Category: creativity

How to Benefit of Reality Distortion Fields While Avoiding Total Disconnect

Reality Distortion Fields are essential for visionary leaders like Steve Jobs, but they can also be dangerous if too strong – reality often catches up rather quickly when ignored for too long. This is in particular the case for distortions of time (the most common maybe).

distortion in timeThere is thus a fine balance to be maintained so as to allow visionary jump forward while at the same time, retaining sufficient connection with reality.

It is very possible to keep a moderate reality distortion field, which most people do even if unaware, and sufficient realism too. The issue is when the distortion strength becomes significant.

It is then easier to have this balance maintained by a team rather by a single individual. The visionary leader with his distorted vision of reality must then be paired with a down-to-earth realistic counterpart, and sufficient trust must exist between those individuals, which must rely on mutual respect. Sometimes leaders themselves must try to maintain this balance, but this often leads to unease and sometimes to accidents.

Strong reality distortion fields are essential for creativity and for leaps forward. They need to be managed and counterbalanced for a healthy progression.

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Why Inspiration is only for Amateurs

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work” writes painter Chuck Close. I think it is actually a great quote about creativity, and against naivety.

inspiration_amateursThe people that are the most creative are those that devote themselves to a creative discipline, which simply involves a lot of work. And this discipline is also the only remedy known against Resistance, which will try to impede you of being creative and break new ground.

Chuck Close continues: “And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.”

Because connections will only be created if you invest yourself in the work. They won’t happen by themselves.

Read the full Chuck Close interview in ‘Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating‘, a great paper on many things related to creativity.

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How Social Ratings Determine Our Choices

In a well-known but scary experiment on the music market, Duncan Watts and a team of Princeton researchers showed in 2006 that the popularity of songs was only very partially related to their appeal and quality – most of it is influenced by our peers’ rating.

Ratings: What drives our choices?
Ratings: What drives our choices?

In this experiment, people were either able to see or not the ratings from others. This created very significant differences in behavior. When rating was present, there was a big “luck premium”: whoever had some good ratings first would emerge as the uncontested winner at the end.

Hence, funny articles such as ‘Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?‘. As mentioned in this paper, “The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory.” We come back to one of the main characteristics of the Collaborative Age.

There is no way to predict the popularity of your creation. But early support and excellent ratings from your tribe might be a good place to start!

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How a Reality Distortion Field is Essential for Visionary Leaders

I was struck how Steve Job’s “reality distortion field” was repeatedly highlighted in the Walter Isaacson biography. In several instances this drove actions that were at odds with acknowledged possibilities. It was definitely a major source of creativity. This capability also influenced significantly people around him.

Steve_JobsThis particular capability was quoted as a strength that allowed leaps of faith and moving teams to achieve impossible feats. It was also identified as a weakness as Steve Jobs was unable to process information that was contradictory to his intent or position (sometimes indeed, reality did not bend to his will!).

I have personally observed that visionary leaders do generally possess this reality distortion field capability (and the related influencing capabilities). It is often the only way to move the team. And it is often a visible distinction between the “bureaucrat” leader that remains withing the current reality and the “visionary” leader that can jump in new reality fields.

And it is sometimes difficult to withstand the attraction of the reality distortion field when one is around a strong one.

Measuring the strength of the reality distortion field of those people around you is indeed a good way to measure whether people are visionary.

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Why Being a True Artist Requires Being a Sales Person As Well

If you are a creator or artist, marketing and selling is as important as creating. The artist that only concentrates on his art does not contribute to the world, because the world does not know what he does!

salesman“Art, without distribution and discovery, moves nobody. Did it ever exist? […]Will it make an impact? […]  Thought, if not written down and shared with others, changes nothing. Does it matter? ” writes Scott Belsky in ‘Make Your Mark: The Creative’s Guide to Building a Business with Impact‘.

He continues: “Creation must be made accessible for consumption. This is your real job. Execution, distribution, packaging, marketing, messaging, strategy, leadership…”

This is a real challenge for many creators in many fields (this includes artists, scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, etc.). Sometimes the best solution is to work as a team, with one focusing on creation and the other on creating and selling.

But the main lesson remains: creating the most beautiful, earth shaking idea is worthless if you don’t sell it to the world. Don’t believe in hidden genius anymore. Genius includes communicating to the world.

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Why We Need Intuition More Than Ever Before

Intuition is one of the most important of our capabilities. In our ever more complex world, it becomes indispensable. As Albert Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift”.

EinsteinIntuition is at the source of creativity. Creativity is the hard currency of the Collaborative Age. Value and compensation will increasingly be for creativity, while the application of rationality – processes – will become a commodity (and often taken up by robots).

What Einstein highlights is how much we still tend to hide the inputs from intuition when we describe for example how we developed an idea or worked on any problem. Yes, the final output might appear rational in hindsight, but the insight is often pure intuition.

Learn to respect and develop your intuition, because that’s what is going to make the difference in the Collaborative Age.

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Three Unexpected Issues of the Collaborative Age

In a remarkable talk, Scott Belsky (Head of Behance, the leading online platform for creatives to showcase their creative work), shares some very interesting findings about the operation of the Collaborative Age’s internet.

scott_belsky_quoteHe initially supposed that:

  • careers would be more independent and distributed
  • people would be far more collaborative
  • opportunity would be increasingly determined by merit, creating a new meritocracy.

