5 attitudes to awaken the creative leader within you (and create the future!)

And Also a Blow to This So-Called Creativity! (or rather: what people call creativity.)

Awaken the Creative Leader Within You

Leandro Waldvogel

Since forever, we've been forced to believe that creativity is a somewhat rare talent, reserved for a few special people who hide in colorful rooms, with colorful pens, sitting on colorful beanbags, writing colorful ideas on colorful post-its. This image, even if it might exist in some rare moments in some people's lives, is far from the reality of most professionals we consider "creative."

If you want to awaken all the creativity that already exists within you, the first myth we need to deconstruct is the myth of the creative professional itself. It seems that this so-called creativity only exists in the secrecy of agencies, in marketing team meetings that nobody ever has access to, or in companies like Disney, where creativity itself ends up being the final product. We have the illusion that while we live among gray work cubicles and tedious glass aquariums, creative beings inhabit a world without barriers, in bold architectures designed to feed their brilliant creative minds.

The truth couldn't be more different. The truth is this: creativity is power, and not everyone wants you to be powerful. So, from the terrible evaluations of "right and wrong" that we learn in schools, to the legend of those colorful rooms, everything is designed for you to believe that being creative is as inaccessible as it is rare, and that you would need some kind of special environment or cool tools to access this much-desired and precious mental space called creativity.

If one day you visit Disney headquarters in California, you'll be shocked by the number of gray rooms and "normal" people walking through the blue-carpeted corridors. You'll also be shocked if you visit the spaces of the most creative companies in Silicon Valley. Everything will be more familiar than you might think. Creativity is something much more normal and accessible than we are led to believe all the time. It's something that exists in each one of us, in every Homo sapiens without exception, but that life gradually destroys and constrains, until you believe that creativity is a colorful and wonderful gift, but that few people were lucky enough to be born with it.

In his excellent book "Creativity, Inc.," Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar, says that the most important thing for accessing our creative mind is overcoming the invisible obstacles that block the way we think. For him, the notion that ideas are born complete and unquestionable is as wrong as believing that Archimedes, during his famous bath more than 2,000 years ago, shouted "Eureka!" when a new and revolutionary idea supposedly emerged fully formed in his head, as if by magic. The truth is that he already had the absolutely most important thing: a question, a challenge to be solved. How could he calculate the volume of gold in King Hiero's crown without having to melt it? If it weren't for this question haunting his thoughts and without all the thinking that preceded the famous bath, Archimedes probably would never have noticed that the volume of water displaced when he entered his bathtub was exactly equal to the volume of his body.

Therefore, our Greek mathematician creatively concluded, he would simply need to immerse the precious object in a tank of water to discover its volume in gold. And thus, creativity saved Archimedes' neck and King Hiero's crown.

The biggest invisible obstacle to creative thinking is precisely believing that the most innovative and revolutionary ideas were born ready and perfect, from people with special minds very different from ours. People who woke up in the middle of any night with a totally new and relevant idea... that made them rich and famous. Nonsense! We are all much more alike than we imagine, and the only thing that really differentiates us is the choices we make - the choice to be creative.

The creative process is long and can be difficult. It's methodical, requires effort, a lot of work and rework, frustrations, and a good deal of persuasive ability. The crux of the matter is that the best ideas usually seem obvious when executed; they are so seductive and necessary after they come into existence that we can't imagine how they were never thought of before. It seems they were born ready like a good story... No! Good stories aren't born ready either! They require sweat, a lot of effort from neurons and their synapses. It's worth reading the book "Creativity, Inc.," which I mentioned above, to understand the magnitude of the creative process behind Pixar's delightful films. A lesson in creativity from the best in the business!

Although it's not easy, being creative is not a divine and unattainable gift either. It's a talent that all of us can awaken. The first step is to understand that most of what we call creativity is not related to creating animated films, composing sublime music, having the idea for the perfect slogan, or creating the package for the coveted latest cookie. Creativity is the extraordinary power to solve everyday problems in a way that no one has thought of before, to untie the knots of processes that can improve the performance of an entire organization, to find the clearest way to communicate with your team, to create new desires and needs. Creativity is being able to do what seems impossible with the scarcest resources. I often say that, almost always, the more creative your idea is, the less it will probably cost. Creativity creates new resources where they didn't exist before, and this is called innovation!

