In the old days, you invented a technology and protected it. The technology was designed to sell your service or product. You didn’t want to mess up the profit chain. You had legal teams lobby congress to crack down on hackers and people using your technology in new ways.
Now, you release your technology to the public. You encourage them to take it apart. Figure out how it works. Hack it for their own uses. Write their own programs.
Before, you relied on hiring a team of developers, coders and programmers to innovate and push the uses of your technology.
Now, you realize that the creativity and ingenuity of 7 billion people will always be greater than your R&D department.
Creativity is …
Wearing a snapback hat with a bowtie.
A hand dryer without hot air that uses 80% less energy. Beer aged in scotch barrels.
Blending two genres of music together to create musical poetry.
Lighting a home with a plastic soda bottle and bleach.
Creativity is …
Breaking the conventions.
Questioning the norm.
Trying something different.
Putting your thoughts into action.
Creativity is a fairy tale where the princess tells the prince to fuck off.
You consume something. Your body digests it. Then your body uses the energy from what you put in it to produce. This is true for food. And it’s true for ideas.
What you put into your body impacts what you get out of it.
If you put in food that your body is able to easily process and digest, you’ll get a lot out of it. If you put in junk, your system gets overloaded and you feel like shit.
HACKING YOUR DIET
I’m fortunate to be a genetic freak. My body seems to have a metabolism that runs high and is able to process most things. Wendy’s Baconator? No problem. Raw fish? Hell’s yeah! Salad? Sure. It all seems to go through the same.
But recently, I began to learn how to hack my body. There are certain things that I can put in my body that jump starts the system if I’m feeling tired. There’s meals that I can eat to give me sustained energy before a big tournament. There are shakes I can consume to speed up recovery after workouts.
The same applies to creativity and ideas. What you put into your mind impacts what you get out of it. If you consume inspirational stories, interesting knowledge and actual learning, you produce great ideas and insights. If you’re reading gossip sites and watching Jersey Shore, you liable to end up producing the standard entitled teenager bullshit.
And when you’re in a crunch, you can hack your brain. You can consciously control the inputs to maximize creativity. Consume information that inspires. Learn things that provoke. Observe insights that spark ideas.
YOUR CREATIVE DIET
Consider your creative diet. What is it that you’re putting into your brain? Is it fine tuned to generate the creative output that you’re looking for?
Sometimes, simple awareness makes a big difference. By being conscious of what the type and quality of content that you’re consuming, you’ll become much more in tune to what your habits are. That awareness allows you to tweak them to your specific needs.
The simplest solution is to consume better content. Read a book. Avoid the standard internet distractions of Facebook, daily news and gossip websites. Look for intelligent content that will provide you with different perspectives. Look to uncover new information. Look for inspiration in the real world and online.
CONCLUSION
Content is brain food. The videos, books and articles that you consume impacts what your brain produces. You can hack your inputs to generates the results that you want. Be conscious of your creative diet. What are you consuming? How you could be putting in more of the right stuff to get the ideas you want?
If a problem grows to become complicated and all consuming, you have to ask yourself one simple question: is it worth it to fix it?
Your time might be better spent doing something else. Something that you love. Something that doesn’t cause you stress for nothing. Or something that delivers results.
It’s easy to get drawn into a black hole with a project. You start and some small bumps arise in the road. And then the situation gets bigger and more complicated. It gets bumped up a couple of levels. At the end, there seems to be more effort on getting agreement and approval than actual work being done.
Is it worth it? If not, ditch the project.
Spend your time on a project that keeps things simple and ships.
My head is full of stupid ideas. A lot of them. And I found that as I get older (and more mature) it’s a lot easier to recognize which ones are stupid. Experience tells me when not to follow through just because something pops into my head.
So, I guess that makes me a “mature adult”. But the stupid ideas keep coming. They’re still in my head, taking up valuable real estate. It got me thinking.
What do you do with your stupid ideas? The ones that are ridiculous. They don’t make any sense. Not only are they impossible, but you’re pretty sure that they’d be stupid if they were possible.
What do you call them? Are they dreams? Or hallucinations?
And then I figured out what to do with stupid ideas.
LET THEM OUT!
Release them out into the world. Tell people about them. Stop keeping them cramped up in your skull taking up space.
Because once they’re out there in the real world, you never know what can happen. They can fall flat. They can die. But they can also spark something. They can act as inspiration. Or they can get recognized as not-so-stupid. Maybe even as good ideas.
Think about the person who invented the GoPro cameras. Every single other personal video camera on the market had one thing in common – there was a viewfinder so that you could see what you’re shooting. Why would you make a camera without one? That’s stupid.
