There is a lot of talk about creativity these days. Creativity drives innovation, it sparks new thinking about success, it enriches our lives, and it connects us to other human beings. While this is all wonderful and true, schools and educators find great difficulty in figuring out how to get more creative. The subjects that Steve Jobs taught me.
Since creativity is individualized and it expresses itself in each person differently, it becomes difficult for educational systems entrenched in testing and standards to figure out how to unlock creativity in students.
Unfortunately, there is no ideal top-down solution. Luckily, creative people can be cultivated.
Here are the ingredients to cultivate creative and successful people:
Awareness
“If you don’t know where you’re going, the road will take you there.” – the Cheshire Cat to Alice
Any math teacher worth their salt will exclaim, “math is everywhere!” They see geometry on a pool table; they see calculus as a car slows to a stop, they hear it in the toe-tapping of the clarinet player, they see simple math in giving change at the store.
They know what math looks like in real time and real life because they have spent the time studying, practicing, and becoming aware of the many ways math is relatable. Creativity is no different.
A creative teacher is aware of what creativity looks like for themselves as well as how it might manifest itself in others. A creative person always keeps their radar up for “interestingness.”
Steve Jobs taught me … empowerment
Empowerment is not a gift bestowed upon you; empowerment comes from within.
Every individual is filled with greatness and flaws. An empowered person dares to accept themselves for who they are and chooses a growth mindset.
A growth mindset says creativity begets more creativity. A growth mindset says you can learn to be more creative. A growth mindset says you can create conditions in which creativity flourishes.
This is the kicker. It’s not enough to just read about creativity or to scour Pinterest for hours each day. Creativity requires getting in there. It gets messy. It requires some failing forward. That being said, there is real joy in creative practice.
The act of making something, however small the act may be, changes something within. It lights a fire.
One way to start a creative practice is with a little copying. Children do this instinctively. They trace letters; they repeat movie lines (sometimes with perfect voice inflections) and song lyrics.
Copying allows an individual to learn the ropes. Many great painters learned first as understudies, copying their masters.
The next step is a little something called remixing. The art of the remix is to take something that already exists and make it new. This might be a song; it might be blackout poetry, it might be improving on a coffee cup.
Remixing is different than copying in that an individual is adding a little of themselves into the mix. It’s like an homage to the original artist, but with a little kick.
Remixing fuels creativity, and serves to spark others. This is evident in the viral videos that arise each day with parents, co-workers, and children dancing, lip syncing, and singing to remixed works.
The last way a person might practice their creativity is through combining.
A great example of a combination is when Steve Jobs merged the idea of a graphical interface with the idea of a computer as a household appliance. The combination emerged as the wildly successful Macintosh computer.
Combinations are powerful forms of creativity. Unlikely pairings can often yield interesting results. It often takes many trials and failing forward to get the combination just right, but as the saying goes, “there is no glory in practice, but without practice, there is no glory.”
It is said that we are all born creative, but it can get buried and trampled in this modern world. Creativity thrives in classrooms where there is courage, awareness, and a culture that supports creative practice. When people light their internal fires, it serves as a beacon for others.
Everyone wants to be successful, whatever that means for the individual. But so many people struggle with getting there. Often, it’s because they don’t have a clear definition of what success is.
In my journey, I have spent time with entrepreneurs, executives, and billionaires. While they are certainly as diverse in personality as are their versions of success, I have noticed similar attributes. Here are nine you may want to incorporate into your practice.
In Simon Sinek’s popular TED Talk, which remains one of the most viewed ever, he explains how great leaders, like Steve Jobs, the Wright Brothers, and Martin Luther King Jr. succeed where many others failed because they put purpose first. “Start with why,” he says and then moves on to the “what” and the “how.”
That’s generally good advice. The best way to build a great organization is to start with a clear mission rather than a plan or a product. Still, it overlooks another very important truth. Success eventually breeds failure and, when that happens, you must venture into the unknown where your purpose becomes unclear.