In your professional life, you need to be aware of where and how you will employ this powerful skill of yours. The intelligent use of creativity is certainly the talent that will determine the success or failure of your career. Think of a successful executive who hasn't used a lot of creativity to get where they are. And remember, creativity isn't always something cute that we admire, something that looks like Buzz Lightyear. The worst villains are usually also the most creative - who isn't frightened by the meticulously thought-out plan executed with precision to kill Mufasa and blame Simba in The Lion King? Without a doubt, the diabolical creativity award would go to the cold and calculating Scar! Be sure that discovering what we really want should be the most difficult task in your journey to become someone more creative.

Once you understand your individual purpose - your most intimate and sometimes unconfessable why - your creative power will be the engine that accelerates your life toward your boldest goals. But how do you release this extraordinary power? Pay attention to these 5 seemingly simple attitudes that can really transform the place you occupy in the world:

1. Recognize that most people don't want you to be creative.

Creativity is power, and power is not an unlimited resource. When one idea wins, it's possible that others won't have the same success. Therefore, start noticing the entire structure that exists so that you become just another person like everyone else, merely executing the creative ideas of those who have the courage to fight for what they believe. If all human beings were super creative and there was no one to follow their ideas, the world would be a mess and we wouldn't get anywhere. To use an expression from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, you can be a lion or a gazelle. Most people choose to be gazelles!

2. Accept that creativity is a solitary process.

Have you ever seen two brains connected, creating at the same time? No! Because this, at least for now, is still not possible. Creativity is a solitary process that happens in the depths of your mind, connecting ideas, memories, and information that you collect throughout life. Your idea emerges in you, in you alone.

Your ideas are born into the world only through the stories you tell. From there, it's possible for people to connect with these ideas, collaborate, question, make them grow and become reality, innovations that generate value. And remember: innovation is a collective process of exchanges and collaboration; creativity is not. It's very important to be aware of the solitude of the creative process, of the understandable insecurity that plagues us when we have to expose something that at that moment exists only in a very intimate place in our minds.

3. Learn. Observe. Think.

Creativity doesn't happen in the vacuum of an empty mind. It needs inputs, precious resources to process and create something new from what already exists. Everything we learn and our attentive observation of the world are the indispensable fuels for a creative mind. There's no point in believing that you're going to reinvent the wheel, because you probably won't. But if you knew the wheel and had observed the need of someone who needed wheels on their feet, maybe you would have invented roller skates!

Curiosity is an absolutely fundamental prerequisite for creativity. Curious people are usually creative. The reverse is almost invariably true. Twenty years ago, I received one of the most important pieces of advice in my life: learn something new every day. It doesn't matter the subject, it doesn't matter the complexity, but learn something new every day of your life. A day without learning is a useless day. I try to follow this advice strictly, and it is responsible for the best things that have ever happened to me.

Your brain's hard drive has infinite storage capacity, and the more data you put into this extraordinary machine, the more powerful it becomes, the more connections are created, and, besides becoming more knowledgeable, you become increasingly intelligent and creative. And... stop to think! Have you noticed how many times you've used this expression, but rarely actually do it? How many times have you stopped in your corner, without distractions, without music, without a cell phone, without any specific goal, and stopped to think? Rare, isn't it? So, create this habit that is as simple as it is powerful. Reserve a few minutes of your day, 5 to 10 minutes at most, timed on your cell phone, to stop and think. Let your brain go where it wants, focus on your thoughts, don't let them escape, ask "why," ask "why" of the "why," become aware of what happens in your mind. Name what you're feeling, rationally elaborate your ideas. And when the time you set is up, get up and go on with your life.

Learning, observing, and thinking: you can't imagine the power of these three things so easily accessible to all of us. You can't imagine how much more intelligent and creative you can become. And this isn't cheap self-help. It's actually free self-help!

4. The big secret is finding the right question, the relevant challenge!

I think we've already agreed that ideas aren't born ready, in the vacuum of an empty mind. But then, where do ideas come from? Almost always, the best ideas come from good questions. The most important thing of all is to find the question! If no one had asked "how to put wheels on feet?", roller skates probably would never have existed. If Walt Disney hadn't challenged himself to create a solution to the problem of "where can families have fun together?", Disneyland, one of the most profitable creative businesses in the world, would never have existed.

