentation. Maybe it was an e-book. Maybe it was a video. Maybe it was a dressed-up annual report. You injected thought, creativity and data into it. You worked it. You might even have worked it from scratch.
It feels good to work things from scratch, doesn’t it? Like you’re creating with your hands again? Nothing existed before you started. So, you started where you did, completely up to you. You worked at it. You whittled away at it. You softened it. You sharpened and polished it. You made it better. Maybe you went through 12 or 15 drafts. Good! Nothing improves things like iterative drafts. You worked it all the way from initiation to completion. Now, how does that feel? Like a win? Like you contributed? Like you were creative here? It should. It should feel validating that it is complete. That you shipped. That you published. That you said to your market, “Here, I created this for you. Let me know what you think of it. Perhaps this is the change you seek.“
Only they may not like it. Or, they may have suggestions for improving it. Or, they may say it is great and share it with others. Or, they may pick up the work and massage it in their own way. Or, they may love what you did so much that they become a super fan of yours.
You won’t know until you ship. And you must ship. You don’t have a choice but to ship.
Take some creative courage here.
Here’s some creative courage advice for you: ship your creations at 80% complete. Work the thing to 80% done, release it and see what happens. Work it to 80, then gather feedback from people you trust, see what they tell you. This feedback will surprise you. Good. It’s designed to do just that. Take it in even if it is hard. Then, decide which of it makes the most sense to you.
Feedback is a gift if you think it is.
Even if somebody is a jerk to you, which happens, try to at least not take it personally. Sure, jerks can hurt, but only if you let them. Fly over them. In fact, you’re already flying over them with your creation, which is why they came down hard on you. They have no creations of their own to share, only harsh critiques. It wasn’t for them. OK, good. Onto the next person. Now, go on.
But for the people your creation is for, these are your people. They are your fans. They are your supporters. They are your Who, who you make things for. One of the fundamentals of marketing is that your thing isn’t for everybody. It is only for these people here. It is our job as creators and marketers to realize this and then go out and find our people. Then, encourage them, even incentivize them, to share. As fans, this won’t be hard because we all love sharing things we love and that resonate with us. We just need to ship our work and ship it often. Create a regular rhythm of shipping, and be consistent with it. Remember: great artists and creators ship.
The Discipline of Creativity
One of the most common misperceptions of creativity is the inspirational moment: it hits us and then we get to our creative work. It strikes us like lightning and then we’re off to the creative races. Only it doesn’t work that way.
Creativity is deep work, your best work, the work your Boss really pays you for. She’s not really paying you to fill in the spreadsheet with numbers. Not really. She’s paying you to provide insight into those numbers for her and for her boss. Numbers without context and insight are simply random, digital noise. She’s looking for the story behind the numbers.
Employers pay a premium for creativity today because we’re awash in data and information. We’re short on insight and story. We’ve got all this data. Great! Now, what do we do? Creativity plays a contextual role. How do you best display / view / show / tell the story of what these data sets are trying to tell us? Can you interpret the data in a creative, easy-to-understand way and explain it to others in order to clarify decision-making? Bill Gates once said that if you cannot explain something simply to others so that they understand, then you don’t understand it yourself clearly enough.
Today’s genius is making the complex simple. What we’re really trying to do is tear away at these layers of complexity to discover the simplicity within it. We are not getting more value by adding. We’re getting more value by taking away the complexity.
We don’t necessarily need things to do more for us. We need things to do less for us, but better, more concentrated, more focused, more effective. A small, ‘A’ Team of software engineers will out-code a bigger ‘B’ Team of software engineers. In fact, one software development pro who knows exactly what she’s doing can knock the socks off of a team of five other software development pros who may not work well together. In a fraction of the time, too. It is in the nature of the work. That’s why we pay top dollar for creative talent. More is not necessarily better. Smaller, more creative teams prevail. We don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen running amok, trying to prove to each other how right they are.
Where does this discussion of creativity leave us now? How do we best apply it to our own discipline, our domain? How do we learn to see again? How do we change our perception? By looking outside our own domain. By taking ideas from other disciplines, other industries, and seeing if they might apply to our own. It is likely that they will. We just need to widen our point of view instead of being so tunneled on our own professional discipline. There is so much more out there that we can be looking at, that we can take in. We simply need to look with an open mind. Other industries may have already solved your problem. And if you leave the building to go and see for yourself and apply your findings to your own domain’s expertise, you’re committing a creative act. You’re learning to see again. You’re connecting the dots. You’re contributing to and enhancing your industry. You are making creative things happen.
Where are you looking now? Look outside, beyond where you’ve historically looked. Go, and see for yourself.
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