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Kaizen Creativity: The Science of Creativity & Innovation

Kaizen Creativity: The Science of Creativity & Innovation

By Jared Volle, MS

Creative inspiration for artists, entrepreneurs, and problem solvers! Each episode focuses on a different creativity and innovation topic designed to boost your natural creativity. Jared Volle received his M.S. in Creativity and Innovation and teaches an accessible, science-based approach to creativity that’s perfect for anyone. Learn how to optimize your creativity, stay motivated, market creative ideas, work in teams, and much more!
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Getting Good Feedback (#51)

Kaizen Creativity: The Science of Creativity & InnovationMay 03, 2021

00:00
24:16
Meta-Cognition & Creativity Blocks #63
Jul 26, 202104:34
How Negative Moods Effect Creativity #62
Jul 19, 202110:46
You Cannot Escape How Important You Are #61
Jul 12, 202105:19
Creativity Isn't "Well Rounded" #60

Creativity Isn't "Well Rounded" #60

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Jul 04, 202107:22
Motivation, Beliefs, & Assumptions - How To Sustain Motivation In Creativity #59
Jun 28, 202117:60
3 Ways Busy Schedules Kill Creativity #58
Jun 21, 202113:12
The World's Most Fascinating Creative Problem: How AI Safety Researchers Are Avoiding a Robot Apocalypse (#57)
Jun 14, 202124:15
Creativity In AI: What Creative People Can Learn From Artificial Intelligence (#56)

Creativity In AI: What Creative People Can Learn From Artificial Intelligence (#56)

How do we teach computers to be creative? Discover how an AI is trained to do tasks, both creative and otherwise. 

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Part 1: How AI is trained to complete non-creative tasks

Part 2: How AI is trained to complete creative tasks

Part 3: Adversarial Algorithms - How competing algorithms are used to create unique, useful ideas.


Episode links:

AI playing Mario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44


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Jun 07, 202133:51
4C Model of Creativity (#55)
May 31, 202122:29
How Personal Values Shape Our Creativity (#54)
May 24, 202117:20
Componential Theory (#53)

Componential Theory (#53)

Componential Theory

May 17, 202109:26
3 Ways To Find Creative Insights (Without Struggling For Them) (#52)
May 10, 202109:21
Getting Good Feedback (#51)
May 03, 202124:16
Find Creative Inspiration - How Sensitivity & Problem Discovery Lead to Innovation

Find Creative Inspiration - How Sensitivity & Problem Discovery Lead to Innovation

Creative people are sensitive to problems, but that’s a good thing. Most people are confronted with a problem and they choose to ignore it. Others have smaller problems that they don’t even consciously recognize are problems. Creativity thrives when there are problems. They guide our creative behavior. They teach us what we need to do. They show us what needs or attention… and they inspire us to take action. What’s more, they effect every part of the creative process, from the creation of the initial idea, to to problem solving required to build it, to the marketing done afterwards. Creative people are problem solvers. A few weeks ago, my wife bought a trash can with automatic lid. The lid of the trashcan has sensors that know when you’re walking towards it so that it can open without you needing to touch the lid. I thought it was incredibly strange at first. It was solving a problem I didn’t have. I thought of it more as a novelty. Something that was unique, but not really useful. A few weeks later, I love that thing. It’s solved a problem so minor that I never really noticed it. I was happy to use a foot pedal to open the trash. It never even occurred to me that this was a problem. It was only after I got use to the high tech trashcan that I realized that I wasn’t happy with the old one. I’m not sure who invented a trashcan with laser technology… I’m sure their name will go down in history. Whoever it was, they were very sensitive to the problem. If they had been like me, they’d have been too satisfied with the current solution to realize that there was something better. I’m someone who’s very sensitive to seeing creativity and beauty in ideas. As weird as it sounds, that trashcan actually has deeper meaning to me. I use it several times a day, and I can’t stop thinking about how important it is to be sensitive everyday problems. Any one of us could have invented it. It was a problem that every one of us have faced several times a day. But we missed it. We weren’t being sensitive enough to everyday problems. We live in times where you can jump on Fiverr and get just about anyone to do just about anything. There is no longer an excuse to say you don’t have the expertise. The biggest barrier to using a freelancer isn’t finding them, it’s that you’d have to admit that you want to build a trashcan with lasers. As you’re creating today, think about the smaller problems you engage with everyday. Try to be sensitive to what’s going on around you. Be sensitive to the problems you might have in a project. You’re not going to notice every problem out there… nor would you want to. But you can guide yourself toward becoming a better problem finding. This isn’t to say that you stress yourself out. When you recognize a small problem, you can appreciate that its there. You can appreciate the opportunity to create a solution. Perhaps you’ll pursue that possibility or perhaps you won’t. You want to find problems, not emotionally react to them. Those are two separate processes, finding a problem and interpreting it. If you interpret problems as little more than an opportunity for you to be creative, you can enjoy the benefits of problem finding without feeling stressed. 

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Apr 30, 202105:23
Marketing Innovation: How To Convince People To Value What They Just Learned Existed

Marketing Innovation: How To Convince People To Value What They Just Learned Existed

How do you convince people to value your creation when they just learned what it is? Innovations are solutions to problems.

Some solutions are wildly original, like the first Google algorithm or iPhone. These solutions violently shoved the industry in a new direction. Wherever Yahoo was going, wherever the Motorola Razor was going, it no longer mattered.

Sometimes those solutions push an industry forward in the direction it was already heading. Every few years, a new gaming console comes out with more power than the last generation. The PS4 becomes the PS5. There are some new features here and there, but the general idea stays the same. This is linear augmentation.

How you market a product depends on which group you fall into. By far, the easiest group to market is the linear augmentation group. It does’t take much work for Sony to explain why you need to upgrade your PS4 into a PS5. Whenever creativity is linear, it becomes very easy for consumers to place value on them.

The brain uses a system called “Anchor and Adjust” to arrive at value judgements. To figure out how much you value a PS5, your brain takes the value of the PS4 (the anchor) and then scales it up or down based on what it knows about the differences between the 2 (the adjustment). This is how your brain takes guesses. It’s how customers figure out what your product means to them. The Anchor & Adjust strategy isn’t simply one tool in your brains toolbox, it’s THE tool.

The more linear this process is, the easier it is for your customers to figure out how much value to assign your idea. When you market your idea, you’re essentially trying to influence this process. You want customers to anchor themselves to high-value ideas and you want them to use adjustment so that they arrive at high value. This is pretty standard when it comes to marketing.

The more revolutionary an idea is, the more difficult it becomes to market it. You can choose between being wildly different, but difficult to market, or you can choose to be marginally different, but easy to market. Said different, the more unique an idea is, the more difficult it becomes for customers to relate to it. This says nothing about the value of the product itself. This deals solely with your customer’s ability to relate to and value your creation.

The Anchor & Adjust strategy is the only tool in your brain for this purpose. But what happens if change isn’t so linear? What happens when Google puts out their first algorithm or the iPhone comes out and revolutionizes the industry? How do we value something wildly new when we have nothing to anchor and nothing to adjust?

The best thing we can do as creatives is to focus on what’s in front of us and get it right. As you’re creating today, think about how you can help your customers interpret your creations. When your customers view your work, what do they anchor to? What metaphor or analogy are they using? How do they go from having little information about who you are and what your product does, to actually valuing it above your competitors?


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Apr 28, 202108:59
Do More With Less - What Video Game Design Can Teach Us About Innovation

Do More With Less - What Video Game Design Can Teach Us About Innovation

One of my secret passions is game design. I love watching YouTube videos about how games are made and why game developers made the decisions that they did. The topic for this episode was inspired by 2 YouTube channels that explain video game design really well. One is Adam Millard, who has the Architect of Games. The other is Mark Brown, who has Game Makers Toolkit. Even if you’re not designing a video game yourself, there’s a lot you can learn from how they’re designed. There are a lot of parallels between what game designers go through and what creatives in other fields deal with. If you’re interested, I’ll leave links to their channels in the description. It’s fascinating when it all comes together to form an amazing video game, but it’s also fascinating when a game collapses under its own weight.

Video game design is incredibly competitive. It’s a high-risk, high-reward industry. As we talked about on the episode about hyper-segmentation (EP 10-11?), when there’s tons of competition, businesses tend to respond by trying to add more and more on top of their base offering. They tell themselves “I can’t simply give you X… I need to give you X, Y, & Z.”

In game design, these additions come in the form of game mechanics. There are skill trees that give you special moves. There’s crafting, like in Minecraft, where you can combine items together to create new items. These are often so complex that you need to download an online PDF just to remember all the combinations. Games are super-complex.

Let’s take another incredibly simple and popular game: 5 Nights At Freddy’s, likely one of the scariest, creepiest games out there. You play as a security officer. What can you do in the game? You can look at your security cameras and there are 2 doors that you can open or close. That’s it. Even more impressive is that there are almost no need for graphics in the game. When something moves, it moves while you’re not looking at it. So not only does the game create a creepy feeling that something is wrong, but it saves money on all the programming and graphics.