Practically, through the platform he founded, he found that meritocracy, innovation and access to opportunity are not natural on the web. In particular:

  • niche communities tend to be created which limit the ‘long tail effect’ and prevents encounter-driven creativity
  • the critical mass concept for rating work does not fully work, and a lot of creative work gets commoditized for a low price (e.g. logo creation)
  • there is a very widespread lack of attribution on the web, which limits the value of creative people’s portfolio and the leverage they can get from it.

It is not yet clear if these issues are structural issues of the Collaborative Age, or if they are transition issues as the Fourth Revolution unfolds.

Listen to his talk here:

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Why You Need to Give Yourself Permission for New Ideas

“New ideas won’t appear if you don’t have permission within yourself” – Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, quoted in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman. He continues “When I was a VP at Oracle, I took off to Hawaii for a month just to relax, and when I did that it opened up my career to new ideas, perspectives, and directions.”

walkingYou need to give yourself permission and time to release your creativity. This is often related to giving yourself permission to disconnect and be creative. This might then take the shape of a walk, or of a couple of days off, undisturbed by the concerns of your usual occupation.

I can testify that my most creative moments have been related to a change of scenery and some time to think and develop new ideas.

So, if you want to be creative, create the space for it. You can’t find and explore new ideas if you stay in your daily grind and don’t spare time and space for this essential activity. It is not easy to give ourselves permission to do that because we all run very busy lives. But essential for change and your personal growth as well.

When will you give yourself permission for some time and space off?

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How Your Attention Determines Your Reality

“How we deploy our attention determines what we see” – quoted from Anne Treisman in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman. A more poplar quote is attributed to Star Wars Jedi masters: “Your focus is your reality“.

focus-jediControlling our own attention is an extremely important skill, in particular today as multiple technologies increasingly compete to grab our attention almost every minute of our waked life.

As our perception is filtered more or less automatically by our learned categorization. Focusing our attention is the only way that allows us to see beyond our learned filters to discover new things. Thus, attention is the only for us to grow and develop intellectually and spiritually.

Your reality is determined by where you focus your attention. Develop your attention skill. It needs to be trained like a muscle. A simple exercise is how long you can concentrate on a task or a book without looking at your messages or your emails. Remove unwanted notifications from your life, and grow your reality!

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What Collaborative Age Education Should Concentrate On

Education requires a major revamp nowadays with the Fourth Revolution. We don’t need anymore the Industrial Age schooling that was designed to educate the resources needed by the industry (in summary, compliant and literate).

Creativity-SchoolingCollaborative Age requires people that are collaborative, creative and know how to deal with the vast amounts of data and information available at everybody’s fingertips. This excellent paper from ParisTech review ‘Education Series – 2 – New knowledge, new know-how: skills for the 21st Century‘ summarizes some essential traits of future education:

 

 

  • Managing data to find useful information
  • Maintaining and developing creativity
  • Navigating diversified knowledge spheres

I think this paper forgets about a very important aspect of future education, which are the soft skills require to collaborate effectively. Industrial Age education promoted individual excellence (for example though the typical exams); Collaborative Age education needs to promote teamwork and team success.

In any case, “Developing a culture like this requires that the learners be not afraid to fail. […] If you want to discover new ideas, you must be prepared to take risks and to make mistakes. […] In the same vein, schools today do not value differences. In many instances, there is only one right answer to a question, whereas a creative approach enables students to propose new answers to a given problem, seen from a totally different angle or point of view. Conformity must be abandoned and intellectual curiosity stimulated“.

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Why the Law of Financial Viability is Important

When starting a new pursuit or a new venture, it is important to remember ‘The Law of Financial Viability’: “When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on” – writes Cal Newport in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

cash-paymentHence it is essential to determine as quickly as possible (based on a demonstrator or Minimum Viable Product as they say in the Lean Startup movement) whether people are really ready to pay for what you want to offer. That is also applicable to a career change – are people willing to hire you?

And there is a significant distance between people saying that that they’s be interested and they would be happy to pay – and people really, actually paying.

One of the interesting consequences of this observation is that it is far better to have the first customers pay a little something rather than giving for free: it will prove that people are happy to reach their wallet, which is a significant psychological hurdle; and as an associated benefit it will force you to get your payment and invoicing processes up and running.

To summarize, Cal quotes Derek Sivers as saying: “When it comes to decisions affecting your core career, money remains an effective judge of value. If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea”

Demonstrate the value of your idea by effectively getting money for it.

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Why We Need to Set Limits Before Liberating our Creativity

Many authors state that creativity will be enhanced by accepting limitations, such as for example on a physical limitation on the format, size, number of words, or on the method and means.

enemy of art: absence of limitationsI certainly believe so, because it enables us to focus without having our mind wandering endlessly into the infinite possibilities to express what we need to bring to the world. It also creates a welcome challenge that is more conductive to put us in a state of Flow.

The best artists (which is a denomination I like to use for all of us engaged in creative endeavors) then manage to transcend the self-imposed limitations to create awesome art.

Let us reverse then the statement. It is essential to set a number of limits before we release our creativity. Going further, creative endeavor won’t work before you’ve set these limits. And it is important then not to change the rules of the game in the midst of creation.

If you find that you have difficulties to be creative, maybe you should first review the limitations you’ve set and check whether you should not add a few.

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