CHAPTER 5
The Brain and Heart on a Collision Course of Prosperity
T HE DEFINING FACTOR of the next generation in business will be established by companies and employees who learn how to balance the power of creativity with the relentless quest for the analytical. Above all else, this is the plain and simple truth of the arrival of the twenty-first-century creative economy: companies that are able to embrace a new way of thinking creatively will thrive, and those stuck in the analytical past will die. This movement is at its historical apogee, and adjusting accordingly has never been more important. As the global economy becomes more fluid and technology advances at breakneck speeds, this is the time to invest in joining the heart and the mind—the creative and the analytical—in ways that will increase value and make your product or service relevant in the new economy.
That all starts within us. As we learned in earlier chapters in this book, we have been bestowed with one of the most amazing devices the world has ever seen, and it’s not something that we can go out and buy. It comes part and parcel with each human being on earth. It’s the human brain. It has the most incredible ability to allow our actions and thoughts to become truly balanced and harmonious; we just have to relearn how to do it. We are all born with an innate ability to balance both the creative mind and the analytical mind to achieve what we are all capable of, yet most of us have not even begun to scratch the surface of our capabilities. Like an iceberg where you can see only a small tip above the water, our potential has been shrunk to a representation of our analytical only selves. It’s time to show what is beneath the surface—the creative side—and reveal our whole selves to make our businesses and the world a better place.
Let’s talk anatomically for a second to understand how creativity works. The mind is separated into two divisions. The left hemisphere deals mostly with issues of the analytical, including numbers, charts, measurements, and precision. The right hemisphere mostly deals with the realm of creativity, including music, questioning, dreaming, and envisioning. There is some crossover between the two divisions, but still you must choose carefully and work hard to make a harmonious balance. When operating in this balance, the human mind is the best computer ever. Its potential is truly limitless. Sadly, though, most of us do not use our thinking potential in full balance. Instead, we’ve built up the analytical side so much that we’ve disabled The Creator Mindset from the start. This can be fixed, but first we need to understand the errors that got us here:
1. We have forgotten how to use the creative side of the brain to solve problems. We are out of touch with what we were in touch with when we were children: the ability to solve problems creatively before any other skill set emerged. Almost like a memory that has become fragmented as we age, creativity has become foggy as we have grown older. As a result, creative solutions we had when younger seem foreign to us because we have forgotten how to use these innate creative tools. We must remember that these creative tools are as basic to the human experience as breathing air and eating food.
2. We have learned to turn down the volume on the creative side of our thinking process. We aren’t listening to ourselves even though our brains are forever trying. Have you ever told yourself lies such as “It’s just a midlife crisis,” “This is not reasonable,” “No one would ever go for that,” “That’s not mature,” and “This idea is too far-fetched”? Most of us have, and in doing so we have become our own worst enemy. We are full of self-doubt that we need to conquer (we’ll talk about this in Chapter 15).
Our schooling is partially to blame for the dominance of the analytical mindset. We tend to like things we can see, things that can be expressed in numbers. Don’t fall for that fallacy. The fact that something can be quantified doesn’t mean that we have captured a sense of what it is. It is at best only part of the story. At worst, quantifying something will only assign a number or measurement that is meaningless while ignoring a host of wealth that is to be found in the creative view, which unlocks powerful emotional intelligence. More on this in a bit.
Our workplace is also partially to blame for the buildup of the analytical mindset. We think with spreadsheets and charts and reports and profit and loss statements as the guiding light. We think that someone needs to show up in person and sit at a desk; because we can “see” that someone is working, we deduce that that person must be working. The business world has taught us to see these analytical things as the bible of our business while ignoring the emotional intelligence and soft skills that truly makes a difference in a product, service, or career. It is out of creativity that we strengthen and grow our emotional intelligence, and from that emotional intelligence we develop a sense of empathy, understanding, fairness, and connection to a greater cause. Using this newfound emotional intelligence in all aspects of your business from hiring to strategy will yield a profound shift in balance from the analytical to the creative.
Although there are many things to blame for the loss of creativity today, ultimately we are the ones to blame for this departure from creativity. We stopped listening to what we know we need to listen to. We see empathy as weakness in business. We see passion as being too assertive or aggressive in business. Women who speak up are called “bossy” or worse. Men who are assertive are seen as “aggressive” or worse. We see kindness as superfluous and redundant for the bottom line. Perhaps the saddest part is that whenever thoughts come up that really excite us or really get us thinking differently, we talk negatively about them and put them under lock and key. The Creator Mindset is trying to speak to us to show us a better path—a path of possibility—yet we shut it down.
It’s because of this ignoring, forgetting, and putting down of the creative memory that our brains develop a highly unbalanced physical structure. Without operating both sides of our brains together, we will never be able to work to our fullest potential and instead get stuck wondering why we are not fulfilled.
