CHAPTER   6

When Nothing Else Works, Creativity Will

I T WAS A dark and stormy night roughly 100,000 years ago during the last ice age. Harriette, an early human, ran into her cave. She was not having a good day. Sopping wet from the storm, she was further pummeled by pounding rain moving sideways into her cave. It was miserable. She then heard footsteps getting louder and louder from just outside the cave. “Oh, damn,” she thought. “What now?” Her shelter was primitive at best—just an opening in an outcropping of rocks—but it was the best she could do. She had some basic tools but nothing we would consider as being of any real utility today. She looked down and noticed the floor begin to rise as a flood beckoned. She heard the footsteps get louder and louder. She looked down at her meager tools. They were now floating. A sharp snap was heard just outside her shelter. It was a saber-toothed cat¹ standing four feet high at its shoulders and eight and half feet long. It weighed almost 600 pounds, had 13-inch fangs, and had an appetite for early humans.

Hunting season was on for these early animals 100,000 years ago. They had dominion over the entire globe. They were able to hunt with impunity and take what they wanted. They didn’t differentiate between humans and other animals. It was a violent world where the average early human didn’t see his or her thirtieth birthday,² in large part because these beasts were such good killing machines. To say that the Earth was a slaughter ground is an understatement. Early humans like Harriette needed something to help them stay alive. They were outmatched by these animals in every way. The animals were faster and larger, and their senses were better. They were ferocious in every conceivable way. Only one thing stood between death and survival for those early humans: creativity.

Harriette was face-to-face with imminent death. The beast was now at her doorstep. Yet Harriette remained eerily calm. Just yesterday a similar beast had attacked and hauled off two other humans from her village. With the screams of her kinfolk echoing in her head, she stopped and composed herself. She had a creative idea, the world’s first for a human. She looked down at her floating tools and saw an arrowhead she had crafted to collect berries from jagged bushes. She had never seen that tool as anything but a berry picker. Then she saw a large branch from a tree. She had never seen a branch as anything other than a branch. But with the power of creativity she put the two together. At the most perilous time, an idea was sparked, and all of a sudden there was a slight chance she could stave off the beast. In a few quick terrifying moments while avoiding the fangs of the attacking animal, she fastened the arrowhead to the end of the stick. And a new tool was created.

Creativity saved Harriette’s life, and creativity was born out of necessity. It’s ingrained in our very DNA as an attribute of humanity that is necessary for survival.³ Without creativity we wouldn’t be alive today. The Earth was filled with animals far stronger, far bigger, and far more violent than humans. We would not have made it had it not been for creativity. This is not frivolous stuff. This is a matter of living or dying. Creativity is the very substance of life.

Over and over the story remains much the same. There is some adversity. Creativity wins. Adversity is overcome through the principles of human ingenuity that manifests itself time and time again as creativity. We learned which plants to eat. We learned how to build the best shelters. We learned how to make jugs to carry water a long distance. We learned how to fish. We learned how to hunt. We learned how to build a bridge over water to get to the other side. Airplanes, robots to Mars, and so on and so forth—all creative efforts.

All the largest developments in our history came from the power of the idea. Someone much like Harriette came up with some idea at some point and solved some problem. Let’s get to the moon. How? No one has ever gotten to the moon! It is time to get creative. Creativity can solve problems that are unsolvable if we look only to the current darling of human thinking: the analytical rubric. Historical events are often wrongly attributed to who won this or that war or who conquered whom. That is missing the point because creativity is—no matter how you use it, from warfare to welfare—the glue that binds all human accomplishments.

But creativity comes with a pretty strong side effect, and it happens to be a wonderful altruistic side effect. Creativity comes with a contiguous energy that allows any idea to spread. As deeply as creativity is ingrained in us, so is its side effect. Harriette ran back to her village immediately after she thwarted the attack to share her new tool. Jonas Salk, who invented the polio vaccine, immediately rushed to push it out to the world for free. It was too important not to share.⁴ The guys who started Tesla shared with their friends and families each milestone of their new development so that they too could feel the rush of the electric car. There were lines to ride their prototype around the parking lot!⁵ Thinking with a Creator Mindset allows the idea to spread far and wide, and there is a contagious energy that unites everybody with the championing of the idea. It crosses class, ethnic, and socioeconomic boundaries. It is a sheer joy that emanates from the deepest recesses of our innate altruistic vision of the world. No one really gets excited by seeing an analytical spreadsheet of numbers endlessly hanging off the bottom of a report or another analytical PowerPoint presentation. But creativity captures everyone’s imagination each and every time.

Today it is not enough to just survive. We look to thrive—and so we should. We want to grow our businesses. We want to do more faster, better, and more efficiently. We want to leave the world a better place for our children and their children. Here in its most basic form is the stuff of life: creativity. What better tool of the human condition can we possibly use to improve our standing in life than creativity?

Now that we have established how creativity is ingrained in our experience as humans, imagine how harnessing it in your business or career will grow it, shape it, make it relevant, and make it successful. You are tapping into a nerve that makes us who we are. It is the very stuff that makes us tick. If you are able to use and harness creativity in your business, you have a direct path into our primordial minds and our emotions. You have a one-way ticket to a nerve center full of emotion designed to get someone to react to what you are doing.

Apple knew this when it designed beautiful-looking yet fully functional technology. They designed more than a computer. They designed an iconic technology experience. Tesla knew it too. Sure, they designed a nice car, but more impressive is the fact that the car became a lifestyle item that shouts a person’s values and personality to the world. This is primordial creativity at work.

Connecting to who we are and what we want at the most intimate level allows products and services that derive from The Creator Mindset to thrive in a way an analytical approach can never accomplish. Creativity works because it connects us to long-lost ancestral needs, needs that you can position your company or career to take advantage of.

Positioning your company or career to take advantage of the intimate connection creativity gives us is nothing to have compunctions about. We often vilify corporations by saying that they are taking advantage of us by selling us stuff we don’t need, but when this is looked at creatively, it is not true. Corporations are beholden to us, and we vote with what we buy. None of these companies would be in business if we didn’t consume their products. Companies have made our basic survival so easy. Why? Because we want them to.

Our environment today is far removed from the daily fight to survive our ancestors had to deal with—and that’s all thanks to creativity.

You see, in a way creativity reminds us of our function as human beings. It reminds us of what our ancestors endured, and it drives us closer and closer to our real selves. It puts us back in touch with the pure essence of our humanity, which is the fact that we were filled with creativity designed to solve problems and triumph over adversity on an intimate level.

Today we need it more than ever. We need it because we no longer rely on fight or flight from this or that beast. We are no longer afraid for our lives from one moment to another. Adrenaline and dopamine are still active inside us to guard against primordial death, but they are triggered only by things such as riding roller coasters and solving crossword puzzles.⁶ That’s how far we have come. We need to stimulate the basic human functions that used to entail far more significant consequences in order to feel alive today. Commoditizing creativity meets that need and is nothing to be ashamed of or bashful about. Free enterprise is the heartbeat of the global economy because it is what is needed most to connect us to our real selves.