Predictors of Success (creative or otherwise):
- How committed are you to this goal? Is this a goal you take seriously, always wanted to do?
- How do you react to the inevitable frustrations and failures along the way – are they interpreted as a sign by you to try something else, or, that you should double down.
“The grittiest win. Creating something new is always going to be hard. If it were easy it would have been done already. It’s always going to involve lots of frustration, lots of failure, lots of edits, lots of drafts, iterations, and that’s why it takes grit. That’s why grit is such an essential component of creative success. Woody Allen has this great quote, ‘Creative success if eighty percent about showing up.’ Well grit is what allows you to show up, again, and again.”
“Everyone says, ‘Make the company bigger, grow the bottom line.” So they get an expensive bureaucracy, lots of fixed costs, but they’re no longer able to innovate at the same rate so they become more reliant upon their old ideas, for their new ideas they’ve got to invest in expensive acquisitions, but eventually those old ideas no longer work. They’re no longer useful. And those acquisitions don’t pan out. And that’s when companies go belly up.”
“Because cities don’t try to maximize creativity they end up doing exactly that. Companies on the other hand they try to micro manage the process. These well paid CEOs say, “I know how to do this, I know how to get the most out of my employees.” So they tell you which problems to work on, and they tell you who you can talk to, they tell you were you can go, they tell you not to drink a beer in the afternoon – they tell you to focus, focus, focus. Stay in your cubicle all day. Tell you to brainstorm when brainstorming absolutely doesn’t work. And all these things – many of which are done with the best of intentions – they actually get in the way.”
“Imagination has always seemed like a magic trick, but, the good news is, by finally understanding where new ideas come from, we can hopefully have more of them. The science of creativity can make us just a little bit more creative.”