That’s a very different type of problem and we need to approach it differently. We have to explore, probe new spaces and make new connections. That’s the only way you will come across the unexpected, random pieces of insight that can take you in a new direction. Starting with the “why” is one path to success, but sometimes it’s better to start with the “why not?”
They focus
So many people try to do too many things. Incredibly successful people have learned they need to focus on doing one or two things well. Then they can leverage those skills to build something great. They can easily team up with others who have complementary skills.
Steve Jobs taught me … to plan
There are many arguments in the entrepreneurial community about the merits of business plans. The mistake in thinking of those opposed to the idea is that a business plan is a hard and fast schematic for the business.
The most successful people always have a plan as a preliminary structure from which they can deviate. The benefit comes not from the plan but rather from the process of planning.
Steve Jobs taught me … to delegate
It’s difficult to obtain success without involving other people. There is little success that can be easily achieved by one person. Life and business are too complex today.
Incredibly successful people constantly engage another talent to help make a vision reality. They master the art of deconstructing process in their brain and sharing it.
Steve Jobs taught me … to learn
I have yet to meet a successful person of any age who believes he or she knows everything. In fact, the most successful people I know strongly believe they know less than most others.
They love to learn and are cognizant of how much knowledge is out there for them to explore. And so they do.
They lead
The world needs followers. Without them, so much would never get done. And certainly, a modicum of success can come to those who are not trailblazers. But incredibly successful people never sit back when they know the opportunity is theirs. They get out in front and bring worthy followers along for the journey.
Steve Jobs taught me … to respect
Incredibly successful people rarely look down on others. This is one of the factors that differentiate a successful person from just a rich one. Most incredibly successful people earn mutual respect based on their behavior and the value they bring to society. They relax and enjoy their success by sharing with humanity.
They evaluate
Many people take things at face value. They don’t question or investigate. Incredibly successful people are naturally curious. They like to dig down into the details to understand how things work and why the world is the way it is. Then they can decide how to engage most effectively.
Just because someone is smart or wealthy doesn’t mean others will want to emulate that person.
Incredibly successful people create an aura of their activity that makes people look up and take notice. Their work is purposeful, righteous, and worthy.
They thank
It takes a lot of support to create success. Incredibly successful people are mindful of showing appreciation sincerely and often to those who help them achieve success. It’s not hard, the thought of leaving someone un-thanked never even enters their mind.
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of the small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
When your intuition is roaring, follow it. Do you often follow your intuition? Do you consider it a success enabler of highly creative leaders? Let’s investigate what these success enablers are.
There is a wide consensus in industry and academia that creativity is a key requisite to master today’s business challenges. A recent CEO survey by IBM showed that creativity is the number one requirement of today’s managers for the next years to come.
To be creative under time pressure, however, is not an easy task. Ideas are often the result of insights or come about through the long incubation and development of dispersed insights. Yet in business contexts, idea generation must work ad-hoc, on-demand and often in group contexts, as diverse and distributed knowledge is needed to solve problems creatively.
Related: The Zen of Abraham Lincolns Leadership Lessons
To facilitate such instant creative idea sessions, various creativity techniques have been developed over the last decades. These techniques are supposed to help professionals be more creative and generate novel and feasible ideas, either individually or in teams.
Still, numerous scientific evaluations show that the most widely used method in business today, brainstorming, is not necessarily an effective tool. Participants may think too far out of the box so that their ideas cannot really be put to use, as they are not sufficiently related to the problem at hand.
Based on experience we have defined 9 success enablers of highly creative leaders, as discussed below:
Creative leaders … committed senior leadership
Leadership depends on senior leadership for support. Even more so when you add creativity to the equation. This support helps remove barriers to enhance organizational creativity.
While the truly inspired and creative may break through the barriers to success, an environment where help supports organizational creativity may reap benefits from many surprising sources and not just the Einstein’s of the world. All leaders own the role to remove barriers.
Examples of creative leaders … building a community
We all need to find people that have common interests and thinking. Connecting to others helps us uncover phenomena, patterns, and solutions more quickly— and in ways, we might not imagine on our own.
