Creativity and the damage!!
Creativity is the most appreciable, sought after, positive trait anyone can possess. Some also swear by it being innate and non-transferable. But, in any sense can creativity be damaging!?
Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else has thought.
- Albert Einstein
The dictionary defines “creativity” as,
“The use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness”.
2010: -
When touchscreens mobile devices started to take over the world in a major way, the idea of having a mass-following and achieving that by posting content regularly over a public medium / channel may have been thought as a strategy that was limited to a handful of corporates esp. operating in the Education / EdTech verticals.
2018 and beyond: -
Take a good look around yourself today as to how social media / social networking has evolved changing the world around us. Literally nobody in the early 2000s would have even visualised that in a few years the user adoption rates would be blown beyond proportions in getting so overwhelmingly segmented & widespread, that it would lead to an increasingly large no. of people pivoting on creating fresh quality content online and some even earn a living through it.
It is again thanks to the corporate space, the start-up ecosystem that kicked off in the Silicon Valley back in the 1999 - 2000s (initially with the dotcoms though) and spilled over far and wide, today there is an explicably increasing onus on "creativity" with an exodus of jobs and roles being created around it.
Talking of "creativity", one can’t condone Dietrich and his 4 distinct processing models of what comprises the "Knowledge Domain".
He managed to bucket different types of thinkers into each of the 4 quadrants representative of characteristics / traits they carry. Both Dietrich and others who have researched this topic created the following visual to represent these four quadrants.
Image Credits: https://study.com/cimages/multimages/16/screen_shot_2018-04-20_at_1.35.49_pm.png
*Creativity* is the ability to seamlessly spawn ideas.
Creativity often needs a lot of bundling & packaging to make it usable.
*Creative thinking* is a skill which often leads to unearthing magnificent ideas whilst also finding multiple streams of applications.
Creative thinking is a directly marketable skill & eye-popping.
Delving a little deeper, Creative thinking can further be classified into types based on their inherent scope and application: -
Divergent Thinking – the act of exploring to find many solutions
Lateral Thinking – the ability to come up with out-of-the-box, innovative ideas
Aesthetic Thinking – the knowledge that leads to creation of art and beauty
Systems Thinking – the skill to synthesize, congregate several elements or building blocks of those ideas into one single entity
Inspirational Thinking – the ideas that seem to pop into your head from nowhere (can be a Godsend at times)
Image Credits: https://medium.com/@adamjorlen/five-types-of-creative-thinking-3f734a427f7c
But *creativity* can be damaging!!
Yes, I said that. Let me elaborate.
Creativity has a dark side as well.
- Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (HBR - Harvard Business Review)
Some excerpts from HBR article by Tomas:
Creativity often requires the person to possess the ability to suppress irrelevant thoughts and inappropriate ideas. And creative thinkers also tend to have poorer impulse-control. The very thinking patterns that define the creative process and help lead to original thinking can have a maladaptive side as well.
More often than not for cofounders, product leaders, product managers, it is widely considered to be a great asset if the person is known to be deeply creative. But, in a parallel vein that very asset could be detrimental and tough to discern.
So, that is an instance of a strength turning into a horrible weakness.
A real-world analogy: -
Consider a sketch-artist who is impeccable in his craft and can sketch comic strips to absolute perfection.
Image Credits: https://www.tintin.com/en/essentials
(Sorry! I had to quote my favourite comic character of all time here. Bit of a binge!)
If such a sketch-artist has to think about monetising his craft by creating products / services and spin a business model around it looking to appeal largely to the masses, he would need to step out of his comfort zone – i.e., his creative space & get down to reality, face up with a lot of facts: -
What is my market, who are my target audience (demographics)?
What other segments could use my sketches so that I could focus on widening my market scope?
How are people accepting my sketches- do they really like it?
What are few factors that draw them to it?
What is it that they like & what is it they don't?
How can I effectively consume feedback looking to factor it into improving my sketches & improve my product offering?
Can I find a viral topic / create a new character to pivot on?
So, essentially the creativity has to halt for a bit / take a breather and get real in assessing the situation based on the market's / user's responses. And, a person who is a slave to his creative self, more often than not would find it very difficult to achieve this feat. ultimately leading to that magnificent brilliance going unnoticed / wasted.
A few learnings: -
Are you a co-founder? Does the above narrative regarding comics sound peculiarly familiar!?
Here are some steps that might help you counter those problems: -
completely accept creativity as your forte & your emotions towards the craft
scope & understand the void to fill in terms of inducing a different perspective
look for partners / hire a suitable cofounder who specialises particularly in growing businesses / products
spend ample time over spelling out & dividing your responsibilities clearly
work in tandem collaborating seamlessly as a team & towards a common goal
Conclusion:
Success is illusional, stop pondering over and instead get pragmatic by concentrating on the process aiming to continuously improve yourself & taking small achievable steps towards it getting better by 1% every day.
Ref. & Further reading:
https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-dark-side-of-creativity
https://medium.com/@adamjorlen/five-types-of-creative-thinking-3f734a427f7c
https://uxplanet.org/science-backed-ways-to-boost-creativity-28b140b420bc?gi=4993e8f429f4