Not balancing analytics with creativity is one of the reasons people are so unhappy all around the globe. We find ourselves always searching for that next “something”: a new diet, exercise routine, or wardrobe. We’re searching for something externally and ignoring the fact that the true path to success lies within each and every one of us from birth. We were born with it; we just need to learn how to operate it all over again.
I’d like for you to do another exercise. Start by thinking of something a bit differently than you are used to doing. Take the top right corner of this page and fold it in. Take the tip of the page and fold it back so that it makes a little triangle where the page number is. It should only be an inch or so—not too big. Now look at the page very carefully. The folded tip that you just made represents The Creator Mindset. It’s tiny and is drowned out by the rest of the page. It even looks like a minor anecdote, a dog-eared page in a bunch of pages in a book. Now look at the rest of the page, the part that is not folded. That represents the analytical bandwidth that you have developed in your lifetime. It doesn’t look too proportional, does it? It is a bit out of whack. The analytical is almost the entire page, whereas the creative is just a small corner on the page. Taking a look at this visual should give you an immediate impression of what is actually going on biologically. But the good news is that there is hope because the dog-eared portion of the page is still part of the page—they are one and the same. The fabric of the creative and that of the analytical are forever two sides of the same coin, or in this case two parts of the same page. They are grafted from one sheet of paper, as you can see in the triangle you have made. Just as easily, you can lift the little dog-ear you made and make a bigger triangle across the page. You can do exactly the same thing when it comes to your Creator Mindset. But for right now, I would like for you to rip out this tiny triangle and keep it somewhere where you can see it. Tape it to your computer monitor or put it by your nightstand. Each time you are about to think with the analytical mind only, it will be there to serve as a reminder to think with your whole potential instead.
SCIENTISTS HAVE BEEN WORKING on what they call artificial intelligence in computers since the dawn of computing.1 It seems that technology is meant to replicate human behavior at all costs. The scientists want to create something that looks human, thinks like a human, and even talks like a human. Some of their results have been impressive, but only when it comes to analytical processing. Sure, a computer can process far more numbers than any human can. Its ability to be analytical is second to none. Computers can look for patterns in numbers, sequences in numbers, and the organization of numbers far better than we humans can.2 But as amazing as the progress of computers has been, what is interesting to me is what a computer is not good at doing.
A computer is not good at replicating the creative side of the brain—at all. It struggles to deal with the creative side in the way that humans do without thinking about it. In fact, even at our turned-down volume of creativity, a computer still isn’t a match. Creative attributes such as empathy, understanding, hope, aspiration, sympathy, passion, and creativity among many, many others define the human experience, and they are proving very difficult for computers to duplicate.
Scientists have started working on ways to make AI seem more “human.”3,4 They have tried to synthesize attributes of the creative mind such as forethought, concentration, kindness, justice, and love with little success. These attributes are part and parcel of the experience of being human. This is who we are. It’s what gives our lives meaning.
That’s why creativity is so important. It’s got a finger on the nerve of what really matters to us humans. Using what really matters in your everyday business will build a powerful approach to an ever-changing marketplace. Whereas analytics and technology change from day to day, the principles of The Creator Mindset are forever fixed as the building blocks of who we are. That’s what makes The Creator Mindset so important in all that you do: creativity will always allow one person to connect with another in meaningful ways. Imagine how powerful that can be for your business: staff member to staff member, business to business, business to customer, customer to customer. The number of tools at your disposal while you are thinking analytically is finite, numbered, limited, but the number of tools at your disposal while you are thinking creatively is endless.
To encourage creativity in any organization, we need to understand how human attributes work. We can learn more about this with another activity. This time, I want you to take a pen and write down in the margin what is the most important thing to you right now in your business or career. What do you really need or treasure? What is the most important thing to you right at this minute? There is no right answer, but your response needs to be deeply personal and reflective of where you are right now. Not tomorrow, not in 10 years, but where you are right this minute. Trust me, this will change throughout your life and sometimes even throughout your day.
Now I want you to take whatever you have written down and begin to look at it with The Creator Mindset. Can money being important to you right now actually mean that security is important? What about access to a particular market? Does that really mean that empathy with your niche is paramount? Really think about your answer and find the creative human element that brings new opportunity and defines things in a way that is accessible to your innate emotional intelligence. It is the key that unlocks the door, because when we stop to define our lives only in the analytical mindset and start to examine them with The Creator Mindset, we begin to use the emotional intelligence part of our brain. As a result, we activate a holistic solution that is not derived from the outdated theories of yesterday. Our mind will prepare a custom solution for a problem, but it cannot do that if we don’t change the paradigm of how we think. Turn up the volume now on that part of your brain. Do it while analyzing a particular issue with your business. Force yourself to see it differently. It is trying to tell you what to do and suggest a solution. Don’t be afraid of the emotional intelligence it generates. It will become more and more familiar to you as you remember its power. It will enable you to connect with your staff and your customers. It will enable you to grow in ways you have never imagined. It will be the key factor in embracing creativ-ity in all you do and will enable you to be relevant in the new creative economy. Turn the volume up right now. What is it saying?