Additionally, creative ideas have a difficult time thriving in isolation. Your community can inspire, ask, plant seeds, bear witness, provoke, acknowledge and nurture—all elements of a collaborative venture.
The bottom line: Our ideas need communities of contributors, and we need each other. The more connections we have, the more powerful our creativity becomes. Building communities is a critical success enabler.
Highly creative leaders and curiosity
Curiosity is the cornerstone of learning and creativity. Hands down the most important to creativity in our opinion. Think about answering these curiosity enablers: When did we stop asking questions?
What happens to our habits of inquiry and knowledge-seeking as we get older? What barriers shut down curiosity, and what reignites it?
In order to reclaim curiosity as a collaborative habit—and model the way for others—it’s necessary to embark upon a personal investigation to unravel perceptions and conventions that get in the way of a curious, open mindset and enable it.
Open communication and information sharing
Open communication and information sharing are another of the essential success enablers. Our understanding of organizational decisions and policies, opportunities to voice concerns, and a sense of ‘being heard’ all enhance leadership creativity.
For me, one of the barriers to creative collaboration is an environment where people undermine each other, information is not shared, and there is no credit given for creativity. It is essential to have access to information as creativity is often spurred on by hitchhiking on new ideas that flow past the alert mind–often converting them to a new situation or application.
Reflection is always wise.
Reflection
We need leaders to engage in continuous reflection, be aware and open, and challenge their assumptions. And certainly, gain from continuous learning. On a collective level, we want leaders to share and support while trusting and being vulnerable as part of a creative journey within a supportive community.
Combine and transform
To be a successful leader and thinker, you need to also be an accomplished learner. By participating in combining and transforming, we must recognize the importance of acknowledging and recognizing those individuals and works that have influenced our thinking. And learn from them.
Practicing the habit of combining and transforming is about embracing a new form of learning and finding your creative voice. It allows us to form powerful connections with other people and to engage in social learning.
Empowerment
The empowered have much freedom and authority to initiate change. Some gave it to themselves while others waited for it to be given. Often many see the anxiety that at times accompanies empowerment. Ideally, the empowerment of people results in increased initiative, involvement, enthusiasm, innovation and speed.
Failing forward is a key habit of creativity. Failing fast, failing intelligently, and learning from those failures makes room for imperfection, iteration, and experiencing joy in the process.
One of the ways to practice failure is through a “crash and burn” exercise. A crash and burn is an attempt to do something with a 5 percent or less chance of success. It might be sending an email to someone who is famous and asking for help on a project or attempting to sew a dress even though you don’t know how to sew on a button.
This exercise allows the learner to stretch their comfort zone and pay attention to their failure response. By practicing failing well and observing our inner dialogue when doing so, we recondition and empower ourselves. We get a chance to examine and shore up our identity, take risks, and become better versions of ourselves.
A creative solution
The need for creativity in leadership requires innovative solutions. Creativity is not a singular skill that can be developed in one way or even in several ways. As leaders, we must create the conditions that allow creativity to flourish; keeping in mind that creativity will manifest itself differently in everyone.
One way for leaders to learn how to create these conditions is to develop a mindset that allows them to be aware of their own creative abilities. This then creates conditions for a ripple effect of awareness and appreciation of creativity in others.
The bottom line
“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
For some reason, many of us have been conditioned to be more afraid of failure than we are of inaction. However, failure, in addition to being inherently valuable as a learning process, contains within it the chance of success. And no matter how small that chance is, it’s better than the chances of success when we choose not to even try.
My journey as both a learner and leader has shown me that those that are able to interact and manage their learning environment so much better as leaders than those who don’t.
I believe there is a direct link to creativity in this relationship. Building on it greatly strengthens the highly creative leader’s success enablers.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of great leadership. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to lead. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, history may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
10 Leadership Competencies You Should Not Live Without
Building Collaboration and Sharing Skills in your Staff
How to Create the Best Leadership Accountability
The Zen of Abraham Lincolns Leadership Lessons
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
