# Originals — be the version of your own 🌠
originals = “non-conformists that disrupts and tackle the world’s problem with novel idea.”
To be an original is to be creative and be able to bring your creativity into something actual, something that exists in the world. I was never those who question themselves the ability to be creative. Rather, I always struggle to be more creative. Reading and watching books, online videos and turning to peers are my usual practice. Many of my friends though, doubt themselves so much, is that your case?
- “But I CAN’T be creative. My brain 💀doesn’t work that way.”
- “Neither my parents, none of my siblings nor any of my ancestors has gotten involved in any sort of creative work, so…”
- “Creative people usually have very high IQ like Einstein’s 💡. Mine is around 110, so I. JUST. CAN’T. ”
Babes, doubt your ideas, NOT yourself. Myths are set to be broken, self-set limits are to be smashed 🔨.
Adam Grant, author of this inspiring piece — Originals, shared with us what makes originals, how do we become one if we aspire to bring impact; how do we spot some if we wish to advocate and nurture them.
Quantity > Quality
Being creative is the kind of gift from god 👼 that only a fraction of population in this world shares. While creators like The Beatles, J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and such stunned the globe with their original music and words, mechanics and ventures, people focus on those particular single success stories making the headlines on TIME, Forbes… Little did people realize the amount of effort these figures spent practicing and refining their imagination into prototypes; and from prototypes to the well-known Billboard hits 🎸, Harry Potter 🔮, SpaceX 🚀 and PayPal 💰.
In Malcom Gladwell’s best-seller — Outliers, he interviewed and studied the lives of extremely successful people (def. of success: people who are very good at doing something and make themselves well-known.), to find out that 10,000+ hours ⌛️ of practice is the catalyst to mastery of that subject/field. Such view is also backed by a study conducted by a group psychologists in Berlin, Germany in early 1990’s. Elite violin 🎻 performers on average spent ~10,000 hours plus practicing, and less-able performers spent merely 4,000 hours.
In Original, Grant argues that 🔗when it comes to creativity, quantity might in fact out-weight the importance of quality. This is most-valid in the idea-generation stage and when we first take the path to become original. Think of as many weird, strange and jaw-dropping ideas as we can. Sometime these are mutations of conventional thinking, sometimes dead-end to a problem, sometimes apparent lame idea that scares yourself. Yupe, that is exactly how I always comment on my own idea, “That’s crap…”
This pools a fuel-tank of insights and trials we can revisit and twist and merge. It also trains up out brain to question and critique rather than just taking things as it has been. You know how people always say, you have the let the not-so awesome ideas come out first to get to the best of it 😎! Creativity = quantity over quality at times.
Procrastinate! Might be a good idea
Since when?
Not sure how you spent your college life. I was usually the deadline fighter. Well, not the extreme ones. But 90% of the time I only studied all 13 weeks worth of lecture notes and reference material the night before mid-term quizzes and exams. There were also multiple times that my group-mates and I finished our project presentation deck right before we went up to the stage and literally nailed it in front of the class 👏 👏👏.
It is not like we do not have a timeline or project plan to guide ourselves to get things done, but let’s just say, it never (sort of) plays out to our expectation, isn’t it 😉 I could not agree more when 🔗Tim Urban gave his TED talk about discrepancy in our grand plans and executions just because of procrastination.
How we plan out:
How it actually plays out:
If you are a big fan of the book “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, read on. At times, we could all afford to be a little less proactive and procrastinate a little more.
Many of us agree that procrastination is such a ‘No-No’ 🙅for effective people, Adam Grant advocated and explained why PROCRASTINATION breeds originals. We have the perception that when you have good idea, you have to go and anchor the market with it as fast as you can. Be the pioneer of a new business domain. It sounds so freaking true particularly in the startup and business world where competition is fierce 🔪, changes are in the next seconds ⏰and money comes and goes faster than time 💸. That is the well-known first-mover advantage 🐄.
