Everyone wants to be creative, but no one has the time for it
Creativity is the nourishment of innovation. It is the source of human creation and brought us both beautiful pieces of art and new technological devices. In the following article, I will share my thoughts on how to be creative and how anyone can build their own creative muscles.
Being creative is difficult. However, the reason for it being difficult is not related to the common adage that creativity is an innate talent that cannot be improved. Creativity is also not a magic formula for creating something entirely new.
Innovation never appears out of a vacuum; Innovation is always based on fundamental underlying concepts the person or organization has learned before. Nothing gets created out of nothing. Innovation is about bringing different fields together, combining two or more ideas that have never been combined before or approaching a problem from a different perspective.
The way I think about creativity is that it has three different premises.
1. To be creative, you need to create
2. To be creative, you need to know a lot of stuff
3. Creativity takes time
4. If you want to be creative, you need to think harder by thinking more and differently than others
1) If you do not create, or actively think about creating, you cannot be creative. Many people complain that they are not creative and only consume content or do repetitive tasks the whole day without reflection. You will never get creative if you do not start creating stuff. Surprise, you are also not able to dance someone who does it twice a week and someone who codes all day does it better than you do it with the single online course you almost completed two years ago. Creativity is not different from that.
2) Knowing a lot of things or at least knowing a lot about the stuff that is relevant to your creative effort. By knowing many things, the portfolio of ideas to combine or adapt is much more extensive and can, therefore, lead to more original results.
3) Innovation needs time; it cannot necessarily be rushed. Good ideas are not created in a second, even if it sometimes feels like it. Pixar, one of the most famous production studios of the last decades which in my opinion has never produced a movie with a bad storyline, admits that it never gets the stories right the first time. They adapt the stories multiple times and sometimes scrap the whole script and write a new one. Innovative ideas are the product of past experiences, extensive reflection and often a considerable amount of feedback from others.
4) Time itself is not enough. In addition to time, it is essential to think harder about a problem than other people, since approaching it from more different angles opens up a higher possibility of finding a value-adding combination. Thinking harder is based on two different things, working harder, and thinking differently.
Working harder
Working harder is not a function of merely working more hours. I think that to get the best results when working on challenging, creative processes, the best leverage you can gain beyond working a sufficient amount of hours is the level of focus you can attain when working on the problem. If you can get into a deep flow for long periods of time, you will have a significant competitive advantage over your competitors. One tactic many people use is to cut sleep to unhealthy and unproductive levels. Sleeping less and working more instead will have negative returns after a certain point. You get less output per hour if you are sleep deprived.
Thinking differently
Since your computing power is limited, you cannot innovate if you think like everyone else. This is true for almost every other area of life: To outperform consistently, you must consider options that are different from the status quo. For being better than average, there are some widely accepted rules for success, and you can surpass many people by following them. Additionally, you can outwork a lot of people by just putting in more hours. Once you reach the top 10%, everyone is working incredibly hard, though. This is where novel approaches come into play.
While outworking other people by investing more hours has declining marginal gains and is naturally capped at some point, outthinking other people can lead to a significant advantage. A vast amount of people work many hours and follow a standard success-oriented routine but do not think hard. They assume that their first intuition or the conventional wisdom in their industry is the right way to approach the problem. Intuitions can be correct, and industry adages exist for a reason. However, deep thinking about a problem requires effort beyond the immediate and the obvious. I talked about thinking hard in an earlier article about second-order consequences which elaborated on the fact that effects have effects and that a more profound understanding can be reached when one does not always only focus on the immediate outcome but also on additional changes it can cause. This kind of thinking enables you to overcome the initial obviousness and leads to deeper understanding.
There is another technique that helps to understand a problem deeply. In contrast to following a chain of reasoning, you ask yourself why the things are the way they are and additionally ask what would be different if you changed parts of the system. When you look at a system, try to invert a few of the variables by switching them around, changing their positions or giving them other attributes. Doing that forces you to think differently about a system.
Let us take the Pay TV market in the US as an example. In its early days when HBO, the producers of shows like Westworld, The Sopranos, and Game of Thrones, got started, the executives of the old TV stations were confused by the method of letting people pay money for watching additional TV channels. The established payment flow was that advertisers paid TV stations for showing their ads and consumers would watch the shows for free, paying with their time and susceptibility to advertisements. The stations made a lot of money through advertising and thought that consumers would never pay for watching TV. HBO questioned the established system and asked why consumers could not pay TV channels directly if they got good content in return. This was a revolutionary idea at the time.
Let us take a look at some other crazy ideas in that system. Why don’t TV Stations pay users to watch their content? Why is anyone paying at all? Can’t we just stream everything for free? Why don’t consumers create content for other consumers to watch? Why do we have to rely on the TV networks? Some of these questions may sound stupid but consumers creating content for other consumers is basically what YouTube has built, and they are reasonably successful with it. I would argue that it was a good idea to build YouTube back in the day and that there are more novel, value-adding ideas left in the TV/Video market which may seem stupid right now.
Often it is difficult to assess which ideas are stupid and which are not. However, by asking different, sometimes unconventional questions, you will always get a better understanding of the system you are analyzing and of the relationships within it. Some relationships are more complicated than the TV, consumer one and require more reflection and deeper digging. By asking more what ifs and moving things around, you will learn why things are the way they are and if they should stay like they are or if there is a valuable gap that is worth pursuing. At some point, you may have an idea in your head that seems crazy at first glance, like letting strangers stay in your spare bedroom (Airbnb) or tackling a complicated and regulated market that seems impossible to win (Stripe) but will develop into something significant. It does not have to be at the scale of these companies, and it does not even have to be related to business at all. Using the techniques, I described above may lead you to thoughts and places before other people can think of them. You can decide on your own then what you want to do with it.
To conclude, being creative is a function of, knowing a lot of stuff, giving it time and learning about how creativity works. In addition, working hard and thinking harder is the way to go. The latter can be achieved by improving your ability in both thinking in novel ways and focusing deeply. Creativity is more complicated than what I could convey in this short essay, but it is definitely no magic, so if you want to get better at it, work on it.
Content suggestions
As always, I would like to end with two content suggestions that made me smarter or changed my perspective on something. If you want additional recommendations or recommendations in a specific area, hit me up.
1) Creativity Inc, a book written by Ed Catmull, the President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. He talks about the creativity involved in making movies and addresses how producing art often is as much a leadership problem as it is a creativity problem. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18077903-creativity-inc
2) A concise article from 2010, written by David Cohen, the founder, and CEO of TechStars in which he argues that when approaching busy and important people you should start by asking a small favor and gives some perspective on what a small favor is: http://davidgcohen.com/2010/10/28/small-asks-first/
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