Both of these games are incredibly simple. Anyone can pick them up and within the first few minutes have a complete understanding of all the mechanics. Their simplicity makes them easy to the company to create and for the player to enjoy.

As you create today, try to simply your product. Instead of trying to add more bells and whistles to what you’re doing, focus on creating your masterpiece around 1-2 very simple ideas. Figure out how to pull the maximum value out of what you already have instead of adding more to it. This has the double-satisfaction of doing less, better.

***

Adam Millard/Architect Of Games: Twitter & YouTube Channel

Mark Brown/Game Maker's ToolKit: Twitter & YouTube Channel

***

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Apr 26, 202106:16
Bizarre Ways Frustration Influences Creativity

Bizarre Ways Frustration Influences Creativity

When we deal with creativity blocks on this show, we’ve generally talked about procrastination because that’s an area where many people struggle. In this episode, I want to talk about another important way we block ourselves: Not being willing to put down the wrong tool. Relying on the wrong thinking strategy to solve a problem is a recipe for frustration. It seems like such an easy fix, yet it’s incredibly difficult to both realize your using the wrong tool and, when you do, actually put it down and try a new one. This has been shown by some fascinating studies in creativity research.

Imagine your a creativity researcher. You’ve created 20 math problems that are moderately hard, but solvable. When you give a single problem to a single participant, it takes them rough 2-3 minutes to solve. The more problems you give them, the quicker they’ll get at solving the problem. This is to be expected. The first time you solve a math problem is much more difficult than the 2nd or 3rd. This is what’s true for the control group of the study. The control group are the people who get the boring placebo that lets scientist compare results.

Here’s where things took a turn. While all 20 of the math problems looked roughly the same, there’s a dirty little secret under the surface. Half of the problems require one set of problem solving skills and the other half requires a different set. Said differently, 10 problems are “Group A” problems and you can only solve them using Strategy A. The other 10 problems are “Group B” problems that can only be solved with Strategy B. So the math problems look the same, but require different strategies to solve.

As creative people, we must always be willing to put down our tools and try other ones. Every problem can be solved with the appropriate tool. There’s always a strategy or a path that leads to the breakthrough. When you feel frustrated, it’s often a sign that this is happening. Frustration occurs when you expect something to work but it doesn’t. You expect them to be easy, but they aren’t. We usually conclude that the problem is that we need to work harder. We need to double down, we need more motivation. If we only pushed harder against this brick wall, we could finally break through. But the problem isn’t motivation. The problem is that we’re attacking the problem with the wrong strategy. The breakthrough you’re after is as simple as finding the best tool for the job, but it requires that you first put down the tool in your hand. It requires you take a step back and question whether you’re doing the right thing. Life has taught you the best way to solve problems. Don’t solve today’s problem with yesterday’s tool. When a tool doesn’t solve our problem, we put the tool down and search for another.


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Apr 23, 202107:14
Pull Motivation - How Curiosity Motivates Without Leaving You Drained

Pull Motivation - How Curiosity Motivates Without Leaving You Drained

Long before he was the world’s most famous scientist, Einstein use to sit on the bus and imagine what would happen if the bus traveled at the speed of light. His curious nature was responsible for the bizarre thought experiments he loved so much, and his continued curiosity is what motivated him to keep playing with the ideas for long periods of time.

Creative people are incredibly curious people. They’re always tinkering with ideas. They’re curious about how things work and about how old ideas can be repurpose for something new. Curiosity is one of the most important personality traits for creative people. It effects all three of the core components of creativity: It leads to uncovering new knowledge, it invites us to apply our creative skills, and it motivates us to take action.

Curiosity is a surprisingly powerful motivator. Most people attempt to push themselves toward their goal. They think about all the reasons they should get out of bed or get off the couch and start working. Once they have enough reasons, they finally force themselves to get up.

Curiosity doesn’t “push” you toward taking action. It pulls you. Curiosity never “forces” you to do anything. But it’s such a powerful motivator that something it feels that way. If you’re addicted to getting news or constantly checking social media to see what’s happening, then curiosity is what’s pulling you to do it. My curiosity often pulls me into my email box, even when I know that I’m opening a door that I’d rather stay closed for now.

Curiosity is a tiny snowball at the top of a mountain. We can choose which direction we roll it. The longer it rolls, the more momentum it gets, and the less control we have over it. What was a tiny idea at the top of the mountain is now a powerhouse at the bottom. One that will likely shape your behavior in the future.

When we use curiosity to our advantage, we feel pulled towards achieving our goals. When you wake up wondering what a creative solution might look like, you set your brain down a path of curiosity and exploration. That path can then pull you towards your goals and motivate you to take action.

But motivation by itself doesn’t make you a creative person. It just allows you to take more action. When it comes to a person’s creative potential, nothing is more important than the knowledge and skills they’ve built up inside their industry.

Before starting your creative work today, take a few minutes to get curious about all the great things that could happen today. If you’re a writer, think about the amazing ideas that you’d like to explore. If you’re an entrepreneur, think about how great it’d feel to breakthrough on a problem that’s been nagging you. Spend the first few minutes of your morning in a space of creative, constructive curiosity. Your curiosity can pull you toward social media or the news, or it can pull you towards asking questions that lead to creative solutions. You’re holding a snowball at the top of a mountain. The decisions you make at the top will shape the rest of your day. Guide your curiosity while it’s still small and manageable.


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Apr 21, 202107:08
How To Get Addicted To Creativity, Overcome Procrastination & Enjoy Work
Apr 19, 202105:29
Why You Should Spend More Time Daydreaming To Boost Creativity

Why You Should Spend More Time Daydreaming To Boost Creativity

Daydreaming is fun. If you’re a creative person, it’s also surprisingly productive. So why don’t we do it more often? The short answer is ego.

While daydreaming IS productive, it doesn’t FEEL productive. That’s an important distinction when it comes to motivation. The brain gives far more weight to how you subjectively feel about something than to cold-hard facts about it. This is why you can’t simply recite airline safety facts to a person who’s afraid of flying. Subjective feelings override objective facts.

Why is daydreaming productive for creative people? Because daydreaming allows for a free flowing association of ideas and mental imagery. When you daydream, the association centers in your brain go crazy. This makes you better able to connect ideas together. At the same time, activity in the judgement center of your brain decreases. Daydreaming is like mental play-time. Play, by its very definition, has no outcome other than enjoyment. When children play, they’re not trying to get anything out of it. They’re just having fun. Because there’s no outside goal, there’s no need for judgement.

Daydreaming works the same way. You’re having fun when you daydream. It’s not supposed to feel like work. However, as you keep playing with ideas, eventually you stumble upon something worth keeping. What’s great about daydreaming is how this happens naturally. Not only will you naturally stumble upon interesting ideas, but you’ll naturally recognize which ideas are worth pursuing. It’s as if a big, red flag pops up in your head and says “Wait a second! This idea looks promising.”

Daydreaming is one of my favorite strategies when I’m writing comedy. If you were to watch me writing comedy, I wouldn’t seem very productive. My hands barely even touch the keyboard. The majority of my creative process is spent playing with ideas in my mind. When I daydream, I can imagine a wide variety of situations that could be useful in my writing. Daydreaming helps me not only generate a larger number of ideas, but those ideas have more variety as well. When I stumble upon an idea I like, that play around with it for a few more minutes. By the time I touch the keyboard, the vast majority of my writing is already complete. My job is to translate my mental movie into words on the page.

Today, try incorporating daydreaming into your creative process. Allow ideas to freely move around. Don’t setup any goals for yourself and don’t require any outcome other than the simple enjoyment of the process itself.

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Apr 16, 202105:23
How To Motivate Employees To Be Creative

How To Motivate Employees To Be Creative

What drives creative people to do what they do and how can we motivate people to be more creative? This is a particularly important question for businesses. While an entrepreneur might start a company because they’re already motivated to innovate, they have far less control over the people they hire.

There are 2 types of motivation that dominate creativity research: Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is when we are motivated from the inside. We’re intrinsically motivated whenever we do something because of the way it makes us feel. Any time you engage in some type of play, you’re doing it for intrinsic reasons. Playing is always intrinsic because the only outcome is to feel good. We’re extrinsically motivation whenever we do things for outside rewards. When we go to work for the sole purpose of receiving a paycheck, we’re extrinsically motivated. Our inspiration to take action is coming from the outside world. While there are quite a few caveats, creativity researchers agree that, in general, intrinsic motivation is by far the best when it comes to creativity.

In fact, more often then not, extrinsic, outside motivations tends to backfire. Companies that give their employees a good salary might reasonably expect creative output in return. But from the employee’s point of view, why risk their high salary by suggesting crazy ideas that have a high chance of failure? These well-paid employees are highly motivated, they’re just not motivated in the way that their employers think they are. Employees that are motivated by the next paycheck aren’t going to be risking that paycheck.