This is a fallacy 😮. As quoted in Originals, a classic study of 50+ product categories, first-movers that comes with something unprecedented, entirely new to the market; their failure rates was 47% when compared to improvers’ (or fast-followers) 8%, who bring a better version of the product . It is easier to improve on somebody else’s idea rather than starting from scratch. “Starting from scratch” is one form of creativity as much as “Being different and better” is another course 🚦.
This guy here, is Leonardo da Vinci, sounds familiar? No, he didn’t star in Titanic. He painted “Mona Lisa”, now exhibiting in Musée du Louvre. Back then people called him the “Day-dreamer” (nothing poetic here), just because he was always day-dreaming — unable to get any thing done.
Scholars and scientists estimated that da Vinci painted Mona Lisa on and off for a few years starting in 1503. All the while he darted off to experiment his distractions in optics and physics (as a scientist & mathematician he was), procrastinating to complete Mona Lisa. This ended up stipulated Mona Lisa the mesmerizing divinity with the mysterious vivid smile 😃. How so? Da Vinci’s distraction in studying how light strikes a sphere gave rise to the modeling of Mona Lisa. Calculations in light array, angling, use of colors worked in the back of his mind even when he was not actively painting the portrait — it sipped into his brushes unconsciously and “brought Mona Lisa to life”. The portrait was not completed until 1519 when he was slipping into his death. 16-year worth of procrastination 🕓.
Even though delaying work could sometimes bring out the best version of it, let’s not make it an excuse. In Tim’s 🔗TED Talk, profound procrastination could cost your career, your physical and mental health and do your life regrets. In search of a way out of this loop, Tim found The Panic Monster 👺. The Panic Monster got activated when deadline approaches and obviously, make us panic. Pity how da Vinci’s Panic Monster only got activate near his death, else he could have gotten himself recognized by people and artists then and probably would had brought along earlier fame and wealth 🔹. It is okay to delay your work, your everything, do give them a deadline and stick to it!
Be not a risk-taker
“Entrepreneur”, the word by itself means “bearer of risk” according to Cantillon — an Irish-French Economist. Anecdotal evidence has it that quite some entrepreneurs risked everything they had to fuel their startups. They basically risked every single dollar in the bank accounts on one idea. Whether they succeeded or not people call them the “risk-takers”, praised them like martyrs and heroes. Because risking it all is just heroic 💂.
To be an original, you do not have to be a hero. Be a coward 🐭.
Adam Grant shared with us the reason why he missed 🔗Warby Parker 👓 in Originals. Warby Parker was founded by a group of college students. One day they asked “WHY did such fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone?”. These questions motivated them to get going with Warby Parker 👓 — an American online retailer brand of prescription of eyeglasses and sunglasses founded in 2010. In March 2018 they raised $75M in series E funding. This private venture was valued at $1.2B as of April 2015.
Half a year before Warby Parker was launched, the founders were pitching to Adam Grant in his classroom at Wharton. The quick comment that Adam gave was “It sounds interesting, but it’s hard to imagine people buying glasses online.” Just as if this does not show his doubts enough, he added “if you all truly believe in Warby Parker, you should drop out of school and focus every waking hour on making it happen.”
Adam was trying to make the founders-to-be heroes.
All founders would be graduating in that coming year and Adam believed that these guys could go all-in to the business and this would make things up. When the founders told Adam “We are hedging our bets.” “Just in case things do not work out as we want, we all have accepted full-time jobs.” Ug-oh 😮, that was a good-bye 👋 👄between Adam and Warby Parker…
Why did Adam miss that? Aren’t we suppose to go all-in when it comes to starting our our venture? As cited in Originals, A study conducted by management researchers Joseph Rafffiee and Jie Feng asked a simple question: When people start a business, are they better off keeping or quitting their day jobs? What do you think? Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33% lower odds of failures than those who opted to quit. The phenomenon hosts true in other fields, for those who are taking a big leap in their careers. More examples from the book: John Legend 🎼 was preparing PowerPoint decks by day as a management consultant and performing at night while also releasing his first album in 2002. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google 🌟, were doing their Ph.Ds when they found out the key to significantly improve internet search. They didn’t leave Standford to start Google properly. They tried to SELL Google at $2M while still working hard on their Ph.D research.