The first step is to think. Think about everything you know and observe. Think with a mind abundant with knowledge, stories, observations. Your thinking will take you to many unexplored places, full of questions to be answered, challenges to be overcome. You need to believe that one of your concerns is relevant to other people. This never comes without mental effort, nor from the conclusions of the most modern research. It's something inside you that says your challenge is relevant and deserves to be faced, a question from your restless mind whose answer could be useful to the world. This is insight. Insight means almost literally "vision inward" (in, inward; sight, vision). It's that moment when you have an inner certainty that something is important, that you've discovered a path.

This is the most important step in the entire creative process: that insight that will reveal a journey for your head to start dreaming. Having the most ordinary and most extraordinary ideas, inventing fashion, reinventing the wheel, looking for the missing pieces in the puzzle that you yourself discovered, becoming obsessed with finding a solution to the challenge that instigates and inspires you. Only when you have a question hammering non-stop in your curious mind will you have the chance to shout "Eureka!" in the middle of traffic and start acting boldly to make your idea become reality. That's creativity!

And there's one more detail: almost always the "owner" of the question ends up becoming the "owner" of the idea. But just as we get excited and "creative" when we find our questions, it's also fascinating to dream about the insights that others share with us. Hearing that challenge that immediately seems to make perfect sense, that you're certain was also hidden in some dimly lit alley of your mind. Connecting with the intelligent insights of other people also has the power to release all the wealth of creativity that exists in each one of us. This is how our curious species creates everything that exists around us in this extraordinary world we live in: we collaborate to answer the questions and challenges of restless minds.

5. Creativity doesn't exist without stories. And stories don't exist without creativity.

In the world, there is plenty of room for bad ideas, but no room for bad stories. Steve Jobs repeated this phrase often.

Without a good story to give life to your ideas, they will forever remain just that, merely ideas in your mind. An idea needs a story to be born into the world and connect with other people. Storytelling is this: transforming the ideas from your mind into relevant narratives for the world. A brilliant, revolutionary idea will have no chance of success without a good story to give it life. It will probably die with you, or you will watch another person, who answered the same question as you, having all the success that you didn't have because you didn't know how to "remove" the idea from your mind. On the other hand, a mediocre idea, just minimally good, can have immense chances of success if it gets a good story to be born into the world. How many times have you found yourself convinced of something - a product, service, or even people - that when you got to know it better, you saw it wasn't even worth "thirty cents." You have been persuaded of bad ideas by good stories many times in your life.

If you want to release your creative power, you need to learn to tell the stories of your ideas, you need to know one of humanity's most fantastic inventions, which is storytelling. Communicating an idea well is as important as having an idea; only then can other people know what you thought, contribute to improving the solutions engineered in your brain, collaborate to make your idea a reality, and, obviously, buy your ideas! Buy you as someone creatively relevant.

Speaking of relevance, one last thought. In today's world, few demands already exist ready to be met by the brilliance of your creative mind. Most people already have everything they really need to live a sufficiently full life. This is true both inside and outside organizations. You will certainly need to create the demand for the product of your creativity. You will have to be skillful to make people value the same questions and challenges that were the spark of your creative process and, therefore, want to consume your ideas. And there's only one way to do this: with stories. Only stories are capable of creating desire where it didn't exist before; only they can make people start to value and believe in ideas that were previously totally non-existent or unknown. No one desired an iPhone in 2006 (or its many "cousins" that have appeared since then). Today, these omnipresent little devices are more than a consumerist desire; they are an indispensable necessity in the lives of the vast majority of people.

It's worth taking a look at the presentation Steve Jobs gave in 2007 to introduce the iPhone to the world. It's on YouTube. For me, it's probably the best corporate presentation of our time and one of the best lessons in storytelling for innovation you can have. The narrative is so powerful, the challenges you didn't even know about become so urgent, that before you even know what Apple's phone would be like, you already want to have one. Jobs used stories to create desire where it didn't yet exist, a necessity so necessary, but that people didn't yet have.

If you want to be a creative professional, you need to learn to tell stories. And do you know what a creative professional is? It's the so-called leader! Just to play a bit with etymology: To lead, from English, means "to be in front." It's only possible to be in front of a group of people if we create the future of that group, right? Leading is creating the future!

Leandro Waldvogel (contato@waldvogel.com.br) is an author, speaker, high-performance coach, and business consultant. He was a diplomat, worked for Disney Co., and taught MBA programs in Brazil and abroad. He specializes in storytelling applied to the corporate world. www.waldvogel.com.br