These employees are going to be motivated to pursue marginal change. They’ll still offer creative ideas, but only ones that feel like safe bets. This means linear augmentation will become the norm. This is exactly the kind of products we see coming out of large, bureaucratic organizations. They take safe bets by adding small improvements to old ideas.

There isn’t an easy answer for making employees more intrinsically motivated. One of the best ways to start this process is by validating the creativity of employees. Sure, at the end of the day they might only be here for the paycheck, but everybody loves being validated. Everyone loves being seen as unique and valuable. Simply validating other people’s creative work can boost their confidence and make them much more likely to offer future ideas. This isn’t a silver bullet, but that’s the point. People won’t be intrinsically motivated because you told them to. They need to do it for their reasons. For the creative leader, the subtle approach is the best one.


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Apr 14, 202105:20
How “I Can’t” Destroys Creativity (Constraints)

How “I Can’t” Destroys Creativity (Constraints)

In an earlier episode, we talked about how constraints guide your creative work. To refresh your memory, constraints are the boundaries that are placed on a product. Constraints are how we ensure that our creative work is not just unique, but useful as well. When we correctly define our constraints, we understand the full scope of the problem. We’re about to say, if I do X, Y, and Z, I should be able to create a product that will be useful to others.

Many of those constraints come from the outside world. These external constraints are things like manufacturing costs and limited technology. They’re forced upon you from the outside world.

Figuring out the appropriate constraints to place on yourself isn’t an easy task. In fact, the most important constraint in creativity doesn’t come from the outside world at all… it comes from you. It comes from your beliefs, your values, and your assumptions.

Before you put your idea out there, the only thing you can do is take a best guess at what will work. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream could come up with a flavor called “____” and despite the odds, it might become a success. We just don’t know because before you actually test it out, everything is a best guess. There are only varying degrees of certainty.

This is why defining your constraints can be so difficult. We want to create things that clearly belong in our industry, but we want them to stand out, as well. This is a contradiction. I want to be similar enough to everyone else that my customers understand what I do, but I want to be different enough to stand out from my competitors in a significant, meaningful way. Whether they’re conscious or subconscious beliefs, they determine what actions you take. They are significant constraints on your creativity.

As your creating today, remember that your beliefs, values, and assumptions are powerfully shaping the constraints that you’re putting on yourself. They often come in the form of phrases like “I can’t do that because…” How you respond to that thought will determine what action you take and where you end up. Of course, there’s no easy answer to which constraints should be accepted and which should be rejected. Each constraint is unique. What’s important is that we recognize when we are placing constraints on ourselves so that we can ensure that the way we’re defining the problem has the great chance at leading us to success.

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Apr 12, 202105:13
2 Creative Skills of Prehistoric Humans

2 Creative Skills of Prehistoric Humans

The history of civilization is the history of creativity. You cannot talk meaningfully about the past without bringing up the most important people and inventions of the time. We are here today because of the creativity of the past. Creativity and culture are inseparable. In no small way, creative people are responsible for the world around us.

From time to time in this podcast, I’m going to highlight different people, inventions, or time periods important to creativity. While I don’t intend to go through each era of creativity in chronological order, since this is the first episode where I talk about a creative era, I’m going to start from the very beginning. We won’t go all the way back to stone tools and cave paintings. Cave paintings are interesting in their own right, but they’re less consequential than what I have in mind.

I don’t want to turn these episodes into a history show. I’ll gloss over the dates things happen. I’m also going to do my best to make sure that this isn’t a list of bullet points about history that have no real takeaway for listeners. We’ll keep our focus on the main events of the time period, what creativity meant to the people living in it, and how we can apply the lessons to our own creativity.

Pre-civilized people had their own type of creativity. They discovered how to use items they found as tools, then how to make their own tools. And with all the time they saved, they taught themselves how to draw a mean stick figure Buffalo on cave walls.

The rate of change was incredibly slow during this period. So much time was spent on survival that there was little time to devote to other activities. Creativity is built by combining various ideas together to form something new. The more ideas you have to play around with, the more combinations you can make. This is why expertise is so important to creativity. With few ideas to build off of, creativity was relatively stagnant.

Creativity is built off of the past, so what do you do when you have no past to build off of? You’d think the creativity of pre-civilized humans would break this rule, but it actually doesn’t. Pre-civilized humans built creative ideas off the past just like we do today. They did it using two creative tools that are still incredibly important to us today: Observation and experimentation.

Civilization was largely formed on the back of 4 major innovations: The ability to grow food in abundance meant that people no longer had to all be hunter gatherers. It satisfied the bottom layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Before this, there simply wasn’t time available for the creative process to take place.

The second innovation was labor specialization. This meant that for the first time in human history, people could focus their attention on specific areas unrelated to finding their next meal.

With labor specialization, there were new opportunities to work together. Suddenly, you had something that I couldn’t make myself and I had something you wanted. We needed to work together in a way that humanity had never done before. This required the third innovation: The organization of society.


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Apr 09, 202113:35
Creativity Without Stress: How Elaboration Helps Us Create Without Worrying

Creativity Without Stress: How Elaboration Helps Us Create Without Worrying

Ideas don’t pop into our heads fully formed and ready to launch. The process from initial idea to a finished product worthy of other people’s attention can be a long one.

Each idea develops over time. Your very first attempt at a creative idea will likely only capture the general feeling of what you’re after. Your earliest work tends to be very abstract in nature. There are general ideas you’d like to pursue, but you’ll likely find yourself with very few concrete ideas to work with. This is the nature of the creative process. We begin with the abstract, and we work towards something more concrete.

It’s the next few generations that expand on your original ideas. Your initial idea is generic, but your second idea extends and elaborates on them. Over time, those abstract ideas about what you’d like to achieve and how you think you might achieve start to take shape. At this point, you’re about midway through the creative process.

Towards the end, your continuing to elaborate on your old ideas, but you’ll place special focus on problem solving and smaller details. This is where your creative idea really begins to take on a life of its own. In earlier stages, your creative idea was largely something that was in your head. It was a possibility. Now, it’s something concrete. You no longer have to imagine what it’d be like, because its right in front of you.

Thinking about creativity in this way can take a lot of pressure off of you, especially in the earliest stages of the creative process. Knowing that you’re first attempt at an idea is allowed to be flawed is freeing. It frees you of the stress you feel about getting it perfect on the first shot. You’re allowed to create half-finished ideas, because you’ll know that those ideas will evolve over time into something worthy of other people’s attention.

As your creating today, think about where you are within this process. Are you in the early stages of a creative project where you need to work with generic, abstract ideas? Are you in the middle stage where you’re trying to convert generic ideas into something more concrete and usable? Or are you in the final stage, where you want to apply problem solving skills to ensure your idea does what it promised?

Before ending, I want to invite you to the Kaizen Creativity Facebook group at facebook.com/KaizenCreativity to engage with other listeners and myself. The group is a place where we can both teach and learn from others. You have a valuable set of skills and knowledge that the group needs to hear. You also have the opportunity to expand the conversation by letting others know what issues you’ve run into and how you’ve solved them. You can join us at facebook.com/KaizenCreativity.

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Apr 07, 202105:20
Instant Motivation: How Focus Influences Our Creativity

Instant Motivation: How Focus Influences Our Creativity

What you focus on determines how you feel. When you think about happy memories, you’ll naturally feel happier. When you think about the awful thing someone did to you in the past, before long you’ll start feeling that in your body. Your attention determines how you feel.

When we’re creating, our focus powerfully shapes our motivation. When we focus on how large a project is or how there are so many moving parts that something is bound to fail… whenever our focus is predominately on something negative then motivation goes down.

But the reverse is also true. When you focus on the task right in front of you then your motivation increases. And even more powerful motivator is to focus on how your work will help other people. Most people will do far more to help a friend of family member than they’d do for themselves. Humans are designed to help other humans. It’s in our DNA.

You have the power to boost or undermine your motivation at any moment. This is both inspiring and scary. It’s inspiring because you always have the last say. You can always choose to focus on empowering meanings that inspire you to keep taking action, even when something unfortunate happens to you.

But, it also means that you can shoot yourself in the foot. You can accidentally undermine yourself by focusing too long on the wrong thing. You can choose to turn on the news and focus on all the awful things that have happened this news cycle. As you undoubtedly know from personal experience, once you’re in a negative mood, it can be very difficult to shake it off.

Pay attention to where you’re placing your focus today. Do this for both your creative work and your off-time. When you relax, do you focus on things that energize you? How often is your focus taken up by things you have no control over? And, of course, the most important question… do the things you focus on serve you? If you had the choice, would you actually choose them? You can ask the same questions about your creative process. Do you focus on things that energize you or stress you out? Do you focus on the worst interpretation or the best one? If you had the choice, would you choose to focus on the things you typically focus on? You do have a choice. Focus on whatever serves you, whatever inspires you or energizes you.


