“If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of the artist.”
— Rick Rubin
In 2001, which feels like an eternity ago, Steve Jobs introduced a device that changed the world. The iPod.
Early in his speech, Steve talks about how Apple entered the market and realized the need for a product like the iPod.
Ever single step of the way, Apple wanted to solve a problem for an audience, like all businesses do.
If you listen closely, you can almost hear the questions being asked.
What else are people struggling with?
What would work better with our ecosystem?
What would complement what we are already doing?
Even though it wasn’t the main point of the presentation, we get a lot of insight into how Apple operated with Steve Jobs at the helm.
Steve Jobs was an innovator. A visionary. A creative.
He listened intently, asked questions of the world, and worked with a team to make those ideas a reality.
He wasn’t satisfied with what existed, he wanted to provide people with something that would excite them, that would turn heads.
But most importantly, that would make a difference in their lives.
Every innovation Apple released under Steve Jobs was a hit, not because Steve was great at presenting, which he was, but because the innovations spoke for themselves.
They had a story behind them.
You might not know what that story was, but everything felt meticulously designed with a purpose. To fit an idea.
But as he said so himself in an interview, a great idea doesn’t mean much by itself.
Steve says that creativity is about “keeping 5,000 things in your brain… and fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want.”
Creativity is a process, it’s consistent, it’s difficult, and it’s what makes things meaningful.
Legendary record producer Rick Rubin calls creativity a way of being.
In Rick’s book, he mentions that like most things in life, creativity takes practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not.
How can we say that we are not creative or don’t know how to come up with good ideas, if we’re not practicing it?
It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.” You are either living as a monk or you’re not.
We tend to think of the artist’s work as just the output. We think the song or the painting is what’s creative, when in fact it’s the artist who is creative.
Same with a business owner. People look at the work of Apple as the output. The iPhone, the iPod, etc. When really it’s a way of being.
You’re either practicing it or you’re not.
The Practice of Creativity
There is no one way to practice creativity. Because creativity is unique to each individual, most people develop their own way to practice it that works for them.
But you don’t wake up one day knowing how to practice your own version.
Before you know what works, you first have to struggle with processes not tailored to you.
Same with being an entrepreneur. When you first started, I bet you didn’t know as much as you know now.
Everybody starts with taking a class, reading advice from the business people they admire, watching videos on YouTube.
To learn and try what other people do, so you can learn what does and doesn’t work for you.
Most people misunderstand the idea of copying others.
Plenty of businesses just sit around waiting until someone does something creative that works and immediately copy it until the idea dries out. Then they wait some more until someone else comes up with something.
Copying other’s processes is really an exercise in finding your own path and leveling up what you consider good quality.
“Even if your goal is to make fast food, it will likely taste better if you experience the best fresh food available to you during the process. The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.”
— Rick Rubin
Copying others is merely a starting point. Step number one.
From there, the next practice that makes someone more creative is learning to deal with failure.
Steve Jobs once said that what separates the people that make it from the people that just dream about it is action.
And when you act on something you’ve never done before, you fail.
The fear of failing is what stops most people from being creative, but it’s the exact reason why the ones that take action make it.
Failure is the information you need to get where you’re going.
There is no exact path for success or creativity. To get there, it’s actually easier to fail and learn what doesn’t work, so that what you’re left with is the path closest to success.
That’s why if you read a lot of advice from creatives like Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, or Seth Godin, they all boil it down to having and executing on lots of ideas.
“If you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all your bad ideas first.”
— Seth Godin
Failure is a good thing in situations that have multiple paths or answers.
It feels uncomfortable, like we should know better, and it may even cast doubts, but we should learn to embrace failure.
There’s a world of difference, though, between not wanting what you’re creating to fail, and not wanting to be a failure.
Doubting yourself can lead to a sense of hopelessness, of not feeling like you can take on the task at hand.
Doubting the quality of your work on the other hand, can help improve it.
Because you wouldn’t put something out there that you wouldn’t be satisfied with it yourself.
When we do creative work, we must work on the things we can control. An idea that excites us, the quality we can put out.
Whether people like it or buy it is ultimately out of our control.
All we can do is put our best creative effort forward and continue to fail until we learn how not to fail.
As Susan Kare, designer of the original Apple Mac interface, said, “You can’t really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you’re lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it’s meaningful.”
Next up is Part II. Generating Creative Ideas…