Creativity Under Pressure: Todd Henry at TEDxXavierUniversity

so I've spent the last several years of my life as a student practitioner of creativity in the marketplace and that primarily been obsessed with one question and that question is is it possible to be prolific to be brilliant and to be healthy all at the same time right and what I've discovered I'm going to share with you today I compiled in my book and and I've discovered that it's really easy to get two of these three things right for example we could be prolific meaning we're doing a lot of work we can be brilliant meaning we're doing good work but miss on the sustainability piece miss on the healthy piece and this is where many of us live our lives as creatives as those who turn our thoughts in the value and there's a technical term that I coined for this and it's fried these are the walking zombies that haunt the hallways of our organization and this is not going to serve us over the long term this is not where we want to be of course it's easy to be healthy meaning hey pace of life is great and to be brilliant meaning we're actually doing good work but we're not prolific enough to meet marketplace demand and this isn't going to work for us either and there's a term for this it's unreliable because we can't be depended upon to produce at a high rate and of course the final combination we give you prolific meaning hey pace if you're doing a lot of work and healthy meaning hey pace of life is great but our work is terrible right and there's also a technical term for this and it's fired because we're not going to keep our job if we're not producing consistently great work so my first question for you today is this how are you doing on this equation of prolific brilliant and healthy are you firing on all cylinders are you missing maybe one or more pieces and if you say you're missing one I would suspect it's probably the healthy piece it's probably the sustainability piece and you're not alone as a matter of fact recent research shows that up to 80 percent of people regularly report feeling frustrated disengaged and underutilized in their day-to-day work why is this why is it so difficult for us to stay engaged in the do or our best work as those who turn our thoughts in the value I think there are a couple of reasons the first is this giant nebula question around what is creativity I think for many of us creativity is this mystical elusive force that sits somewhere between prayer and the US tax code on the ambiguity scale ray and everyone saw we have these brilliant thoughts but we have no idea how it happened but then combine that with the fact that we now exist in what could only be called a create on-demand world meaning not only are we accountable for having ideas on a regular basis but we also have to do it by tomorrow at noon on time on budget in order to keep our job thank you very much right we live and to create on-demand world and this creates a unique set of pressures for those of us who turn our thoughts in the value and it plays out a little bit like this this tension between possibilities and pragmatics there are five steps in the typical creative problem-solving process you define the problem you can't do what you haven't defined you explore options right you choose the best option hopefully you execute as in you do it not as an you kill someone and you rinse and repeat because the best of the creatives in the marketplace understand this has to be part of the ethos of how they function now I show you this to demonstrate how most of us actually approach the process when we're under pressure there are actually three steps we panic about the problem we explore the first option that comes along we choose that option and we execute right we are graded executing but in so doing we short-circuit the process by which the best ideas can come we don't venture out into the uncomfortable places you see the creative process is the perpetual assault on the beachhead of apathy its venturing out into uncomfortable places and so as I was looking at those people in the marketplace who seem to be getting this prolific brilliant and healthy thing right I started asking questions about how are they doing it what I discovered is that most of them even unknowingly have built practices into their life to sustain them when things get crazy because things always get crazy right and what I discovered is that they have a kind of rhythm in their life and there are five common elements that I've identified of rhythm the first is focus and focus is all about how you define your work it's about answering the question what are we really trying to do what am I really trying to do here and getting to the bottom of that and asking that question continually so that we know our mind knows the problem that we're really trying to solve but there are some things we have to battle in order to focus effectively a couple of years ago my family and I made a trip to Lake Erie to see the fireworks and we were heading down to the lake we're putting the kids in the wagon is we started heading down to the lake our middle child started protesting via melee I didn't screaming bloody murder I'm not gonna go like a good dad I said shut up and get in the wagon right so we get up in the wagon and we start heading down to the lake and as we get closer and closer to the lake he starts protesting he jumps onto the wagon he runs the other direction and so I grabbed him by the shoulders they say oh and son it's okay the fireworks aren't gonna fall on you they're not gonna fall on you he said I'm not worried they're gonna fall on me fireworks make my feet fuzzy they make your feet fuzzy first if I turned to my wife and said what have you been feeding my child right but that's what they make your feet buzzy what are you talking about he said yeah like at Disneyworld and I suddenly remembered that the prior year we made a trip to Disney World as a family and Owen spent most of the day riding around in my shoulders and at one point we were walking from the Cinderella's castle and at the height of the show there's this plume of fireworks that goes off and in his fireworks in do startled Owen suddenly realize that while riding on my shoulders for two hours his legs had fallen asleep and in his six-year-old mind he developed a causal relationship between fireworks making his legs in mobile work right so we had a little talk about causality correlation I don't think he quite got it but think about that he had developed this false assumption