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Apr 05, 202104:22
PerceptGenesis: How Mental Labels Influence Creativity

PerceptGenesis: How Mental Labels Influence Creativity

Innovative people spend so much time questioning the assumptions of their industry, but they rarely question their own assumptions and belief systems with the same level of scrutiny. How you perceive the world has a huge influence on your personal and professional life. Those perceptions come together to form beliefs, and those beliefs have a huge impact on the actions we take.

Percept-Genesis is the process we use to assign meaning to the world. Your brain has 2 complimentary strategies for this: Bottom-Up Processing & Top-Down Processing.

Bottom-Up processing begins with an experience and the mind reacts to the information by trying to determine what it means. We perceive something happening and then search our memories for anything similar. We combine all the information together before deciding what the experience actually means. This is bottom-up processing. Something happens, we struggle for a moment to figure out what it means, then we conclude by slapping a label on it. We take the raw experience, condense it down into a neat category, and the write a label on it for storage.

The next time we experience something similar, we already have a label ready for it. This is top-down processing. In life, we’re guided by labels far more than raw experience. What you think something ‘should’ mean is often more important than what it actually does mean. For example, there’s probably a food that you refuse to eat that other people enjoy. Your refusal is a label that you’ve placed on the food. People with different labels react differently.

Our job as creative people is to do our best to work with accurate information. We can’t, and won’t, win every battle. Being highly creative is often about flipping back and forth between opposite strategies. This is no difference. We spend time using bottom-up processing until we feel that we have a “good enough” idea of what’s real or what’s possible. Then we assign a label to it so that we can make a decision and move on. However, we also keep in mind that that label is only a label. It represented our best guess at the time. It’s not set in stone. We might have been wrong. Or perhaps we were right, but things have changed since then. Using an outdated label will only lead to unnecessary limitations on your creativity. Oftentimes, this can kill your creativity. You say, “I know my first draft has to be great!” That idea is a label you place on your experience, and it will determine whether your first draft is a fun experience where you explored different ideas or if it makes you constantly feel stressed and not good enough.

This weekend, I encourage you to keep this idea in mind. Not just for your creative life, but in your personal life as well. What labels have you been using that you forgot were just labels. What are some things that frustrate you or make you angry? What are some automated reactions that aren’t serving you? These are all areas where bottom-up processing can be used to change or eliminate labels that aren’t helpful.

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Apr 02, 202114:00
Change Your Mental State To Boost Your Creativity: How Emotions Influence Creativity

Change Your Mental State To Boost Your Creativity: How Emotions Influence Creativity

Creativity is just as much an emotional process as it is a cognitive one. Creativity isn’t just WHAT you’re thinking, it’s HOW you’re thinking. The emotional state that you’re in when you create powerfully influences your process, which, of course, determines your outcome.

Being a stand-up comedian made this really easy for me to notice. I’m not paid to write comedy. Nobody cares if I spend 8 hours a day writing new jokes to tell on stage or if I go on stage and improvise everything I say on the spot. It doesn’t matter to the audience, because the audience will never know. Your audience only gets to consume the product of your work. Your process is your own.

Whenever I sit down to write comedy, whether its for myself or for a coaching client, I always get myself into the right mood first, which, for me, is a playfully curious mood. When I sit down in a playfully curious mood, great stuff happens. When I sit down in a serious, I end up with little more than frustration.

My comedy knowledge or writing skills don’t change depending on my mood. Nor does my motivation. What does change is how I respond to my own thoughts.

Your emotional state changes how your brain acts and reacts. It’s like changing the default settings in your brain. When you’re in a positive mood, your default setting is to interpret things as positive. A negative mood makes you more critical of yourself and others. It’s not that you’re TRYING to do this. Mood determines your default response.

While you’re creating today, think about what default response you want to have. What’s your sweet spot? Keep in mind that it can change over time. Curiosity works great early on while you’re dreaming up ideas, but curiosity makes it really hard to find closure and make decisions. Instead of allowing your work to influence your mood, decide what mood would be best for each task, then work on cultivating that mood.

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Mar 31, 202104:19
Marketing Creativity: Introverts & Extroverts

Marketing Creativity: Introverts & Extroverts

Some of us are shy introverts, some of us are outgoing extroverts, but we all need to market our creativity. Marketing is always a tough topic for creative people because the skills the we use to create our products is different from the skills we use to market them.

Introverts who are creative tend to be very good at the early stages of the creative process. They can find a quiet area and lots of time to thinking through their ideas.

Extroverts tend to be better when it comes to marketing those ideas. They’re more comfortable putting themselves out there than an introvert.

Some fascinating studies have been done on introversion and extroversion. A Harvard study showed that extroverts, and particularly confident extroverts, are more likely to have their ideas chosen in a group. This makes sense. The extroverts are the ones putting their ideas out there. The group can only make decisions based on what options are made public to the group. But the same study, as well as multiple other ones, have shown that it was more often the introvert who had the best idea. The members of the group responded to the confidence of the extrovert and valued their ideas higher than it should have been. They confidently lead the group in the wrong direction.

We can’t escape our personality. We can only recognize what opportunities and threats it creates for us. If you’re an introvert, the biggest threat to your project tends to come at the very end, when it’s time to market and persuade others. If you’re an extrovert, the threat tends to come at the beginning. It’s the lack of time spent alone thinking throughout the implications of your idea. We need both, but we can only excel at one.

How do you do this if you’re an introvert? The introvert needs to get feedback throughout the entire project, not just at the very end. A steady stream of feedback boosts confidence and makes it more likely that you’ll be willing to put yourself out there later. The more you know about how people are already responding to your idea, the easier it will be when that idea is complete.

It’s like a new comedian telling a new joke on stage. The first time they might be shy and timid about the joke, but the more they tell that joke, the more confident they become in it. Receiving positive feedback from earlier performances gives them confidence to take the next step.

You don’t have to fake the confidence. Confidence will come from the feedback you get. Your job is to get good quality feedback and apply it throughout the entire creative process. If you end up with a product that solves people’s problems in an elegant way, your confidence will follow. You can confidently say of your product “I know it will help you, because it’s helped so many other people.”

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Mar 29, 202105:07
Why You Can’t Rush Creativity: Incubating Creative Ideas

Why You Can’t Rush Creativity: Incubating Creative Ideas

Ideas are like stupid children, you need to give them a chance to grow up before you’d actually want to be seen in public with them. Of course, I’m not a father, so perhaps I’m wrong.

Incubation is about giving your ideas time to mature. When you incubate a problem, you’re allowing your subconscious mind to weigh in. Have you ever struggled with a problem, decided to go to bed, and then woke up in the morning with the perfect solution? It happens all the time. You can thank your subconscious brain.

Your subconscious brain lies below the surface level of your conscious thought. You never become aware of the vast majority of the thoughts you have because they’re edited out by your conscious brain. Your conscious brain is a serial processor, it’s like a computer that has to deal with only one thing at a time. To your conscious brain, first you think about A, then you think about B, then you think about C. You can only focus on one thing at a time. Any time you switch topics, you must drop the old one. The reason your conscious brain is a serial, linear processor is because its job is to focus on one thing at a time. Everything that is outside of your conscious awareness is given over to the subconscious brain.

Your subconscious brain is different. Because the conscious brain is focused on the important problem, your subconscious is free to work on everything else. It keeps your heart beating and your food digesting. But it also serves a supportive role to the conscious brain. Any time you make a snap decision based on your gut instinct, your subconscious brain is the source. There simply wasn’t enough time for your conscious brain to think through everything in a linear fashion. Any time you make an assumption, whether it’s good or bad, it comes from your subconscious.

Your subconscious brain is incredibly important to creativity because it’s far more powerful than your conscious brain. There’s a reason why eureka moments pop up out of thin air. When you have a sudden insight into a problem, it comes from your subconscious. If you look back at the types of solutions that came from a eureka moment like this, you’ll notice that they’re almost always elegant solutions to a problem.

Subconscious solutions are different. Since the subconscious isn’t under the same time pressures as the conscious brain, it can work at its own pace, there’s no need for the subconscious to rush. Since it’s a parallel processor, it doesn’t need to create Frankenstein solutions to problems. It’s like an insect that has 1000 eyes. It can look at everything at the same time. It doesn’t need to drop one idea to focus on another. It can do both at the same time. This is why the subconscious brain creates such amazing, creative solutions.

So how do we tap into this process more as creative people? How do we get the most from our subconscious? First, slow down your thinking. The conscious brain always wants to rush. When you incubate an idea, you allow your subconscious time to catch up. Your conscious and subconscious brain are not independent of each other. Your subconscious brain is more like an annoying little brother, constantly peering over your shoulder and saying “Whatcha’ doin? Can I play too?” Whenever you consciously work on a problem, you’re teaching your subconscious brain that the problem is important.

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Mar 26, 202110:19
How Contradictory Personality Traits Lead To Creativity

How Contradictory Personality Traits Lead To Creativity

One of the most fascinating aspects of the creative personality is how often creative people have contradictory personality traits. Creative problem solving is incredibly difficult. There are so many moving pieces that it’s hard to know what to even try. This is why so much advice centers on shifting your perspective. Look at the problem from the top, then from the bottom, then from the inside. Each change in perspective is attempts to find a problem’s weak point. This is how it works when using creative techniques.

