CHAPTER 8
Creativity’s Unlikely Personality Traits
W HEN I WAS a kid, I worked for a coffee delivery service in Hollywood. On the surface this may seem like a glamorous job, but like most jobs that seem glamorous, it was anything but. Sure, there were trips to movie sets and television stages and I got to meet a celebrity or two on one of the coffee and doughnut drop-offs, but by and large it was nonglamorous delivery service work. There were the early mornings for starters, including the 4 a.m. doughnut pickups so they would be fresh for the 6 a.m. drop-offs. There was the endless washing of coffeepots with scouring pads and soap. It took me almost 10 years to like coffee again. The smell of those coffeepots would drive anyone to become a tea lover.
The silver lining was the fact that I had a great boss, a man named Jeff Chean. Great bosses make you stick around no matter how unglamorous or hard the work is. On top of being a great boss, Jeff would give me flyby quips, insights into the human condition. “Cheanisms” he called them. There were quips such as “the work you do is a service to others.” I thought we were making coffee for a bunch of spoiled Hollywood people, but he made sure that the work we did was seen as a service to others. Jeff had other quips too, such as “Tuck in your shirt and comb your hair. No one wants to buy anything from a bum.” He was largely right in those quick teachings. It was almost like a real-world business education executed in five-second snippets.
Jeff’s knowledge was profound, and it helped me realize that there are three attributes of our personalities that are essential compared with all the others in overcoming problems creatively:
1. Humor
2. Empathy
3. Courage
These three personality traits are built into each and every one of us. Once we realize that, we must begin to use all three together and in combination to make sure that creativity can take hold and generate innovation in everything we do.
These are the elements I’ve found that spark creativity time and time again. Why? Because they inspire creativity and lead you to more innovation, wealth, and growth. Pretty awesome, isn’t it?
We have to start learning how to use them for creativity. How do we do that? First, by taking a bit of time to look at each one of these attributes on its own.
CREATIVITY’S UNLIKELY PERSONALITY TRAITS
Humor
Many people believe that humor is not the stuff of serious, intellectual, studious, or successful types. But keeping yourself open to humor will make your effort in creativity all the more worthwhile because it offers an insight into the fallacy of thinking that we are in control of anything—which we are not. You see, humor represents a force that tells us—and others—that it is okay to fail. It’s okay to be human. It’s okay to get it wrong. The Creator Mindset depends on this permission to fail in order to get it right. Making mistakes is one of the key ingredients of innovation, as you will see in Chapter 11, where we look at 3M’s Post-it Notes and other stories of mistakes that turned into amazing products or services.
Humor is also important because it allows us to relax a bit. It grants us permission to see the funny side of life. With humor, we can change the way we see problems in our businesses or our careers. Let’s revisit our overloaded warehouse inventory problem from Chapter 7 as an example. If you’re dealing with a situation in which you have too much inventory and nowhere for it to go and you react with anger, you will eliminate just about all creative solutions to the problem. But if you look at it with humor and perhaps say something like “Hey, look, we’ve got a lot of merch in here; maybe we should have the merch monster come and eat all this stuff up,” you allow others to look at the situation a little more lightly and with humor. It might not be all that funny, but that’s okay. We’re simply using humor as a tool to cut loose a bit and spark a creative idea. After hearing that one silly remark, someone might say, “Actually, I’ve got an idea. What if we move the stuff to a storage place down the street called Monster Storage, which charges a dollar for the first month? We can then discount the inventory within that month and move it.” And so a brilliant idea comes to life because you chose to look at the situation with humor.
Humor ultimately allows you to find a creative solution because it works in subtle and disarming ways. It is indeed the stuff of the studious and serious, because it creates opportunities to connect with the basic truth that we are not all that much in control all the time. And that’s funny. Sometimes a bit of humor can go a long way toward humanizing problems and allowing creative solutions to unfold.
On top of it all, humor makes us more fun to be around, and at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. It makes us relatable. It makes us likable. It makes us connect with others. We spend so much of our time dedicating ourselves to our work, but what we really remember is not the assignment we completed or the deadline we met. What we tend to remember is the people we work with and, one hopes, their humor in tough situations.
Empathy
Empathy is the second critical tool in creativity’s unlikely personality traits, and it’s one of my favorites because it is so versatile.
Empathy comes in two forms when you look at it in the context of my process:
Internal empathy is a result of looking at internal issues in your company or career with creativity.
External empathy is a result of looking outside your company or career with creativity.
Internal Empathy
Internal empathy boils down to actually listening to your staff members and coworkers, listening to what is going on within your company so that you can relate. In the hallways, in the conference rooms, on the road trips, in meetings—really listening. Internal empathy is not what people say about your company or what your reputation is; internal empathy is the inner workings of your relationships and connections inside the company. When looked at through the lens of The Creator Mindset, internal empathy ultimately boils down to understanding that business transactions are about the customers, not about you. Empathy for the customers’ needs is the essence of creativity because it allows you to satisfy those needs with your product or service at just the time when the customers need it the most.
