Quote: (09-21-2017 11:18 AM)John Michael Kane Wrote:
Engineers, programmers, artists, product designers, writers, etc. all have to use different methods to will nothing into something.
These careers all combine a degree of skill and creativity. Some people in these fields lean heavily towards the skill side and only a small number really engage in creativity as a large part of their job. For example, an engineer that spends his days crunching the numbers to ensure that the next bridge his team builds doesn't collapse isn't creating anything new. He's putting his knowledge and skills to use to help with the building of a fairly routine structure.
My brother is an electrical engineer and I'd estimate that his work is about 5% creative. The other 95% is participating in meetings (to share from his knowledge of what is possible and impossible, recommended and not recommended, affordable and cost-prohibitive)putting the actual pieces of a design together and then testing finished products to make sure that they work. Only a small portion of his work day goes into devising solutions that are not repetitive and routine in nature.
Product designers are generally going to fall much more into the creative zone for their day to day work, which is why you'll rarely meet a professional product designer.
Product design usually involves investing a ton of time and usually money into something that is completely unproven.
Of the companies that are large enough to sustain this type of development, this work is generally done through their R&D department, which I'm guessing mostly employees people who are there to practice a specific skill, not create. They'll spend a lot of time research potential market demands, testing ideas out, and building prototypes, which are all skills more so than creative functions.
I'm guessing that even in a big company, there are at best only a handful of people who are actually tasked with thinking about the next big idea (if any at all). I think it's far more likely for a company to empower people who come up with an idea (despite what their real job tasks are) and help them develop that idea than specifically assign people to trying to think something up, as creativity tends to happen on its own schedule and is hard to do as a job.
Artists, if they are creating logos, for example, a high degree of creativity goes into their work, as each product needs to express a certain uniqueness. Watercolour artists, on the other hand, practice the skill of turning a real world scene in a finished painting. Not much creativity there. It's 99% skill.
Writing is also more of a skill than a creative function, especially if doing non-fiction. Good fiction will be good because of the ability of the writer to create a story that doesn't bore you because it's new and therefore interesting.
Non-fiction is far more about practicing the skill of doing good research and then clearly communicating concepts and information concisely.
Quote: (09-21-2017 11:18 AM)John Michael Kane Wrote:
Quote:Suits Wrote:
I am a creative person. I didn't really begin to tap into this feature of who I am until about three years ago.
Question: Was there any particular step(s) you took to discover and apply your creativity? A book? A course? Some observation(s) you made about the world? I'm always curious as to how people find their creative muse.
I spent my whole life probably giving many people the impression that I was a guy who simply complained about everything.
In reality, I was using people as sounding boards to try to solve the problems I saw in the world.
But due to a lack of skills in the requisite areas, I was unable to actually solve any problems most of my life.
In university, I attended the same school as my older sister and she suggested that I come work at the on-campus dining hall where she was the lead student manager. Working there annoyed the fuck out of me, because I was highly aware of a great number of efficiencies that should have been easy to correct.
I also viewed myself as a talented person whose true abilities were being wasted, which resulted in no lack of frustration.
Around the second semester there, I volunteered to write up a report detailing areas that could be improved upon for the dining hall. I later found out that the next year (after my sister graduated and was replaced as lead student manager) that nearly every one my suggestions had been acted on that following year and with good success.
I learned a valuable lesson from that experience. First of all, the best way to get promoted and be in a position to solve problems was to shut the fuck up, demonstrate serious people skills and be the model employee that senior management would feel comfortable putting in a position of minor authority.
Unlike my sister (who is one of those people that is organized and precious and is good at school, but not much else) I lacked the ability to do any of those things. My biggest area of lacking was socially. Eight years of homeschooling and having a high enough IQ that my head was nearly permanently stuck in the clouds made it hard (and to some degree, continues to make it hard) for me to relate to other people, especially ordinary every day people.
I recognized this deficiency and worked hard to improve upon it, but as recently as 2013, my personality and limited growth in the requisite leadership skills to succeed in a management role continued to trip me up.
I realized that my best shot to find satisfaction in work was not to wait for someone else to hire me for a job that I would enjoy doing, but rather to create an ideal job for myself.
Discovering my ability to create within the educational industry was more fluke than anything else.
I finally got tired of doing teaching jobs where I was handed curriculum that didn't work, didn't fill class time and seemed to be created by people who'd never spent any time in a classroom themselves.
I told myself, "I can do better than this" and set out to do just that.
In that process, I learned to take an idea through several cycles of testing and create a product that not only worked well, but could be easily explained to and understood by other teachers.
Initially, I simply planned to create some methods for my own use as a teacher, but after seeing the success of some of my ideas when I implemented them in the classroom, I soon realized that I had a gift that would be best utilized by creating products to share with other teachers, rather than limiting myself to simply producing materials for my own personal use.
My main source of inspiration is having my own time wasted in various useless language classes I've taken over the years and also by just a handful of language learning experiences that happened outside of the classroom that were fundamental in helping me make quickly language acquisition progress.