The creative personality already has a lot of this built in. For example, creative people tend to be very passionate about their work, but they’re still able to step back and be cold-hearted when its time to evaluate their work. The highly emotional mental state allows creative people to dive deep into their work, keeping them curious to try new ideas and explore the unknown. However, that love for your own work becomes a problem when it comes time to be objective. How will you customers feel about your new product? The passion you used to create the work cannot be used to evaluate it. You must embrace the opposite.

Another common contradiction among creative people is that they are bounce back and forth between being very humble and very proud of themselves. Being humble is a natural result of studying the great thinkers that have come before you. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Anyone who dives into his work and understands his creativity would be humbled by someone who was so incredibly far ahead of everyone else of his time. A reporter once asked Einstein how it felt to be the world’s smartest man. His reply was “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Nicola Tesla.” Studying the greats leads to a feeling of humbleness.

But creative people are a proud group as well. Not everyone can do what we do.  We are the group that devotes their lives to expanding the lives of others. Think about how hard it would be to discuss culture without mentioning anything creative. Creativity has largely designed the culture we live in. The creative person recognizes and is inspired by this. They’re humbled by the amazing work of the people who have come before them, but proud that they are doing their best to continue their legacy.

These are just 2 of the many contradictions within the creative personality. In future episodes, we’ll discuss specific contradictions and how they affect creativity. For today, I think it’s important that you accept these contradictory aspects of your personality. It’s OK to be introverted when you want to get work done and it’s OK to switch to extroversion when you’re passionately talking about your work. It’s OK to be proud of your work, even before you’ve created a masterpiece. It’s OK to be humbled by those that have come before you. Acknowledging the greatness of others doesn’t diminish your own. Embracing each contradiction is like doubling the number of perspectives you can use to solve creative problems. Perhaps you need more knowledge. Curiosity can help. Perhaps you need to find closure on a project that never seems to end. Embracing your curiosity won’t take you there, but being closed-minded can. Each personalty trait is already inside you to varying degrees. There are times when you’re curious and times when you’re closed-minded. It isn’t about changing you, it’s about being the best part of you in each unique situation.

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Mar 24, 202107:22
How Dissatisfaction Guides Our Creativity

How Dissatisfaction Guides Our Creativity

Creativity leads to change. Innovators change the way the world works. In recent years, they’ve radically changed how we connect with others, how we purchase things, how we find entertainment, and more.

Long before these innovations hit the market… long before the creative insight occurs, you’ll find a creative person who not happy with the way things are being done. Dissatisfaction is a major driving force when it comes to creativity.

There are many reasons why dissatisfaction is important to creative work. The biggest reason is that its difficult to do anything that changes an industry when you’re satisfied with what’s going on in that industry. The invention of the television can be seen as a response to being dissatisfied with radio.

Underneath every innovation, there’s a “Why can’t…?” Question that is either implied or explicit. For the television, it was “If we can transmit audio over long distances, why can’t we transmit video?” If radio were good enough, there’d be no reason to push forward. Dissatisfactions can have many solutions, as well. Being unsatisfied with the radio eventually lead to the television, but it also lead to websites like Spotify and Pandora. These companies we’re dissatisfied with radio for entirely different reasons. Their Why Can’t Question was “Why can’t the radio be fined-tuned for each listener?” They asked different questions and get different answers.

Since industries are always evolving, these Why Can’t Questions never go away, they just change into different questions that better reflect the industry today. Whatever innovation comes out tomorrow, next year, or 10 years from now, will be inspired by some type of dissatisfaction with the status quo.

This is one reason why creative people tend to be more dissatisfied then the general population. Before you can solve a problem, you must recognize that there is one. Creative people tend to be more finely-tuned when it comes to problem discovery. The main difference is that non-creatives tend to ignore or complain about the status quo while creative people tend to respond to it as a chance to create something better. It’s not that we actively choose dissatisfaction, but as long as its there, you might as well use it. Like the ancient alchemists’ goal of turning lead into gold, our goal as creatives is to convert dissatisfaction into a greater good.

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Mar 22, 202104:50
Steve Martin’s Creativity: The Rebel’s Rebel

Steve Martin’s Creativity: The Rebel’s Rebel

Steve Martin is one of my all-time favorite creative people. What makes him so special is that he somehow managed to rebel against a group of comedians who were themselves in a rebellion. He became the most financially successful stand-up comedian of all time, selling out arenas years in advance. He was one of the first rock starts of comedy. In the process, he developed an entirely new genre of stand-up comedy, known today as anti-comedy. Anti-comedy is the art of being so unfunny, that you’re funny. It’s telling a corny, awful pun, but selling it as if it were pure genius.

Martin’s early career was often disastrous. He was so different from other comedians that the audience wasn’t sure what to do with him. Every other comedian told easily identifiable jokes. Martin was working from the belief that if he told enough bad jokes, he could get the audience to feel so much tension that they’d eventually have to let it out as laughter. And so he let the bad jokes fly, one after the other.

Martin’s extremely unique approach to comedy caught the eye of producers for Saturday Night Live. His performance was a major success. He became a rockstar practically overnight. In his autobiography, he talks about his first show after SNL. When he took the stage, the audience shouted and cheered so loudly that it frighten and shocked him. This wasn’t how comedy audience normally behave, but then again, this wasn’t a normal comedy show.

Martin’s extremely consistent approach to maximizing uniqueness was his biggest barrier to success early on, but it was what made him so incredibly unique later. Steve Martin was the only comedian willing to pursue anti-comedy. He was willing to learn what works and what doesn’t. The original idea of using anti-comedy made him incredibly unique. But it was his determination in learning the rules of anti-comedy that made him the success he is today.

So often as artists, we’re afraid of having our unique ideas stolen. History tells a different story though. People only steal safe ideas that are easy bets. They don’t steal wildly original and unique ideas. Any comedian could have stolen Steve Martin’s style any time over his first 10 years. But they didn’t. It was only after he was already successful that the copy-cats came out. And at that point, he was so good at what you did that they didn’t matter.

Of course we should do what we can to guard our ideas from being stolen, but we shouldn’t live in fear of it. We should be more afraid of never tapping our creative potential. Don’t be afraid to trust yourself and what makes you unique.

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Mar 19, 202114:35
Why We Struggle To Think Creatively: Over-Inclusive Thinking

Why We Struggle To Think Creatively: Over-Inclusive Thinking

The labels in your head are destroying your creativity. The human brain loves it when it can classify everything into nice, neat, little boxes. It loves organizing information. This is what its good at. But this can be a huge problem for creative people who love combining ideas together. When ideas are too organized in the brain, we call it over-inclusive thinking. Think of it as the tendency for creative people to focus too  much on what makes things different that they don’t realize why they’re similar.

Why is this even a problem in the first place?

Your brain is the most expensive organ in your body. It burns through far more energy than any other organ. The brain has an insatiable appetite. But your brain has shortcuts in place to make thinking more efficient. It’s found ways to burn less energy while getting roughly the same results. However, as creative people, this system can often be TOO good. We miss amazing ideas that are right in front of us because the brain is taking shortcuts.

There are 2 general shortcuts that your brain uses to make thinking more efficient: Categorical thinking and hierarchical thinking.

Categorical thinking is when we group things into categories. This is how stereotypes are created. Instead of treating each person within a group as an individual, we categorize the group and use it as a shortcut when deciding about the individual. The brain creates a label for a category so that it can use it as a shortcut later. This saves the brain a ton of energy, but also makes us sloppy thinkers.

Hierarchical thinking is how we structure information in topics and subtopics. On the top you might have “animals,” then under that you have cats and dogs, and under dogs you have different breeds. You can use the hierarchy to make very quick decision that would otherwise take a long time. If you don’t like dogs, then you automatically know that you don’t like Chihuahuas. If you know you don’t like a category, then you know that you won’t like anything in the subcategory, either.

These are shortcuts that make life easy for a brain that is already overloaded with information. These shortcuts are important to normal, everyday life. We couldn’t make it through a single day without them. Shortcuts work.

But when it comes to creativity, these shortcuts lead to over-inclusive thinking. Information and ideas are so well categorized in the brain that they never have a chance to bounce around and combine with other ideas. The categories and labels your brain uses to separate ideas from each other becomes the same walls that keep those ideas from moving around. So much of creativity relies on allowing diverse ideas to come together. We build walls between each idea to make life easy, but we need to break down those walls to allow ideas to come together to form something new. Creativity is often referred to as “Combinatorial play” because creative ideas often come from the playful behavior of combining ideas together. But we can’t combine those ideas together unless we first break out of over-inclusive thinking.

