How to Overcome our Taste to Become Really Creative

Creative work is tough and it takes a lot of time to reach the point of true creativity. Most of all we need to overcome our taste.

Ira Glass creativityI like very much this quote from Ira Glass. It is very deep about our taste and the work required to overcome it:  “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.

We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Yes it will take lots of time and work to really become creative, and so many people drop it before. What about you?

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Why Discoveries Are Made by Questioning Answers

I like this quote: “Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers” —Bernard Haisch.

question the answersQuestioning answers is a great tool in many instances in life, and it is true that it sometimes leads to deep insights. It is too easy to be led by the soothing sound of answers delivered with assurance. Answers reflect the common knowledge, the knowledge that the person talking wants you to share.

Question answers more often. It will lead you to discover new areas of thought. It is a great skill. It is a great creative tool too!

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What the AlphaGo experience teaches us

The world witness with awe how the world champion of Go, Lee Sedol got defeated earlier this year by a machine, AlphaGo. This historic event (go is apparently much more difficult than chess for a machine – a machine beat the chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, 19 years ago!) has generated a lot of comments and controversies.

alphagoAn interesting segment of the comments is that the machine won using strategies that no human had used before, and some found beautiful (see this Wired article). Interestingly enough, quickly however (after 3 stunning defeats though) the human Lee Sedol was able to take the machine to its own game. The graphic analysis of what happened is exposed in this great article very worth reading on Quartz ‘Google’s AI won the game Go by defying millennia of basic human instinct‘.

Is AlphaGo actual Artificial Intelligence? There are even some articles denying it like Why AlphaGo is not AI.

My take on this momentous event is that it shows again that the machine can help us develop new abilities and look at things differently. It probably still cannot equate the humans in learning ability, but does provoke thought supports us by finding new ways to consider problems. And that is possibly the main message from this experiment.

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Why We Should Consider a Situation to be a Dilemma When in Doubt

Following on our post explaining ‘Why We Are Moving From a World of Problems to a World of Dilemmas‘, let’s give ourselves some guidance when we can’t really be sure that what we are facing is a problem or a dilemma.

trolley-problemThe rule is simple – in doubt, treat the situation as a dilemma.

This will force a much wider range of considerations and solutions, and will probably be more right. Consider a situation to be a problem only when it is clearly delineated and where linear thinking appears to be applicable. All the rest should be treated as dilemmas.

Dilemmas implies choice, it implies regret and it generally requires prompt action to be released. It requires character more than analytic thought. It is harder but nowadays it is often more useful to consider situations as dilemmas rather than problems.

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Why Dealing with Complexity Requires Non-Linear Thinking

Managing complex situations cannot be dealt with linear thinking. Another sort of thinking is required: non-linear thinking, also called lateral thinking. The thing is, our education is very much oriented towards linear, inductive thinking. We definitely to up our collective game in lateral thinking.

complexity nonlinearLateral thinking is tough because it is related to creativity, “thinking out of the box”, and taking leaps and bounds beyond logical induction. This leads to many dead ends, failures and mistakes. But that is required to find a way in the ever-more complex world.

Staying with logical, linear, inductive thinking can only keep us within the same context that we are in. If we are to find disruptive solutions, we definitely need to adopt lateral thinking. When do you start upping your own game?

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How You Can’t Be Creative Without Taking Some Risk

Being creative entails some kind of risk. But further than that, it is not possible to be creative if you don’t take risks.

creativity taking risksCreativity requires by definition being unconventional, exploring new spaces and ways of doing stuff. It entails risks. It means frequent failure, and pivots and new tries. It is necessarily messy.

Is it possible to “manage” risks while being creative? Yes, and that is the job of e.g. car designers, who develop concepts and test them with members of the public. There is a fine line between managing creativity and killing it, and many organizations play with that line.

Being creative is a risky business and you must be ready for what it entails – rejection, failure, agony over concepts and ideas. Yet it is worth it. Are you ready?

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Why We Should Focus on Our Energy Level

More and more I find that focusing on my personal energy level is the right way to go. “The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.” writes  Scott Adams in his book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘.

energy_not_timeMy energy level is directly correlated with whether I am keen to perform certain tasks or engage in certain work. Also, it is clearly relevant to stop working on something when energy is low: production will anyway be poor too!… Better do something to regenerate at that time!

Managing one’s energy level through the day is also important, and it is where what we eat and drink (like coffee) comes in to make sure we keep the relevant level.

I also struggle with a particular energy-killer: jet lag. That does not help because it is difficult to remain adjusted to the local natural rhythm, creating unexpected energy troughs and highs.

At the end, managing our energy and responding to its variations are probably an essential skill in the modern world. And you, how do you manage your energy?

