CHAPTER 13
Character Counts
I N GOOD TIMES, it’s easy to be a hero. It doesn’t take much effort to show fine character in fair weather. Things are going well, after all. Clients are responding and buying, your career is going well, promotions are beckoning, and margins are healthy.
But what happens when the ship takes on a bit of water (or a lot of water) and starts sinking?
In bad times, character is put to the test. From rich to poor, from hardship cases to those born with a silver spoon, everyone comes from somewhere, and where you come from defines who you are and what your character is. The Creator Mindset is designed in such a way that it magnifies the experiences that make you who you are. It channels who you are as an individual into creative strengths that are as strong as the DNA that makes you. It’s as individual as anything in life. Because no two people are exactly the same, no two practices of The Creator Mindset will ever yield the same results.
Because it takes character to forge a path forward with dignity, honor, fairness, and respect when things don’t go as planned, it’s important to have the following three tools and mindsets so that you can thrive in hard times.
HOW TO THRIVE IN HARD TIMES
Be Yourself
No two people ever look at the same problem the same way creatively. In other words, who you are and creativity are one and the same. Creativity will allow you to attack issues in a way that only you can. Creativity gives you a distinct and unique voice.
For example, if you grew up in a home where money was scarce, you may or may not have developed a sensitivity to money issues. And the way you may or may not deal with those issues becomes a factor when it is looked at creatively. How? Because you are able to realize what your particular Achilles’ heel is and—here’s the important part—creatively decide whether to frame your view in the context of your particular past. The important thing to remember here is that creativity gives you a choice about how to view your individual circumstance.
With this in mind, you can either reject or embrace the cards you were dealt to fuel creativity. That’s the beauty of creativity: it gives you a choice. Likewise, the choice you make opens up endless opportunities for creative thought to flourish as only you can express it.
Another example is a company in the manufacturing world that is regulated by government policy. You can choose to throw up your hands in frustration and blame all the issues you are having in your business on regulation. Plenty of companies do that. Or you could embrace creativity in coming up with a solution to the box in which you are locked up and through creativity redefine your limitations so that you can break through. It is a choice that is as intimate as any you can make in life, and its roots are deeply anchored in creativity. The beauty of creativity is that it gives you a choice about how to view your regulation problem and, best of all, choose how to solve it.
The solutions you create by using creativity will always be yours and yours alone no matter where you come from or what your circumstances are.
Question Norms
It turns out that we humans find normality comforting. We seek comfort and strength in patterns, and this is tied to our ancient quest for survival. It’s how we are biologically wired.
That is why the necessity within The Creator Mindset to question established norms is very important. We will dive deeper into this in Chapter 20, but for now it’s important to realize that anytime a norm is established, ensconced, always done this way, or routine is reason enough to question it. In this questioning of why things are the way they are you will uncover creative truths that are actionable. Just because we have always given away coupons to clients, that doesn’t mean that this practice has to continue. Just because we have established a pattern of having meetings every Monday morning, that doesn’t mean that this practice has to be continued.
In other words, there is nothing preventing you from looking at the world as you see fit through the lens of creativity. What you see is valuable. What you see is important. What you see deserves to be recognized. Because creativity is expressed so differently depending on who is doing it, determining what your view of your career or your company is becomes a deeply important and worthwhile exercise.
That’s why it’s important to question norms. Avoid the comfort mentality that is so prevalent in business today. Create your own path forward that is armed with creativity instead of accepting the established precedence of analytics.
Fight What Comes Naturally
If it were up to me, I’d be on a beach somewhere sipping a cold drink in the sunshine. Abject laziness is what comes naturally to me, but I know that laziness gets you nowhere in life. You have to fight that urge.
Perhaps laziness isn’t what comes naturally to you and instead you like to control everything. No matter what you gravitate toward naturally, you must fight it because the expression of creativity will not come to anyone who is lured by what comes naturally, which to most human beings is the easy way out.
Creativity cannot thrive while we are dictated to by our natural biological instincts. What we need to do is fight this aspect of human nature so that we can climb out of the comfortable and familiar to enable ourselves to truly break free of analytical chains. Fighting human nature will allow us to embrace the potential our thinking has to be combined into one superunit and operate at the highest order of humanity. Giving in to comfort or routine will yield no worthwhile results.
Likewise, what comes naturally to us is the fringe view of always seeing what is wrong in the world. We are programmed naturally not to celebrate little victories (Chapter 10) or look at the world as it can be (Chapter 7). Instead, we see the fringe view that shows what is wrong or what is failing every time.
Fighting what comes naturally involves a heavy dose of creativity to conjure a more positive view that differs from what everyone else is seeing. Therein lies your advantage in any business or career. While everyone is seeing the bad, you are seeing the good. When it’s far easier to be down about some mistake, you see an opportunity for growth and change. When it’s far easier to call your boss an idiot, you instead look within to see what it is that you could be doing better.
Creativity is the greatest equalizer of resources ever because creativity does not rely on whom you know, your past, or how many resources you have. Creativity allows you to think beyond your current constraints and see nothing but potential. Within that process is a choice that you have to make at all stages of your life and career. What you choose underlines one of the most important of human endeavors: the chance to make creative character count.