August 25th, 2007

Creativity On Demand?

I’m both captivated and repulsed by Tim Ferris’ 4 Hour Work Week blog. He’s gotten national attention and notoriety for some controversial ideas on life and work (bottom line: outsource everything, from phone calls to taxes to dating, so you can live a life of mixed martial-arts, travel, and writing). While that sounds like… okay, like a lot of fun, I don’t think family life should be outsourced, so I guess it’s just for bachelors.

But, there are some good tips once in a while. Things like visual voicemail (check), not answering unknown numbers (done) - the little things that add up - do help be more efficient, at least. I came across this one today: is creativity on demand possible? I think so, and wrote a few thoughts on it.

How do you enhance your creativity?

Posted in Life, Work

Responses

I don’t know who said it first, but I agree that “inspiration finds me working.” I don’t know if that makes it on demand, but discipline does help.

In my work, creativity comes from getting multiple types of inputs, reading, and talking to others in diverse fields or industries (which I don’t do enough).

The best tools for creativity for me are that which forces me to simplify.  I’ll give a pretty tactical example.  Working on a proposal for how we will support a portion of our business in a different continent.  After struggling with the formatting and such, I asked myself three questions:

1.  What is the problem I am trying to solve?  It wasn’t really a proposal.  It was that we wanted something that we could communicate to partners at an upcoming trade show.  That was the problem to solve.  What to tell them.  That changed the focus not to creating all the infrastructure and making all the decisions, but being able to weave a story that our audience would trust would address their requirements over time.

2.  How can I tell this in 30 pt type (a tip from Guy Kawasaki’s in his Art of the Start)?  It forces you to use less words, which is a good forcing function to make sure you understand your content.

3.  What will some distributor in this country do the day after this presentation?  How will they know who to call for what?  This lead me to create a summary page (this was the story from #1) and a contact matrix.  Putting in a chart, forced me to think about what we could do accellerate some portions of the plan.

I know this is very different work than what you and others readers of your blog do for a living, but I bet many of the same things apply.  I often find myself burning out or stalling out on a problem or project, because I am not really focused on what I have to accomplish, how to do it in the most efficient way, and how my audience/users need me to deliver.

Hope this is helpful.  I look forward to reading other posts on this topic.

On August 28th, 2007 at 07:37 pm, Jennifer Davis said:

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