Just Do It

“Just do it.” The Nike slogan was created during a meeting at Wieden+Kennedy, an advertising agency. According to Dan Wieden, his inspiration for the “Just Do It” slogan came from the American criminal Gary Gilmore’s last words. Gilmore was convicted of murdering a motel manager in Provo, Utah, and was sentenced to be executed by a firing squad. In 1977, right before his execution, he proclaimed the words: “Let’s do it.” These three words would later be transformed into one of the world’s most well-known logos. Today, the Nike slogan is ubiquitous. We see it everywhere, on billboards, on people’s clothing, in the media.

While “Just do It” is relevant to many aspects of our lives, it is also quite relevant to the topic of creativity. How? Well, a lot of creativity just comes from “doing it,” whether that entails trying something new for the first time or doing something for the 100th time in a slightly different way. After all, if you do nothing, nothing happens, and absolutely no creativity will arise.

As you may recall from from the chapter about creatives, creatives are people who create, create, create, regardless of potentially imperfect results. They are successful precisely because they embrace imperfection. The Warby Parker founders went through 2,000 names before coming up with the name “Warby Parker.” Thomas Edison went through over 100 prototypes before inventing the light bulb. Bach composed hundreds of smaller pieces before finally composing his most famous piece.

The Warby Parker founders, Edison, and Bach were particularly innovative because they just created. They just did it. And just doing it is what gets the ball rolling, regardless of whether the first idea is successful or not. In fact, the first idea is very rarely successful, but just putting out the first idea is the first step toward eventually coming up with what could one day become a famous idea.

“Doing is the most important, because it’s the first step to figuring out that by just doing things you can do anything you want. Once you get over the hump of, ‘Can I do this?’ you can actually do it. And it’s not worth spending time asking yourself if you can do it. It’s so much better to just do it.” — Kevin Cha (Founder of NousCulture, a lifestyle blog).

In a recent scientific study titled “Creativity and Cognitive Skills among Millennials: Thinking Too Much and Creating Too Little,” the researchers found that while employers today are seeking to hire diligent entry-level employees, tests for diligence, such as the Cognitive Reflection test, are based on effortful thinking rather than intuition. The problem with this is that effortful thinking is akin to the ceramics students who made one single piece, while intuition is akin to the students who just went with their gut and made dozens of pieces. Intuition is a major component of creativity, while thinking too much hinders creativity. Though this might sound counterintuitive, if we want to be creative, we can’t take time to make elaborate plans and outlines.

We have to just do.

For more information, please contact me at sfd9@georgetown.edu. To read more, you can purchase my book, “When Birds Swim” on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.