CHAPTER 12
Art and the Ego
ART
T HERE IS A stark difference between art and creativity that is not well understood. We tend to think that art and creativity are the same, but they are not, and it’s important to understand why.
Art is really a small subset of creativity, and because art represents such a small fraction of the creative potential that we all have, equating art and creativity can be very dangerous to the limitless potential of creativity.
For example, if creativity were a building, art would be one piece of plywood. Sure, it’s important to have that one piece of plywood in the building, but when we look at the big picture, the wood is in fact a very small component of the entire building.
Even though art is such a small subset of creativity, within art we have tons of subcategories that enhance our lives and enrich our experiences as human beings. This art affects all of our senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound. We have music, sculpture, fine art, and dance, among other things, that allow for self-expression and gratification for the people who create them.
When I say art is a subset of creativity, consider that as a startling point. I mean that art has touched countless lives—I would argue that this includes just about each and every soul on Earth—yet it’s only a tiny fraction of potential creativity. That is incredible, and once you see it, you can truly see how powerful and grand creativity can be.
Why do we equate art with creativity? To answer that, we need to go back to childhood.
It was easy to equate art to creativity as children because art is the very first exposure we have to creativity. Art is the first instance of creativity that is approachable and understandable to us, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is in fact a very good thing! In Chapter 3 we did an exercise in which we drew a flower because art can often be the catalyst for great creative thought. It is perfectly all right to start the journey into creativity from the base of art, but at some point art alone cannot express the limitless creative potential we all have deep inside us no matter who we are and no matter what we do.
Something interesting happens as we age: we lose the ability to differentiate between creativity and art. We think creativity is only art, and as a result, we cheat ourselves out of the wide breadth of creativity as a whole.
The consequences are dire.
We figure that art is creativity, and so we stop fostering any development of creativity. But that is a travesty. It is quite literally the belief that one piece of wood in an entire home is a good enough representation of our creative potential. That’s damaging and simply not true.
The truth is that creativity is the basic building block of creating revenue and igniting a long-dormant part of the mind to reawaken the full human potential. It is innovation (a much larger subcategory of creativity than art, by the way), solutions to real problems, profit enhancement, endless growth in one’s career, and so much more. In other words, creativity provides solutions that fit a real need. Creativity in my method helps people push for solutions that can be of value and service to all. The type of creativity you will find in The Creator Mindset is laser-focused on making you more money, improving your exposure, and building your brand while fusing your mind into one superunit that unleashes all human potential.
THE EGO
No conversation about art is complete without looking into the ego. The ego is defined in the dictionary as “a sense of self-worth, a sense of self-esteem, or one of self-importance.” It drives artists to complete their work no matter what they are doing, from painting to music and beyond. The ego assures artists that what they are doing is a just and right expression that is worthy of completion. We can see how some dose of ego is a good thing.
But sometimes some ego becomes far too much ego, and not just for the artist. You and I and everyone we know can see that sometimes ego can get out of hand. I personally see this inflated sense of ego crippling the success of many businesses and careers today. Inflated ego can come from a person, a group, or a work culture. What we need is a recipe for how creativity views the inflated ego and what it can do to help control it, because when ego gets out of hand and goes from useful to inflated, it ends up being damaging to creativity.
What can we do about inflated egos? We need some tools from The Creator Mindset to help control it and help us catch this inflated sense of self before it can wreak havoc on our organizations and careers. This inflated sense of ego can have the tragic effect of shutting down creativity entirely, and so we must look deeper and learn three techniques to help us understand why inflated ego takes hold and what we can do about it. But first we need to look at how we can control inflated ego.
Controlling the Inflated Ego
The fact is that the complete banishment of inflated ego from an organization is a futile goal. Isn’t that horrible? It will never happen, and it pains me to say that. Therefore, instead of removing ego entirely, make your goal to reduce it as much as possible so that creativity has a chance to flourish and take hold.
Inflated ego reduction is something we can control. We just need a little background on how it gets out of control and what we can do about it. The development of an inflated ego is directly tied to these three things I have identified below. These techniques to combat and reduce the inflated ego will work in any organization or any career no matter what your business does or where your career is headed.
1. Inflated Ego Is Tied to the Good Old Days
In many ways, inflated ego develops on top of a previous success or two. This is very important to recognize. There is no business anywhere in the world that has continued to survive unless at some point it had some success. The same thing is true of any career. It is probable that you would have been fired if you didn’t have a previous success or two. That success could be big or small. It could be incremental or a tidal wave of success. But no matter how much success you’ve had so far, there is a foundational aspect that one thing or many things have happened at some point in the timeline of the company or career that have given you the ability to keep the lights on.
