Category: Business

Couple of days ago, I listened to an interview with Chase Jarvis, who gave an insightful definition of a creative process. A creative endeavour needs to have an idea-forming stage, a planning stage, and an execution stage. In addition, it needs to involve problem-solving during the execution. This definition is very broad, so it captures activities outside the realm of arts, which if what typically comes to mind when people think about creativity. For example, computer coding would easily qualify as a creative process. Ironically, I am struggling to fit martial arts into this definition, even though it has the word “art” in it. It might be because of how I personally have been approaching my kendo training – literally, not being creative enough to make the practice my own.

Being creative attracts and enables more creativity. When we take photos, sketch or play music, we not only become better at it and therefore can enjoy it more fully, but we also notice more opportunities to engage in these activities. This way, creativity really changes our lives in a tangible way. Chase talked about his mom, who became more outgoing, started to enjoy travelling, etc., because she initially developed an interest in taking photos and sharing them online. We personally met an airport mechanic-turned-painter in Milan, who has been a huge inspiration for my daughter and myself. This idea of exercising creativity like a muscle is similar to the abundance mindset evangelized by Peter Diamandis: doing creative things opens up an abundance of creative opportunities.

Creativity is woven in to the mundane details of everyday life. What matters is doing things with attention and intention rather than forcing a pretentious all-or-nothing artistic lifestyle on oneself, like wearing a beret and moving to Paris to surround oneself with a high art community. Because creativity is hidden in the small details, it makes sense to start small. Case gives an example: if you are an engineer, who dreams of opening a cafe (which would be a very creative thing to do), it would be a poor decision to quit your job, take out a lease on the building and to start running a business, about which you probably know very little. Instead, he suggests to begin baking scones and inviting friends over for brunch for ten Sundays in a row to test how it would feel. Taking things to the next level would be so much easier after you have had some first-hand experience with the core activity of the. Basically, we don’t need to make drastic changes to our lives to live creatively.

Maybe it is easy for me to say, because I am lucky to have both my main job (academic research) and hobbies that squarely fit into Chase’s definition of a creative process. Even so, I find that I often have to remind myself to do what Tim Ferriss’ favourite note to self says: “Notice the best part.”

Derek Sivers, who famously donated most of the proceeds from selling his first company, pointed out in an interview with Cal Newport that people should pursue a radical shift in career only if there is a concrete evidence that others would be willing to pay for the product of the intended work. He said that “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”

Personally, for a long time, I have always been attracted to applied art – commercial photography, industrial design, architecture, etc. Even the art that doesn’t seem to be very applied on the surface, such as classical paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance masters, for example, upon closer consideration appears to be quite closely link to applications. Majority of the works of Rafael and Michelangelo were explicitly commissioned to promote the idea of Christianity and the might of the Church.

Of course, assigning a dollar figure to a piece of art is a tricky business, which is influenced by many, often irrational factors, such as fashion or political conjecture. Still, I believe there is at least a grain of rationalism in the idea that what is useful is necessarily valuable. For photographers, for example, capturing human emotions and commemorating life’s milestones is an obvious way to be useful to other people. This why, among the variety of possible niche genres, portrait and wedding photography is considered as the most straightforward way to start making money.

At the same time, I believe that in science, the idea of necessarily linking the scientific pursuit to a well-defined practical application has become overused. Often, the most significant scientific progress starts with pursuing something for pure fun or out of curiosity, without worrying whether the result could be immediately applied or even is something like this has already been done. Richard Feyman, for instance, decided to look into the dynamics of a spinning and vibrating dinner plate, as away of recapturing the excitement of his childhood scientific pursuits. Eventually, this work developed into something, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, but the connection was not obvious to him at the time.

Artists, for some reason, are expected to do things for the sake of creating itself, and the opportunity to differentiate oneself from the mainstream is to do think differently (i.e. start with the practical application standpoint). In scientific research, the current paradigm seems to be the opposite, so the logical way to go is not to follow the majority, but to do fundamental work (“deep work” in Cal Neport’s terminology) and let the applicability emerge naturally.