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How It Can Sometimes Be Difficult to Disrupt Traditional Industries

Talk about disruption of whole industries by the internet is everywhere. Yet that does not work out all the time. The dabbawalas are a famous organization in Mumbai delivering every day to workers in town-center meals prepared by their family in the outskirts – all with a very low percentage of error. As reported by Bloomberg ‘Startups Haven’t Replaced India’s 19th Century Food Delivery Service‘, many start-ups have attempted to displace them in the past years and they have all failed.

Dabbawala in action at a station in Mumbai
Dabbawala in action at a station in Mumbai

This goes to show that it is not so easy to disrupt traditional processes even in the area of distribution, in particular when cultural aspects need to be taken into account (Indian workers seem to largely prefer home-made meals, possibly on hygiene grounds and/or family pressure! – and they appear reluctant to order meals from restaurants).

As a hypothesis for this interesting failure, the fact that those startups have tried to replace at the same time the distribution system and the sourcing of the product. This might have worked in some instances (Uber, Airbnb) but that remains a very rare occurrence.

This reminds us that we need to always remain very humble when it comes to disrupting any kind of industry or process!

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How to Manage Self-Doubt When in a Leadership Position

Following up on our post on ‘How Leadership is a Relationship‘ on how you can’t be a leader without a relationship with others, one of the quotes from Barry Posner’s talk was that “Leadership begins with belief in yourself“.

leadershipNow this made me think about the importance of self-confidence in leadership. There is an issue though – in my experience, it is difficult to reach a 100% self-confidence, but in any case at least a significant amount of self-confidence must be projected out to the team for leadership to work.

How can we manage self-doubt at the same time we need to project self-confidence? It might be one of hardest issues in leadership, in particular in situations where failure is quite possible (e.g. in a startup or during some experimental project).

Authenticity is, I believe, the solution. Authenticity with oneself (acknowledging one’s doubts), and authenticity with the team (acknowledging uncertainties). However it is always a difficult path to be sufficiently open while at the same time not be discouraging. The solutions lies in the quality of the personal relationship with the team, that can acknowledge difficulties.

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How Powerful Algorithms That Shape Our Lives Still Rely on Human Creativity

The great Quartz post ‘The magic that makes Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists so damn good‘ gives a wonderful insight of the positive brought to us by advanced algorithms and basic Artifical Intelligence.

spotifyIt goes into the details of how Spotify proposes new playlists based on one’s own preference, the playlists of other members with close preferences, and advanced algorithmic to bring all together into a wonderful proposal of new music tracks.

What I find extremely interesting is how the basis for the value that is created is actually human-produced: the playlists of other people. The algorithm does not find new tracks or discover new musicians by itself. It relies on the curiosity, the knowledge of its members. The algorithm exploits the community effect to create value for all members, leveraging the efforts and chance encounters of all subscribers.

Spotify is also using deep learning—a technique for recognizing patterns in enormous amounts of data, with powerful computers that are “trained” by humans—to improve its Discover Weekly picks“. That’s where AI comes in to further improve the algorithm. But still at the core are the lists of others and how they interact with them to fine-tune their preferences.

All those algorithms enhance the power of the community but can’t replace it. All original creative data is still created by humans. Algorithms are still only powerful crutches to create value in our lives putting together all these individual contributions.

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Why Profit Will Increasingly Be At the Edge of the Existing

In a market-exchange economy, profit is made at the margins” writes Jeremy Rifkin in his interesting book ‘The Zero Marginal Cost Society‘. His argument is that the natural trend for commodity products’ price is to tend to zero; and this trend has significantly accelerated in the last decades.

Esoko add
A great product creating high value and profits, at the edge of the existing

As more and more of the goods and services that make up the economic life of society edge toward near zero marginal cost and become almost free, the capitalist market will continue to shrink into more narrow niches where profit-making enterprises survive only at the edges of the economy, relying on a diminishing consumer base for very specialized products and services“.

The model where you copy the existing is less and less sustainable. If you want to create value, and hence profit, place yourself at the edge. How does your current strategy fare?

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Why Learning Comes from Giving

For a long time I have found that the best way of learning is teaching. It is a bit of a double-edge sword of course (you need to know a minimum to be able to teach) but the preparation and the performance of the course really nail the knowledge down. And the questions and challenges from the students do help light up some obscure corners as well.

teachingRoland Barth, a specialist of school learning, is quoted to say: “The most powerful form of learning, the most sophisticated form of staff development, comes not from listening to the good words of others but from sharing what we know with others. Learning comes more from giving than from receiving. By reflecting on what we do, by giving it coherence, and by sharing and articulating our craft, knowledge, we make meaning, we learn.

I love that sentence: Learning comes more from giving than from receiving.

This statement is actually potentially much more far-reaching than just the issue of teaching. It applies throughout our life: we can’t learn without some exchange. We can’t learn without giving. And it is those lessons that matter.

Quote extracted from the book ‘Optimizing the Power of Action Learning‘ by Michael Marquardt

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