Once I determined and proved that you can have 90% of students communicating with confidence in a new language after only 22.5-45 classroom hours, I decided that it was a crime for any student to spend a semester in a language class that achieved anything less than the ability to speak the language. (Note that it takes much longer for a person to memorize the necessary vocabulary to speak fluently in all situations, but students over the age of 7 can learn enough to function in a new language in well under 50 hours of classroom time).
Quote: (09-21-2017 11:18 AM)John Michael Kane Wrote:
Quote:Suits Wrote:
Since then, I've realized that I'm not sure if I've ever met anyone who actually does create. I know those people are out there (watch enough Shark Tank episodes and you'll see a few), but they seem incredibly uncommon. My best guess is that there are far more people capable of noting a business opportunity and who have the drive to see it through.
When it comes to businesses, there are four general flavors in my experience as an entrepreneur, listed from hardest to least hard:
1. Original concept. That is when a whole new product space is developed. The Telegraph for communication would be an example. This brings to mind your example of Shark Tank people creating a whole new product/market space where one did not previously exist.
2. Iterative concept. That is when existing technology or a business concept is updated. For instance, landline telephones to cell phones. Dumb cell phones to smartphones.
3. Efficiency concept. That is where existing technology is taken but modified to be much cheaper or more efficient, even if the underlying tech didn't change that much. Uber is the prime example of taking existing infrastructure that was being under-utilized and put those cars/drivers to work.
4. Copycat concept. This is where you launch a coffee shop because you know people like drinking coffee. There's no total creativity because you know people will want comfy chairs, fast wifi and good coffee. You can pattern your store off successful coffee shops. Taking this concept even further, if you don't want any creativity, you open a franchise, as you discard all notions of creativity instead of having guaranteed corporate mandates on what you should and shouldn't do. You've outsourced your creativity.
I love the film
The Founder because it shows a real creative process better than any movie I've ever watched. Two brothers set out to create a highly efficient kitchen service.
This is what creativity looks like. Notice, that unlike slapping watercolours on a canvass, it's a process of trial and error. You don't exactly go into it with a clear solution in mind. Rather, you come into it with a problem and you test hypotheses as to what could be a possible solution.
This particular scene shows a 6 hour process, which I would consider a very quick turn round time. The solutions I work on involve months of turn around from idea, through prototype building and testing, which is a multi-cycle process unless you get it perfect the first time. The creative process for many things can stretch out much longer, years or even decades.
There are two more points that stand out from that film, but the first contains spoilers, so only read the bold if you've already seen the film or don't care about spoilers.
In the film (and the real life story on which it is based), the man who is ultimately successful is not a creative person. He's simply a man capable of recognizing a good idea when he sees one. You see several times in the film that other people bring him new ideas that he chooses to implement, but you never see him invent anything himself.
The creative guys who came up with the business concept that Kroc turns into the biggest fast-food chain in the world got screwed in the end because while they had the creative ability, they lacked the drive and business savvy to grow their small business into a national chain and couldn't handle the stress of fighting to maintain control of the business they'd poured all their passion into.
The second point is that the McDonalds business went against many business assumptions throughout it's history. Instead of introducing better, more comfortable chairs, they actually innovated uncomfortable chairs to reduce the time people stayed camped out at a table.
In reference to the point above about creating a coffee shop that is better run and more responsive to customer needs than its competition, sometimes the money is in not responding to customer needs (at least not entirely), but rather finding ways to minimize costs while retaining customers. The drive-through window is genius, as it allows restaurants to sell food at regular prices without having to pay rent for a larger dining area or delivery drivers and allows fast-food joints to continue selling at a point in the evening where it's unprofitable to keep the dining room open (but still profitable to keep the kitchen open).
It's a perfect example of going against the grain (taking away the dining room experience and table service from customers), but making more money because the benefits being able to pick up dinner quickly on the way home was something that kept customers coming back, despite the departure from conventional wisdom on how to run a restaurant.
Tim Hortons in Canada has been very successful by offering a drive-through window as a coffee shop, since coffee costs almost nothing to brew and a coffee-shop's biggest liability is customers who sip a $1 coffee for 5 hours while they take up valuable real estate inside the venue.
There's a reason why there are far more Tim Horton locations in Canada than Starbucks. It's not because people don't like $7 sugar bombs. It's because Tim Horton's has a superior business model (in my opinion).
Quote: (09-21-2017 11:18 AM)John Michael Kane Wrote:
Creativity looks to apply original concepts, modify them as they are field tested (or in this case, classroom-tested) and adjust the program accordingly based upon real-world feedback.
Exactly.
Quote: (09-21-2017 11:18 AM)John Michael Kane Wrote:
Being creative is hard. Being creative for an extended period of time is even much harder. Most people overestimate their ability to sustain creativity, even if it is something as "easy" as writing a daily blog. Creativity burnout is real for many people, which is why most people can't and won't be location independent through creative means.
That's why I approach it with the expectation that it will happen at it's own speed. I just maintain a product testing regiment and allow the ideas to come to me when they want to. Due to the slow pace of product testing, I always have a backlog of ideas to work on when I'm in the mood to create, when I'm not, I just rest up or go out to enjoy some socializing or otherwise keep myself healthy.
Nothing will kill off the creative juices faster than not living a balance lifestyle and failing to take good care of myself.
For me, the best recipe for having a productive day is getting started with a good protein heavy breakfast.