Today, as you’re creating, stay mindful of these shortcuts. Don’t rely so much on your past experiences that you fail to see the original ideas that are right in front of you. The problem you have in your industry has likely already been solved in another industry. Break out of over-inclusive thinking. Stop seeing other people or industries as totally different from yours. That’s just a shortcut in your brain. You can find inspiration for creativity anywhere, but it requires you to break down the walls that keep ideas apart

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Mar 17, 202109:42
Experiments: Your #1 Tool For Creative Thinking

Experiments: Your #1 Tool For Creative Thinking

Experimenting is one of the most important actions you can take as a creative person. What I love most about running an experiment is that it implies that you don’t know what will happen. You might have a guess, but you aren’t sure.

Experiments require that we put down our ego. We say “I’m not sure what will happen, but I’m willing to find out.”

If you want to explore the unknown or be an innovator, get comfortable with experimentation. The more original your idea is, the less prior knowledge you’ll have about it. When Twitter was first invented, nobody knew for certain whether it’d work or not. Twitter was different from every other social media platform at the time. You couldn’t compare it to anything else, so you couldn’t take any meaningful guesses about what would happen. It required experimentation. There are some great interviews with Jeff Bezos before Amazon become the powerhouse it is today where Bezos acknowledged that he wasn’t sure if the idea was going to work or not. It seemed like it should, but he wasn’t guaranteed.

This is what tech companies do so well. Technology develops at such a fast pace that it’s important to quickly figure out what technology is coming out and how it can be used. Since the technology is new, nobody really knows for sure. Experimentation is key. Small companies, which are typically much quicker at responding to emerging technology come up with radically new ideas. Ideas that, with increasing frequency, are then bought up by the industry juggernauts for ridiculous sums of money.

Experiments can be big or small. Small start-ups typically stake their entire company on a single, innovative experimental idea. Small experiments are much more common. This is what you do when you’re solving a problem. You ask yourself questions like, what if I tried this or that? Then you run the experiment to see what happens.

As your creating today, think about what experiments you can run. What are you curious about? If you’re in the early stages of a creative project, try running wild experiments and seeing what happens. If you’re towards the end of a project run small experiments to see if you can improve on your design. When you’re done, be sure to spend time objectively analyzing what happened. Learn every lesson you can, apply those lessons, and then repeat the process with another experiment. This process can strengthen any idea.

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Mar 15, 202105:26
Maslow's Hierarchy (For Creatives): How To Be a Happier, Creative Person

Maslow's Hierarchy (For Creatives): How To Be a Happier, Creative Person

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is one of the most groundbreaking theories of human psychology. It posits that human needs are hierarchical. We must satisfy the lower needs before we can satisfy the higher needs. There are 5 groups of humans needs. From the lowest to the highest, those needs are:

1- Psychological Needs (food, water, warmth)

2- Safety Needs (physical safety)

3- Belongingness and Love Needs (Friends, intimate relationships)

4- Esteem Needs (prestige, accomplishments)

5- Self-Actualization Needs (achieving your full potential)

Creativity resides at the top of the pyramid. It’s a self-actualization need. This is an important clue as to why so many creative people are depressed. The basic needs for food, water, and safety, are absolute musts. They take priority over everything else.

The need for belongingness and esteem aren’t musts though. This is what opens the door to problems. For SOME creative people, especially among various types of artists, there’s a tendency to place all your hopes on self-actualization. There’s an unconscious belief that creating a masterpiece will give you everything you want. This is a Faustian bargain. They’re essentially betting on 2 things being true.

First, that the gamble actually works. They push through and actually create a masterpiece.

Second, they’re assuming that the masterpiece will automatically fill in the rest of their human needs. One only needs to look at the behaviors of famous people to realize this isn’t a guarantee. Famous artists feel the constant stress of having to live up to their fan base’s expectations. They take anti-depressants. They get addicted to drugs. They fall down like any other human. Instead of having their needs for esteem met, they’re replaced with the belief that they must fight to keep it.

Jim Carrey, one of the exceedingly rare creative people that have found both ultra-success and happiness, said this: “I wish everyone could experience being rich and famous, so they’d see it wasn’t the answer to anything.”

The lesson here is simple. Don’t flip the pyramid on its head. Being hard on yourself won’t inspire you to be more creative, it will only leave you exhausted. Don’t assume that some creative masterpiece will save you or that the ends will justify the means. Creativity is a part of who you are. It will still be there if you focus on yourself for awhile. I hope you take this weekend to get aligned. Get your pyramid in order. It probably won’t happen in a single day, but that’s OK. Point your creativity inwards.

If you’ve been living with an incomplete pyramid for awhile now, then you deserve it. You’ve likely told yourself that the outcome will justify the means. I’ve fallen for this exact same thing myself. You deserve to be happy.

And for the ultra-competitive listeners, you deserve to know what your capable of when you’re fully aligned. If you’ve ever gotten a full night’s sleep and woken up feeling more productive and creative, you know what I mean. Sleep is a great example because it’s obvious. Tired people, are stupid people… and being ambitious will only help you create more stupid ideas. Go to bed. Get your human needs in order, then try again tomorrow. You’ll likely find a flood of ideas coming to you before you finish your morning coffee.

Don’t flip your pyramid. Don’t ignore your human needs. Don’t take the long road to happiness.

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Mar 12, 202107:35
Identity: How Protecting Your Ego Kills Your Creativity

Identity: How Protecting Your Ego Kills Your Creativity

How do you view yourself? What identity have you created for yourself? When you tell yourself the story of you, what do you say? What experiences have shaped you? What beliefs do you hold? What values guide you? Your answers to all of these questions make up your identity. They are what psychological researchers would call your “Self-concept.”

Your identity plays a massive role in your life, but it does so in the background. We don’t explicitly say “I’m a kind person, so I’m going to help this person.” Yet that’s exactly what happens. Our behavior is shaped by the identity that we hold for ourselves. We take actions whenever there’s a nice fit between who we are and what we need to do, but we procrastinate, ignore, or even attack ideas that don’t fit our world view.

In your brain, there’s a very special type of neuron called a “Defense Neuron.” There are all types of specialized neurons in the brain. Some focus on facial recognition, some are responsible for counting numbers, and some are so highly specialized that they only light up when you see a particular person or celebrity. Defense neurons are the same, except they special in something incredibly awesome. Their job is to protect your ego. They only light up when you are exposed to ideas that don’t fit how you see yourself. They light up when a democrat is exposed to republican views, or when a republic is exposed to a liberal one. They light up when a kind person witnesses an act of cruelty. They light up when a miser or penny-pincher is asked for money. Their only job is to protect your identity… to protect your ego.

All procrastination can be traced by to defense neurons in your brain. Why didn’t you start your college term paper sooner? Because defense neurons in your brain were afraid of failing. They were afraid that doing a bad job on the paper would result in the loss of your ego. They chose to protect your identity, even when it wasn’t actually in your best interest to do so. So why did you eventually sit yourself down and write the paper? Once again, defense neurons. They were confronted with the growing reality that NOT turning in a paper would result in a loss of ego. Earlier on, the defense neurons tried to protect you by keeping you away from what needed to be done. Now they’re trying to protect you by pushing you towards its completion. It used the same system to arrive at two wildly different conclusions.


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Mar 10, 202119:08
The God-Like Power of Creativity: The Power To Create Or Destroy

The God-Like Power of Creativity: The Power To Create Or Destroy

As a creative person, you hold the power of the gods. You hold the power to create and destroy. The product of your creativity can send powerful companies to the knees.

At its height, Yahoo was worth over 125 billion dollars. A few years later, Yahoo crumbled and lost 96% of its value. The sale of Yahoo is known as the saddest deal in the history of the tech industry. Let me put this into perspective. If you took your car, melted it down into a solid block of metal, and then sold the metal, the deal you get would be around twice as good as what Yahoo got. All this chaos was caused by 2 phd students who didn’t even want to be entrepreneurs.

There tragic tail is far from unique, though. Blockbuster video was a behemoth in the movie rental industry. They went from being valued at 6 billion dollars to becoming nothing more than the butt of a joke and a sad, cautionary tail. All because 2 entrepreneurs from California had a vision.

Out of the ashes of these once great companies, new behemoths arose. Netflix has replaced Blockbuster as the newest powerhouse in entertainment, but they are just as susceptible to being destroyed as the competitor they replaced. The same is true for Google. No one is immune to the march of progress.

What is the number one fear of these huge companies? It’s that people like you might replace them. It’s fairly easy to fight against a foe when you know what your enemy is capable of. If you choose the battlefield, you’ve already put the odds in your favor. When people fight you on your own terms, you’ve already ensured victory.

But creative people are different. Creative people don’t attack head on. They do the unexpected. They surprise you. It’s more akin to guerrilla warfare than conventional fighting. They pop out of nowhere and hit you where you were the most vulnerable. Because powerful companies don’t know where the battlefield is, they can’t protect themselves. To the large corporation, the scariest place in the world is someone’s garage. In your garage, you can create anything you want. You can solve any problem. And you can reveal your invention to the world without anyone seeing it coming. They are afraid of you… and they damn well should be. The moment they think they’re safe is the moment they become the next Yahoo. The next Blockbuster Video. And the worst part about this whole thing is that they can’t do a damn thing to stop you.

