Creative Careers & Coffee Cups
His skills were unparalleled. This guy oozed creative genius and no matter where he worked he was the envy of his peers. Well, mainly his junior peers. Though everyone around him admired his creative mastery, those who managed him struggled to be inspired by him. He wasn’t a terrible person by any stretch of the imagination, but he carried a habit that hindered him from holding down a great job that would really let his genius shine. Though he continually excelled at his craft with ingenuity and care, he disregarded all the periphery aspects of the work. Some people refer to these aspects as “soft skills,” but I would suggest that the term has diluted the true weight of what it takes to be a well-rounded, highly valuable person.
To understand what I mean ask yourself this: What does it take to get better at what you do? How can you become the best, however you define it? From what I’ve seen and what the illustration above would posit, it’s not necessarily about focusing on getting better at your craft. It’s about everything else that supports it.
Your Value: The Coffee Cup & Beyond
Consider for a moment a perfectly beautiful cappuccino sitting on a saucer. The latté art makes you salivate, the mug holds its form beautifully, and the saucer is…well, it’s there. But just like my story illustrates, I’ve seen many people struggle through their creative careers just focusing on finding a great mug to use to hold their perfect latté art that they fail to pay attention to the peripheral elements that help them get that art in front of people: the saucer. The saucer seems inconsequential but consider for a moment the design of the saucer and how it holds the mug in place and offers the server a platform enabling them to get the coffee from behind the bar to the table just as perfectly as when it was crafted. In the same way, there are skills that must be developed in order to be able to get great work out there for everyone to truly admire and watch succeed. Here are just a few skills I’m talking about:
- Working collaboratively with a team
- Working for a boss/team lead with vision
- Managing client expectations
- Presenting your work with a legitimate rationale
- Managing your daily time well
- Communicating with clarity, confidence and concisely
- Being able to be held accountable
- Consistency/being a person of their word
- Taking initiative
- Humility
And basically everything else employers put into their job postings after all the technical requirements — the “hard skills”.
Why Soft Skills > Hard Skills
When I consider people I’d like on my team, it’s rarely because they’re a “design ninja/guru/whatever-other-trendy-description”. Obviously, they need to have chops but I’m not typically impressed by technical perfection; beyond competence and experience my main concern is “the saucer”; I’m looking at the other things they bring to the table. Granted, we all have our blind spots and need to grow in these supportive skills, but these foundational elements of your career will be the things that carry out any great thing you can make further. I am, in fact, not concerned as to whether people on my team will become better at their craft. This is because I aim to always hire people who are naturally curious about their craft and will get better at it as a baseline in their development. It’s the other things that I work to develop in myself and those I lead. That’s what I’ve seen to be valuable in both leaders and individual contributors alike and always motivates the development of the craft at the same time. Now that’s the perfect latté right there.