We fool our ego into believing that we have had these successes because we “know what we are doing,” and that is the basis for not wanting to change anything or learn anything new; an inflated ego is the result. This becomes particularly damaging in the implementation of creativity because creativity depends on having a flexible viewpoint. Being open to different opinions and a diversity of information allows creativity to emerge. You cannot have a flexible viewpoint if your ego will not look at your mistakes creatively and use Chapter 8’s unlikely personality traits of humor, empathy, and courage and the host of other tools The Creator Mindset has to allow creativity to work for you.
The belief in the good old days must be challenged and challenged repeatedly. This starts with allowing success to be appreciated but not falling in love with one’s ego at every turn. It’s a personal decision that we have to make. It’s about viewing success in terms of little victories, not as a final milestone or arrival to serve up to our inflated egos. Only then will we find that ideas begin to be generated everywhere if we are brave enough to look. To counter the mentality that an inflated ego creates by believing that yesterday is far better than tomorrow, we must use creativity to free ourselves from the shackles of yesterday. Question past success and question future success. This keeps the ego in balance and prevents it from becoming inflated.
2. Inflated Ego Is Tied to the Structure of the Organization
Ineffective leadership in any section of a business leads to hurtful inflated ego. As an inadequate manager’s ego tries to stay in control, that manager increasingly will use ego to try to maintain order. Managers like this want to keep their little turf, and any threat to that is shut down, and so they develop an inflated ego. Because any threat is shut down, creativity is unable to take hold because it’s a threat to their turf. This is a vicious cycle that forever prevents creativity from starting.
If you are an employee stuck in this cycle, the only way out is creativity as a method of generating fresh and new ideas. Because creativity tends to work in tangential and nonlinear ways, you may not see immediate success. You may not see an immediate impact. But that’s okay because the true power of creativity is not a cause-and-effect outcome—I do this, and therefore that happens—but a long-term haul of try and try again. It’s grit. And if you are stuck under someone who is protecting his or her inflated ego’s turf island, adherence to creativity to elevate the power of the idea will work eventually. It may not happen in the way that you expect, but it will happen eventually because creativity is the antidote for all darkness in ego.
If you are in a leadership position, you must recognize that these inflated ego turf islands develop as one piece of the business amasses too much authority, success, or even failure. It’s amazing that failure generates inflated ego just as much as success does, but it’s indeed the case. Creativity demands a constant and regular vigil over all the parts of a business, because the minute you allow a part of the business to run without challenging and adjusting it with creativity, you have set up that part to develop eventual ego cancer. What ends up happening is that any success or failure a particular part of the team has inevitably leads to a lethargic response, a silo that is deemed good enough. “It’s working in some respect, so leave it alone,” an inflated ego says. There is a tendency to rest upon success, a topic we will cover in far more depth in Chapter 17, but it is your responsibility in leadership to maintain an ever-growing, ever-changing, and ever-flexible path of creativity in your organization so that inflated egos do not run rampant and have a chance to develop these silos. It is also tied to comfort, which we shall see is a place where inflated ego loves to hide.
3. Inflated Ego Will Always Look for Someone Else to Blame
When one is dealing with inflated ego, the search for the culprit is always external. I have heard it all. The most common include “my clients are difficult,” “the economy sucks,” “it’s a race to the bottom with these margins,” and a personal favorite, “my boss is an idiot!” I’m sure you can come up with a few of your own reasons why you cannot achieve your goals. But the ability of creativity to ascend over an inflated ego requires that you look within.
The inflated ego has a tough time looking within and is always looking elsewhere for the problem, and so one thing you can do right now is stop blaming others for your lack of success. Take responsibility and admit that perhaps your inflated ego has gotten in the way once or twice at the very least. You cannot begin any real embrace of creative principles if you do not believe in your culpability for your own actions. If you take a minute to think of the last time you blamed someone else for your own shortcomings, you can see the inflated ego at work.
So what can you do? Contact that person and apologize and make it right in your own way. It will be painful, difficult, and uncomfortable, but even one act of admitting that you were wrong because of your inflated ego will lift the inglorious weight of ego from your shoulders and lessen your load as you progress along The Creator Mindset way. Also, increased consciousness of this issue will go a long way. Ask yourself, Did I do this because of my ego? And is it getting inflated or is it in check?
ONE OF THE GREATEST threats to the implementation of The Creator Mindset is inflated ego. No creativity can occur in any enterprise in which ego is rampant. Inflated ego begins to erode the very foundation of the business and your career. As corrosive a power as anything, an inflated ego begins to chew away at any progress by establishing an analytical mentality that wills itself to not be changed. This mentality is inflexible no matter what is going on. Inflated ego ensures that you will be stuck. It is a prescription for disaster in any business and any career. Inflated ego leads to secrecy. It leads to silos. Communication breakdowns and a sense of complacency lead to the eventual death of the business and being stuck in countless ways over the course of your career.
The inflated ego road is one that does not need to be taken. There is hope! Using the three points described in this chapter will help shed light on certain problems in your business and career. And by shedding light, it will force the inflated ego to realize, perhaps begrudgingly, that maybe things are ripe for change. And in that change comes the true hope of true creativity.