Think of it like a fight scene in a movie. The hero fends off attackers from all sides. They fight off multiple opponents at the same time. Then, the door opens and a giant, behemoth of a man walks into the room. This is when the audience says “That’s it. It’s over. There’s no possible way you can fight such a big, scary looking guy.” A powerful company is that scary guy. You… are the skinny little brat who punches him right in the d*ck. Do that, and it doesn’t matter how big or scary they appear. They’ll fall to their knees.

Powerful companies want to choose the battlefield. They want you to think that this is a fight over resources and raw strength, because that is a fight they can easily win. If you choose their battlefield, if you try a head-on attack, they will crush you. But it’s not a fight over resources. It’s a fight over ideas. That’s why they can’t stop you. That is why you are a CEO’s worst nightmare.

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Mar 08, 202106:34
Taking Risks: Unlock Your Creativity By Letting Go

Taking Risks: Unlock Your Creativity By Letting Go

Creative people are risk takers. We invest time, energy, and oftentimes a lot of money pursuing our ideas. Ideas that are not guaranteed to work. Creativity researchers have identified risk taking as one of the most important aspects of the creative personality. Simply put, if you’re not willing to take risks, you’re not going to be a highly original thinker, or, at least you want get those highly original ideas in front of the public. People who are too shy to take risks, tend to not be creative people. Being able to take risks is that important.

Dealing with risk isn’t easy for creative people. There’s no single rule that can tell you when to take a risk or even how much you should risk. Every creative idea is, by its very definition, something new that hasn’t existed yet. There are no rules because it’s an entirely new game being played.

When we have already created an idea, risk is much easier to assess. An entrepreneur develops an idea and then they can take a relatively accurate guess at how much time and money it’d cost to implement it. This is the most obvious risk we take as creatives, which is why it tends to get the most attention, but it’s not the most important. The biggest risks a creative person faces isn’t anything that they can quantify easily. The biggest risks come throughout the process of creating the idea itself.

When you are creating an idea, you’re constantly taking risks, both big and small. Problem solving is usually a small risk. You have a set goal and you can make good judgements about how much time it’d take to solve it. You risk your time and energy, but since it’s a short-term goal, there’s not much you can really lose.

That changes the bigger the project gets. Large projects have a lot of moving pieces. The person writing a novel has the immediate, concrete problem of writing this chapter, but they have the abstract, long-term problem of writing the entire book. Each chapter of the book contains a new set of problems to deal with.

By writing the book, the novelist is making a bet. He’s risking the time spent on chapter 1 because he believes that when he’s on chapter 2, he’ll be able to solve any problems that arise. This is why ego-strength and resilience are also important aspects of the creative personality. You won’t write chapter 1 if you don’t trust yourself to eventually figuring out any problems that arise in chapter 2.

Often, the rules of the game are unfairly set up so that we can’t win. On one hand, we don’t want to invest too much of our ego when there’s a chance we’ll be turned down. On the other hand, we generally don’t like to be seen as full of ourselves and over-confident. This is incredibly unfair. We’re not allowed to sit out the game, but we’re not allowed to play hard. It’s no wonder that so many creative people struggle when it comes time to persuade others of their ideas.

How do we fix this broken system? By realizing that those rules are merely in our own heads. Scientific studies on creativity show us that marketing and persuasion are important parts of the overall creative process. If you aren’t willing to market your ideas to others, you better find somebody who will.

Learn More:
Tapping Your Creative Muse Program

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Mar 05, 202113:41
Imagination: The Most Productive Creative Tool (That You're Not Using Enough)

Imagination: The Most Productive Creative Tool (That You're Not Using Enough)

How often do you sit down and allow your imagination to run wild? Using my imagination is one of my favorite parts of the creative process. When I write comedy, I spend very little time actually touching the keyboard. The vast majority of my time writing is spend playing around with ideas in my imagination. It’s only after I find something interesting in my imagination that I actually write it down and begin working with it.

Using your imagination is intensely enjoyable. Think of it as a form of mental playfulness. Using your imagination is different than simple problem-solving.  When you problem solve, you have a specific outcome in mind. You can win or lose. When you use your imagination, there’s no specific outcome that you have in mind. Of course you hope to stumble upon something you can use, but just like how children play, the act in itself is the outcome. You don’t do it to get anything from it, even though you will. You do it because it’s fun to freely explore your ideas.

As your creating today, spend some time playing around with ideas in your own imagination. Let ideas freely bounce around. Let them combine and then separate again. You can consciously guide the process so that you keep focused on the general topic without being overly controlling of them. Think of it as telling children where they’re allowed to play, but not telling them what or how to play. They still get to be children and have fun, but they need to do it in the area you tell them to. Do this, and you’ll find unexpected and unique ideas.

The combinations of ideas found in your imagination don’t have to play by the same rules as those you work for. If you’re consciously trying to solve a problem, you’ll likely reject weirder ideas. When you’re playing inside your imagination however, those ideas are allowed to be weird. They’re allowed to be crazy. When your imagination finally stumbles upon something amazing, you’ll know it. A red flag will pop up in your head and you’ll think “Wait a second! That’s actually good.” From there, you can take your idea and elaborate on it. Let go of the need to control the process. Use your imagination to have fun and let the solution find you.

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Mar 03, 202106:34
Unexpectedly Awesome: Court Serendipity To Innovate

Unexpectedly Awesome: Court Serendipity To Innovate

You don’t need to take control of every single aspect of your creativity. Make room for something unexpectedly awesome. Oftentimes, as creative people we love making decisions. We tend to be really competitive people, so we love pushing forward. While being competitive can be helpful, it also focuses us a bit too much on the path ahead of us. We get so focused on trying to win, that we end up missing the original ideas that would actually help us. The more competitive you are, the more you’ll focus on what’s directly ahead of you. You’ll make great progress, but only for as long as the ideas in front of you are what you happen to need, when you happen to need them. When the ideas directly in front of you no longer work, which at some point is inevitable, then you got a problem.

One discovery often leads to another. This is why a tiny, unexpected ideas can lead to something truly incredible. You’d be surprised at how many inventions began with an accidental discovery: bread, vinegar, the microwave oven, nutrasweet, photography, and even cellphones. You could trace any of these inventions back to some kind of unexpected discovery. Unexpected ideas have a great way of changing the entire direction of a project.

This is what it means to court serendipity. Leave yourself open to the unexpected. Don’t be so focused on getting to where you want to go that you ignore all the interesting ideas around you. From time to time, make it a point to create new experiences for yourself. This will open up possibilities in both your creative and personal life.

Kaizen Question (Join the discussion on our FB group)
What is an experience that you had in the past that unexpectedly helped you with solving a problem?

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Mar 01, 202109:10
How Schedules Boost Creativity

How Schedules Boost Creativity

It might seem counter-intuitive, but habits and schedules can be incredibly beneficial to creativity. Creative people do the unexpected. They mix things up. They expose themselves to new ideas and incorporate them in fresh and interesting ways. On the other hand, schedule and habits invite the expected and mundane into our lives. The reject fresh and interesting ways of doing things… how could these two things possibly get along?

All of these activities require a lot of energy from the brain. Creativity isn’t easy. This is why schedules are so important to creative people. Many creative people falsely think that scheduling is a bad thing. When done in moderation, it’s incredibly beneficial to creativity.

The most obvious way to apply this is to schedule your creative time. This does’t mean you aren’t allowed to work outside of this time, but it does mean that you set aside a part of your day to focus on your creativity. You might prefer being creative in the morning or at night. Either way, it should be scheduled.

The creative muse can strike at any time, but the only reason the muse found them is because they had been consistently working towards the idea. The consistent work, the consistent schedule, taught their subconscious brain what to look for. It was only a matter of time before the muse showed up. It was actively working on the process that eventually resulted in the creative insight.

A less obvious way that schedules help creative people is by protecting your mental energy. Every decision you make throughout a day requires some amount of mental energy to make. The bigger the decision, the more energy your brain has to burn through to make it. We’ll discuss this in a later episode.

Schedules are a way of reducing the number of decisions you make throughout a day. You wake up in the morning and you turn on the coffee maker because that’s what you do every day. If you’re a coffee drinker, your brain didn’t need to think about the decision. That’s one less decision you have to make that day. This isn’t a whole lot of energy to save, but it becomes significant when you include all the different habitual actions you take throughout a day. The entire reason we rely on habits is to save energy on decision making. This is why schedules are important.

As you’re creating today, think about how your schedule is either adding to or subtracting from your creativity. What decisions can you schedule ahead of time so that you no longer need to worry about them? Pay special attention to how your schedule might be sucking energy out of you. For me, I’ve had a lot of success scheduling emails after I’ve completed my writing for the day. Emails are rarely urgent and they tend to throw a wrench into your daily schedule.

Here is today’s question for the
Kaizen Creativity Facebook Group:

1 - What are some ways you can take more control over your schedule to benefit your creativity?