Manage your decision like a stock portfolios 📊. Balance out the risk of taking a big leap for your start-up, career change as well as in other aspects. Let’s not forget Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs 😆 :
In short, you have to satisfy some basic needs to advance to the top of the hierarchy — actualizing your dreams and passions. When we all have a sense of security in say income from a stable paying day job, we can afford to go a little crazy or fly to space 👾 in another domain. Taking extreme risk on one end and offsetting the risk with extreme caution on another. Did you know that when Bill Gates started Microsoft 💻, he didn’t really ditch Harvard. He applied for a leave-of-absence which was formally approved by University Office. He was also financially secured to have his parents backing up with bankrolls.
Be not a hero, be coward. Be not a risk-taker, be risk-mitigator ◀️ ▶️.
How I am doing
Everything is always easier said than done, except procrastination 💁. I just want to share a little bit with you all how my friends and I are living out to try to become originals 👭
We celebrate quantity
Very lucky me, I have a group of weirdo colleagues at the organization I working at exchanging one-of-a-kind, stupid yet funny ideas all the time. We would joke about some of the organization’s marketing campaigns and re-imagine them into something more hipster, nerdy and stupid 😆 I’d love to share more in details but you know, I have to hedge my bets by keeping my job, so let’s leave it here 🐵
One of my friend were deep in thought to come up with an campaign idea for his work. A few of us were in his happy-hour think-tank and did not particularly set an agenda to go over items and for discussion. Babe, it’s happy-hour 🍷 🍻. So we were just thinking out loud some dumb and lame ideas. I was so moved and touched by 🔗 SoftBank’s marketing effort back then. When the group fell silent for a brief moment, that’s what I remembered. I show them the video and boom, here you go! His team nailed it with the campaign and got some lines and sections in local newspapers. The point here is that your experiences — anything at all, could fuel your creativity and make you the original. Expose yourself to as many novel, different things, people as possible. Putting quality aside first; to produce creativity in quantity requires input too!
We procrastinate
I literally procrastinate every single day. No joke. I got this deadline for this piece I am writing by 2 PM TODAY (Apr 5). It’s 12 PM now. I started this piece on Mar 29, wrote the very first sentence while darting off through the week to get myself certified with Python Fundamentals and AdTech. Guess I won’t take 16 years to finish this because I got a deadline to stick to. Hopefully ❗️
Like mentioned, deadline is the key! Rumor has it that, there is this middle-aged (maybe even older) man, who has been studying in HKU (let’s not mention the faculty he is in 😶) extended his studies for YEARS. Until this very moment, it is believed that he has not yet graduated with a bachelor degree but yes, he is still going to class, asking questions in lecture theater. I was told by source who also is studying in HKU. YOU WANT A DEADLINE FOR YOUR BACHELOR DEGREE ❗️
We hedge our bets
Doing Bit by Bit with my 2 other co-founders (sounds too serious?) is no big risk. All 3 of us are weirdos that love discovering new insights, learning new things, get filling ourselves with novel ideas. I bet we could just go on watching YouTube on how others are doing marketing, go to DataCamp, dive in PyCharm, dive in high-tech innovations all day, and months and year and not getting paid. We would share what we learnt and discovered here and not getting paid. But we won’t. We are rational and all of us are employed with full-time job (sort of).
🔗Xania Wong 👩, founder of the local startup 🔗Jobdoh that aims to help matching employers and employees with temporary jobs, especially in F&B and MICE activities is the prime example. She was working in iBank from 9 to 6 while also working to launch her startup through the night. She went all in only after winning Google’s Entrepreneurship Competition 🏆.
learn_wif_dor = input(‘How you are doing it: ‘)
Now it’s your turn, share with us how you become an original. Share with us your weird idea about just anything. What are those not-so-cool idea you have in the fuel-tank?