But the people behind GoPro thought that people don’t care about seeing the world through a viewfinder – they want to see the world themselves.
So, don’t discount what’s inside your head until you’ve had a chance to test it in the real world. You never know. It may be that you think your idea is stupid because it bucks convention. Because it’s truly different.
Earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to participate in a discussion initiated by Brian that revolved around the concept of the story arc. What’s a story arc? All of the most popular movies, video games and books all contain the same structure for telling a story. The structure has existed for hundreds of years. Beowulf. The Bible. Even The Little Mermaid. The stories that resonate with you all follow the same pattern.
The structure is simple. First, there is a hero. The hero has been comfortably living his life. Then a conflict forces the hero on a journey. The hero faces temptations and challenges. Eventually, the hero has a revelation where they discover how to control their superpowers – they realize who they need to be. They enter a hero state and it allows them to accomplish the task set out to them. They slay the dragon and fulfill their destiny.
The Hero Journey is a universally relevant storytelling structure. Regardless of your age, gender or culture, you can relate to it. Why is that? It’s because we believe that a hero’s journey is the same as our own. Our own lives mimic the conflict, trials and revelations in the story arc. Maybe it’s your journey through adolescence to figure out who you are. Maybe it’s your journey to become quarterback of your football team. Maybe it’s the journey of your career.
We are all heroes in our own story.
And as heroes, we have to pass a series of tests. These challenges pull you into the darkness. You struggle. More often than not, you fail. But then bit by bit you start uncovering your own personal superpowers. You may only get a glimpse at first, but then you learn to understand them. To focus them. To control them. To use them to get to where you want to go.
This sparks the revelation. You realize who you need to become in order to suceed. It lets you step out of the darkness and start kicking ass.
Sometimes, life will shit on you. But when you’re in the thick of it and life sucks, just remember that these are trials. They are tests in your journey. You just have to figure out how to master your superpowers in order conquer it.
I have a friend whose favourite thing in the world to do is to create lists. She makes lists of chores. Lists of places to travel. Lists of groceries. Lists lists lists. All neatly printed and colour coded in some insane organizational system. But in this myriad of lists, I discovered one list that was very interesting – a list of things to accomplish before she turned 30.
It was a wish list of activities, purchases, adventures and memories that she wanted to have before the her 30th birthday. Interesting. It started me thinking on something else. I should start a creative to-do list.
A creative to-do list is the wish list of things that you would like to accomplish creatively. Instead of a normal listing of chores or mundane tasks, it’s an opportunity to catalog all of the creative outputs you want to produce. Put plainly, it’s the list of things you want to make.
People sail through life and get inspired to make things. But that inspiration lasts a couple of minutes. And then we get distracted by something else. So that desire to CREATE something gets buried. Which is why I’ve started to write all of those things down on a list. I call it my creative catalog because it contains everything that I want to accomplish creatively.
Here’s what I have so far:
- Build a piece of furniture
- Write a book on creativity
- Build an app
- Restore a Triumph motorcycle
- Design a poster
- Film an inspirational short based on ultimate frisbee training
- Design a pair of shoes
- Decorate a bar
- Write an article that gets published in a (print) magazine
- Develop a unique cartoon style of drawing
Now, I want to make it very clear that the LEVEL of the final product does not matter to me. The key is actually going out and doing it. Trying it once. I could find out very quickly that I’m an awful craftsman when it comes to building a coffee table. That’s fine. The purpose is to try it out. To see if you can do it. And if you can’t (or you do a crappy job), the point is then to gain an appreciation of the level of skill, dedication and learning that goes into the art of creating.
Creativity comes from gaining new perspectives and trying new things. The most creative person in the room is not always the person who has mastered one specific craft. Often, it’s the person who has tried many things and can bring the the learnings from all of those experiences together.
But you’ll never know until you start trying. And the first step is to write down your creative to-do list. What’s on yours?
Sometimes I write letters. Real ones … with a pen and paper. Letters that get sent to people in the mail. In reality, it’s not the most efficient form of communication. It requires a little bit of extra effort. But the extra effort required produces a disproportionate gain for the person getting a letter in the mail. They get the surprise of getting something their mailbox. They get a physical object. They know that I took extra time and effort to communicate with them. All of this is value that is above and beyond what is actually said in the letter.
All of this is better an email. Email is convenient, but it’s average. It doesn’t stand out. It’s boring.
FROM “MEH” TO GOOD
Mediocrity sucks. Sure, you can get by. You can survive. But you don’t succeed by being average.
The good news is that moving from “average” to “good” is easy. It only requires an extra 10% effort to distinguish yourself from the masses of mediocrity.