2 - What are the biggest blocks to making these changes?

LINKS

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Feb 26, 202107:55
Is "Right-Brain Thinking" Even A Thing?

Is "Right-Brain Thinking" Even A Thing?

Say goodbye to the "I'm not a right-brain thinker" fallacy. Today, we’ll look at the differences between the left and right side of the brain and what it means for our creativity, before finishing with an easy to way apply these ideas in your own creative process.

The left hemisphere of your brain specializes in analytical thinking. It’s good at breaking ideas apart and studying them closely. The right hemisphere specializes in holistic thinking. It’s better at the big picture.

Brain scans studies haven’t been able to find anything that we might call “side-preference.” A 2013 study took 1000 brain scans from different people and analyzed activity in 7000 different regions of the brain. The researchers concluded that the idea of being a left-brain or right-brain thinker appears to be little more than a figure of speech. There’s simply no evidence that your brain cares about which side does what.

So what makes the difference then? Why are some people clearly better with numbers and others better at artwork and design? The biggest factor is likely your personal comfort level. The brain loves doing things its good at. The loves the positive feedback loop.

People who think they’re good at math spend more time doing it, which makes them better at it. The better they get at math, the more comfortable they feel doing it, and the more time and preference they’ll have for it.

This exact same process would play out for anything. Someone aspiring to write music would develop a positive feedback loop, but instead of training your brain to recognize mathematical relationships, they’d be training their brain to recognize musical ones.

The brain doesn’t really care whether you choose math or music. Your brain doesn’t have a preference, but your ego does.

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Feb 24, 202106:29
What Makes Goals Motivating?

What Makes Goals Motivating?

What makes a goal motivating? Today, we’ll talk about a really simple way of understanding motivation. When you think of your goals, how much do you trust yourself to execute your plan. This is called self-efficacy, and it plays one of the most important roles in motivation.

Self-efficacy is the belief that you have the ability to succeed. People who have self-efficacy see themselves in the driver’s seat of their life.

The value of your goal depends on two things: How important is the outcome and how likely is it to happen? Take a gambling analogy. Your goal is the jackpot. How motivated you are depends on the size of the jackpot. You’ll try harder to win a million dollars than you would to win 10 dollars. The bigger and more meaningful your goal, the more motivated you’ll be to pursue it.

But probability is also important. How likely are you to win? If you knew there was literally a 0.00% chance of winning a million dollars, it would mean nothing to you. Even the compulsive gambler could stay away from that bet. But once the probability increases above 0%, the bet suddenly has value. If you multiply any number by zero, you still end up with zero. All creativity needs is a meaningful goal and the belief that it’s attainable. When motivation is in place, creativity is bound to follow. Without it, you find yourself in a constant struggle with procrastination.

As the chance of winning increases, you become more and more motivated to place a bet or buy a lottery ticket. The total value of your goal depends on these two factors: How important is the outcome and what chance do you have to get it?

Self-efficacy influences your perceived chance of winning. Self-efficacy is entirely subjective. The gambler will be motivated to buy lottery tickets because they FEEL that they have a good chance of winning. The actual chance of winning has nothing to do with it. You’re motivated by how you feel, not by what you know. If I feel relatively certain I can win the lottery, I’m going to play, regardless of the actual chance of winning.

The belief in your own ability is what motivates you to pursue your goals. Without it, it doesn’t matter what the jackpot is.

Kaizen Question:

  • What kind of motivation hacks have you used in your own industry?
  • How do your self-efficacy change in different stages of a project?
  • Do you do anything to get self-efficacy back when you lose it?

LINKS:
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Feb 22, 202107:49
Knowledge & Creativity: That Time Henry Ford's Argued In Court That He Wasn't Stupid

Knowledge & Creativity: That Time Henry Ford's Argued In Court That He Wasn't Stupid

In the summer of 1919, Henry Ford  was placed on the witness stand ready to be questioned by a defense attorney for the Chicago Tribune. It was an odd case to be in court, even by today’s standards. Ford was suing the Chicago Tribune for slander. Specifically, for being called an ignorant anarchist.

The defense set out to prove that Henry Ford was ignorant by asking him questions about American History, questions that Henry Ford was rarely able to answer. The court transcripts become popular reading at the time. People love it when the rich and powerful stumble and fall.

What’s weird is that, in general, the Chicago Tribune was probably right. Henry Ford knew fewer basic facts than the average American. But basic knowledge isn’t what made him creative or successful.

Ford’s ability to innovate wasn’t born out of general knowledge that you could pick up in high school. It came from working with machines his entire adult life.

Knowledge can be broken down into 2 categories: General knowledge, like math and science, and domain-specific knowledge. As the name implies, domain-specific knowledge is highly specialized knowledge. Domain-Specific Knowledge forms the building blocks of a creative idea. Without it, you won’t know enough about your industry to understand what problems need to be solved; You won’t understand the pros and cons of different ways of solving problems; You wouldn’t know the needs of the customers you served.

Your creativity isn’t determined by how many facts you know or what you can score on an IQ test. Your creativity is determined by how much knowledge you have about your industry and your willingness to think creatively with that knowledge. You need both. You need the building blocks as a raw material and you need the creative skills to work with that raw material.


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Feb 19, 202107:02
What Makes Art "Useful" to People?

What Makes Art "Useful" to People?

There are two components to every creative idea: Usefulness and uniqueness. Both can be gray areas for people. What makes something useful is subjective. What’s useful to me isn’t necessarily useful to another person.

Artwork is a great example. While I recognize that abstract forms of art are highly valued by some people, I can’t actually see the value in it myself. To me, they seem like blotches of paint with no real purpose. But others see beauty in them. Neither of us are right or wrong. What’s useful is entirely subjective.

So what makes art useful? In most cases, how useful artwork is depends entirely on how meaningful it is to the person viewing it. This is true whether we’re talking about a visual painting, a piece of music, or industries like stand-up comedy.

Each area of art has wildly different ways of arriving at meaning, but they all still share this same foundation. To be useful and important, art must have meaning behind it.

As you’re creating today, think about what usefulness and meaningfulness mean in your specific industry. We don’t have to create new ideas and hope that others find them meaningful. Start with something meaningful and design the entire idea around that. With something meaningful at the core of your creative idea, you can then work backwards to create your art. Start with WHY you’re creating art in the first place, then figure out WHAT you actually want to create

Kaizen Question:

  • How does your industry generally define usefulness?
  • What is a less-obvious way that people in your industry find something useful? (i.e., stand-up comedians can make a deeper point, rather than simply get laughs)

LINKS:
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Feb 17, 202106:08
Feedback: Getting & Using Feedback To Improve Creative Flow
Feb 15, 202111:20
Amor Fati: Love Your Fate
Feb 12, 202111:28
Do The Opposite: Creativity Techniques For Original Thinking

Do The Opposite: Creativity Techniques For Original Thinking

One of the easiest ways to ensure that your idea is unique is by simply doing the opposite of what others are doing. Every idea is made up for smaller ideas. In creativity research, we call these ideas “components.” Think of a component like a Lego piece. You can build whatever you like with them, but you need to have enough pieces, and you need those pieces to fit together. How good your overall idea is doesn’t depend on any single piece. It depends entirely on how those pieces fit together.  When you practice the “Do The Opposite” strategy, you’re essentially taking an important component and inverting it. Of course it’s not going to fit into what you’ve already created, but it’s not supposed to. 

Keep your focus on what you gain, not just what you lose. If you did the opposite of what others expected, what would be the real trade off? Perhaps you can make it work, or perhaps even asking this question is enough to push you in an entirely different direction. Either way, you’ll be exploring the unknown. For a creative person, this is already paradise.

Feb 10, 202107:22
Constraints: Guiding Your Creativity Towards The Best Solution

Constraints: Guiding Your Creativity Towards The Best Solution

Sometimes creative people fall into the originality trap. They focus so much on originality that they lose focus on the other half of the creativity equation: effectiveness. Placing contraints on ourselves as creators is how we guide our creativity towards usefulness. They are a necessary component to great creative thinking. Your creative. Your a free thinker. You’re an artist. That’s true. But what matters is whether you can be a free thinker inside a set of constraints. When you see the problem differently than others, it only makes sense that you’d take different actions, based on different goals, and arrive at a different conclusion. Your constraints matter. How you define a problem matters.

Feb 08, 202107:46
Mindfulness: Getting Clarity On Your Creative Projects

Mindfulness: Getting Clarity On Your Creative Projects

Mindfulness has so many implications to our lives, both inside and outside of creativity. Mindfulness is about taking control of how we perceive the world. We override the automatic behaviors that dominate our daily life and, instead, we view the situation from a fresh perspective. You can choose to be mindful. You can choose to hear the criticisms and not respond. 

As you’re creating today, be mindful of how you’re approaching the problems. Pay particular attention to what preconceived notions you’re bringing into your work. This weekend, I encourage you to use mindfulness not just for your creativity, but to live a happier life.

Feb 05, 202107:20