Internal empathy is also the understanding that looking inside the company or your career and building meaningful relationships is a worthwhile goal. Why? Because in the rush to vilify an external concern such as the fact that the market is hard for sales right now or the boss doesn’t want to promote you, it flips the tables. It puts the burden of responsibility on you to try to figure out your own destiny. What can you be doing better? How can you work better with others? What one thing can you do today, internally, to make your path brighter? These questions will help you shine a light on the power you hold in your life, career, and business.
My favorite case study of internal empathy involves a lawn care service company I did a keynote for a while back. They had a pretty sizable chunk of the market in a particular location but not much work elsewhere. The excuses for that ran deep until one day someone on the staff got creative and took the initiative to come up with a creative idea about how to win new business. Internal empathy led coworkers to get excited about the idea. How? They started listening to one another, interacting, exploring together. Soon this idea led to exponential growth all because someone decided not to complain or blame others. Instead the company pushed a creative idea forward and made its business more successful.
External Empathy
External empathy comes about when you are looking at an issue outside of your business honestly, without pretense or judgment. It’s about listing to what external factors are telling you. Not only that, it is about looking at external factors such as the competition—why that superstar was snatched away and hired by someone else or why someone else got a promotion and you didn’t—as a source of learning, growing, and understanding, not judgment or negativity.
I cannot tell you how often when I am out speaking or consulting about The Creator Mindset, someone in the audience will ask me how to beat his or her competition. The story always boils down to their competitors driving the prices down in a race to the bottom. They wonder, How can I compete? They pass judgment. They are negative and critical. The answer almost always encompasses my concept of external empathy because I ask that person how much engagement he or she has with the competition. The answer usually comes back the same: None. Why should I talk to them? Why should I relate to them? They are my competition.
Then I ask the person if he or she has assessed the marketplace or his or her position within the company honestly by using external empathy, not just passing judgment at arm’s length. Usually, we are so busy passing judgment on what we think the truth is that we do not empathize or relate to anyone else, especially our competition. When we pass judgment, we lose a creative advantage.
You see, it’s actually imperative to relate to your competition because there is a valuable insight to gain. For example, look at the special way they market their product or service or perhaps their unusually decentralized office. You pass judgment by thinking, Everyone’s working from home! How can they get anything done? Instead of looking at this with anger or frustration, try to be creative. Look at it with curiosity and try to learn. Ask yourself, What can I learn from this decentralized office? What are they gaining from having people work from home? What can I borrow from them so that I can improve my own standing or career? By doing that, you will find clues to help you improve your business or career to compete more effectively.
There is a world of creative wealth that can be had by studying these clues. It just takes the will to try.
External empathy is not about passing judgment on the competition. External empathy is instead a creative tool that allows you to look honestly at your career or company and assess it against external forces in an honest and fair way. There you will unlock opportunity.
Courage
Courage is one of the most difficult components of The Creator Mindset to master. You need courage to find out what you are doing wrong and try something new to fix it. It takes a lot of guts to look at yourself and recognize that there is room for improvement. It takes courage to look for things that we can improve on in both our careers and our companies. It takes courage to accept that there is a better way to do something. Then it takes heaps of courage to try something different, new, and creative.
Courage also involves the innate creativity that Harriette our ancestor in Chapter 6 had when she took a pointed stick and fought because there was no other choice. Today, courage deals with believing in yourself and knowing that your direction is the right direction to go in no matter how much things are stacked up against you. Sounds a lot like our ancestor’s definition of courage, doesn’t it? There may not be the data to support your gut feeling and the analytics may be pointing in another direction, but courage allows that creative instinct to point you where you need to go. And that is courageous.
When you are following The Creator Mindset, courage allows you to look for answers in places that seem off limits, places that may seem uncomfortable, places that may seem rife with fear. Because this creative courage I am talking about is the belief that creativity can conquer all, it is indeed worthwhile to try to conquer your fears.
I am certain that you are dealing with some issue right at this moment, perhaps even toying around with a solution. But you don’t think it’s good enough for whatever reason. Creative courage is the will to try that idea as a potential creative solution and believe in your ability to make that creative leap.
Courage is listening to creativity when analytics have mostly been the louder. It takes courage to listen to creativity and consider analytics as well. It takes courage to forge forth a path to unite your thinking, giving each and every problem 100 percent.
Using courage in The Creator Mindset is difficult. Because it involves looking within to see what we are doing wrong, it is just plain hard. We spend so much of our lives, both professional and personal, trying not to look at our flaws. Therefore, courage becomes one of the hardest tools to master. But like anything in life, sometimes the harder something is, the more worthwhile it is. As with running a marathon or completing an advanced degree, the fact that something is hard doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it. Perhaps it means that we should be doing more of it. The same thing is true when we look at courage deep within ourselves and recognize our flaws in order to make ourselves more creative.
HUMOR, EMPATHY, AND COURAGE are three unlikely personality traits of creativity that I find over and over are most successful. It turns out that these three traits are deeply useful in negotiating the often treacherous and ever-changing landscape of business today because they are universal. Putting them all together and being actively conscious of putting them together in your dealings with everyday problems will yield amazing and elevated creative results.