Here’s why:
To accomplish any task, whether it be in your work or personal life, requires a base amount of dedication. You have to put in SOME time and effort into it. Most people coast along trying to stay between the lines. Trying to be normal. Putting in the minimum amount of effort in order to be average.
If you’re already average, than you’re doing it the base amount. To distinguish yourself from from the average all you have to do is add the extra 10%. Run the extra windsprint. Get into work 15 minutes earlier. Say “please” and “thank you”. All of those things are easy enough to do, but allow you to separate yourself from the pack. To stand out. To rise above the average.
EXAMPLES
1. At The Bar
If you’re looking to meet a romantic interest at the bar, there’s a certain baseline. If you’re a guy, all you have to do is stand out from the crowd of lazy and shy guys out there. You have to do the simple things that that none of the other guys do. The simplest? Iron your shirt. Most guys don’t pay attention to their clothes and go out dressed like slobs. A close second? Smile. Most guys look nervous, bored or stoic if they’re uncomfortable at the bar. The third? Get off your ass and talk to a girl. Okay, so this one is probably more than 10% of extra effort, but it definitely helps you stand out, as 90% of guys are too scared to take this step.
2. At Work
The average worker bee comes in, clocks the minimum number of acceptable hours and then rolls out. Sure, they’ll stay late when a project requires it or push through the weekend if there’s a tight deadline, but that’s it. They don’t want to be there. They don’t want to do work. To stand out and show that you give a shit, show up 15 minutes earlier and stay 30 minutes later than the norm. It’s only 10% more time than the typical work week, but you’ll be infinitely more productive. Without other people there to distract you, you’ll be able to focuse to kick start your day and wrap up everything before leaving.
3. Training
If you want a competitive edge on the pitch, you have to train for it. Your teammates are doing it. Your competitors are doing it. The guys who want to take your spot on the field are doing it. But if you’re training as a team, chances are that you’re all doing the same workout. So stay late and do those extra windsprints. Work that extra 30 minutes a week on your pass or your shot. Those little elements will add up to make you a much better player on the field.
CONCLUSION
Going from average to good isn’t difficult. You don’t need any special skills or exceptional brain power. You just need to put in that extra little bit of effort. And that extra 10% will provide you with exponential results that eclipse the additional work you put it. The tougher task is going from good to great. But that’s a whole different story and a whole lot more work.
Downtime happens. You’re waiting for feedback on a project. A supplier hasn’t gotten back to you. The client needs approval on a budget. But what you do with it can make a big difference to yourself. Most people will waste downtime. They’ll do something like watch movies or troll the endless gossip websites for entertainment. But all you get accomplished is a temporary reprieve from boredom. You don’t actually get to take anything away from it. Where you are at the beginning of the downtime is the exactly the same as where will be at the end. Nothing has been accomplished.
But you don’t have to do that. You can do small things that will kill two birds with one stone: (1) keep you entertained, and (2) set you up for better creativity and productivity when the work comes back. Here are a couple of things that you can do in your downtime that will help you stay creative:
1. Get the boring shit done.
We all have shit that needs to get done, but is boring to do. Pay your bills. Do your timesheets. Sort out your expenses. When you’re busy, it’s easy to push this stuff to the bottom of the list. But then it lingers there. It sits there not getting done and all of a sudden your company owes your $350 from three months ago because avoided the 10 minutes require to fill out an expense report. Get the boring shit done. Handle your business and get paid. It’ll keep your mind at ease.
2. Read a book.
Television entertains you with pictures and sounds. A book entertains you with words and your imagination. Guess which one allows you to flex your creative muscles? Exactly.
3. Exercise.
If things are slow, drop out of work for an hour and go for a run. Or go to the gym. Or play a game of pick-up basketball. Just exercise. Get your body moving and start a sweat. A healthy body equals a healthy mind.
4. Declutter Your Life.
Clean up your desk. Organize your hard drive. Go through your closets and get rid of stuff that you don’t need. The goal is to get down to get rid of the clutter that inhibits your life, your creativity and your productivity.
5. Invest In A New Experience
Creativity is fueled by experiences. Things that you get to witness, participate in or do that open your mind to new perspectives. So go to a museum and check out a fashion exhibit. Or watch a folk band live on stage and jive with the rest of the crowd. Or go skydiving and see the world as you free fall at equivalent of an 18 story building each second. Exposing yourself to new experiences create new opportunities for your creative mind.
So that’s the list. Either way, doing any one of these things is better than doing what most people do to entertain themselves during downtime (shopping, watching movies and reading gossip websites). What are you favourite ways to stay creative during your downtime?
