Why You Should Tell Your Boss to Shove It

What is creativity? Are we born with it?

Could it be a gene? If so, is it a gene only certain people have? Or is it one that everyone can harness?

Forget Mr. DNA. Creativity is simple. Creativity is an idea. Actually, it is two ideas that might not first seem related, but which come together to make something special and new.

If you’re John Hammond that means blending frog DNA with dinosaur blood to create a one-of-a-kind Caribbean theme park. If you’re Xerox that means connecting an arrow on a monitor to a rodent shaped piece of plastic. If you’re Richard Branson that means founding an airline from a record label.

The point is this—creativity is simple, and the culmination of two far-fetched ideas has resulted in some of the most successful projects of the modern world (okay, Hammond’s wasn’t so much a success…or even real, but bonus points for the Mr. DNA reference).

Creativity in the case of Xerox led to a revolution in technology. Yes, their idea got kidnapped by Apple, but the mouse did go on to define the way we interact with computers, even to this day. Drag and drop, click and scroll…these are all products of creativity.

For Branson, Virgin Airlines became even more successful than his record company. And—in a world that couldn’t have been predicted when the company was founded in 1984—Virgin Airlines has outlasted and out-profited the music label from which it was born.

So what do an airline and a mouse have in common? Neither of them were based on any business model the two companies had been founded on. Xerox made copy machines. Virgin made records.

Look around. How many copy machines and CDs do you see around today? How about mice and airplanes?

That’s the point.

For companies to evolve and thrive, creativity has to be fostered. It has to be supported, set free.

Believe it or not there are still businesses today which don’t value creativity. Generally, their spill starts with the same sentence, “That’s how it’s always been done here.” And if you’re involved in one of those companies, you should tell your boss to take a hike.

Seriously, the world is too big; life is too short.

We’re not saying go jump off a bridge or get into a fight, but maybe it’s time to take a stand for yourself. Maybe it’s time to take a stand for your ideas to see where they come together. That’s one of the reasons we are here today at Metal Potato. We’re doing abstract website design for a company with an abstract name. We’re connecting the dots between two foreign ideas every single day.

It’s fantastic—but it wasn’t always like that.

You see, most of our staff has met that boss before. The one who wanted it like it had “always been done.” But like you, we knew the old way didn’t have a place in our idea of the future. We wanted to build a mouse. We wanted to found an airline. We wanted to build an amusement park like the world had never seen (we’re still working on that one).

But most of all, we wanted to be creative.

We told that boss to shove it, and now we are free. Click to Tweet