and had fossilised around that assumption do you ever do that in your work because sometimes that prevents us from looking at potentially useful places and focusing in places it can help us find a good solution to our problem the second source of tension related to focus is something I call the ping and the ping is that perpetual pinprick in my gut that says you should go check your email right now you should go check your Twitter feed right now you should go check your phone because maybe the President of the United States is calling you with the national security crisis and it's this perpetual sense that something out there is more important than whatever is in of me and it creates this perpetual sense is Linda stone cause of continuous partial awareness I'm always kind of here but I'm always kind of somewhere else it prevents us from focusing deeply on our most important work so we need to learn to tame the pain if we want to be effective so focus is all about defining our work and answering the question what am I really trying to do here and continuing to ask that question until we get to the bottom of it on a daily basis on an hourly basis if we have to to make sure that we stay aligned the second element of creative rhythm is relationships there is a myth in our society of the lone innovator that there's somebody in a cabin in South Georgia right now inventing the next iPad and they're going to come out and say tada it doesn't happen innovation typically is the collective grasp for the next and my findings are built on your findings and as Steven Johnson says we pursue the adjacent possible together by getting more parts on the table so one practice we can build into our life to help us do that is to get a group of people together on a regular basis and answer three questions number one what are you working on number two what can we do to help you with that and number three what's inspiring you powerful question to ask what's inspiring you and by doing this we begin to get more parts on the table and we have more things at our disposal when we're trying to solve problems and people who are prolific brilliant and healthy get this they have vibrant relationships in their life the third element of rhythm is energy and energy is all about how we manage our most valuable resource we are wonderful at managing time we are abysmal at managing energy and so we stack meeting after meeting after meeting after obligation after obligation and we have nothing left to give you an event one of the primary roles of the vine keeper is to regularly prune areas of new growth off the vine perfectly good fruit why would they prune perfectly good fruit off the vine because the vine keeper knows that that fruit isn't prune eventually the entire vine will begin to succumb to systemic mediocrity because it will steal resources from the older more mature fruit bearing parts of the vine as people who are creative we don't struggle with new fruit we don't struggle with new ideas but we need to be good about pruning and creating space in our life for ideas to emerge in the gaps the fourth element of rhythm is stimuli and stimuli is all about what we put in our head there's a little saying about food that you are what you eat well the same thing applies to our creative process we create what we take in but many of us go through our days indiscriminately snacking on what would amount the creative junk food so we spend all day watching YouTube and Jersey Shore not that there's anything wrong with that other kind of is but anyway Hey and we snack on this all day long but we're not filling our minds with things that nourish us that challenge us to see the world in new ways that calls us to have to commune with great minds as Steven sample says so one practice to bullet into your life is to have dum dum dum a study plan right a study plan identify the things you're curious about and begin to ask those questions and fill your life with resources that help you pursue those deeper curiosities because that's where your mind wants to go anyway so funnel resources into your world to help you pursue those curiosities that sharpen you that challenge you to see the world in new ways be purposeful about your mental development about the things you put in your head because that is what comprises your creative process the final element of rhythm is ours and this is all about time times the currency of productivity at the end of the day where we put our time determines our success or failure many of us default to what could be called an efficiency mindset with our time rather than an effectiveness mindset so we'd rather spend an hour cranking through email than spending time working on our most important projects trying to generate ideas we need to be good about thinking in terms of effectiveness not just efficiency with our time one practice that I suggest to people is to have something in your world I call unnecessary creating and unnecessary creating is a practice where you build something into your life that allows you to develop skills to try new things to take risks and relatively low-risk environment and it's astounding to me how often I come into organizations and I look at a designer I look at a writer I look at a creative director or I look at a manager and I say when was the last time you made something that somebody wasn't paying you to make and the answer is I can't remember I can't remember the last time I made something for myself it's an incredibly inefficient way to spend your time I've got deadlines I've got things to do boss is breathing down my neck but we need to create space in our life for brilliant ideas to emerge so build unnecessary creating into your world it's remarkably inefficient and incredibly effective so it's kind of a brief flyover but these five elements focus relationships energy stimuli hours building practices and each of these areas creates space it provides an under grading infrastructure for our creative process and it positions us for those moments when we have to be brilliant at the moment note at moment's notice so the kind of the dirty little secret is if you want to be brilliant at the moment to notice you need to begin far upstream from the moment you need a brilliant idea so this gets us to a deeper question why okay why do this why build practices just so we can crank out a little more work you said we can reply to emails a little faster maybe climb the corporate ladder and I would submit to you that many of us never pursue the deeper questions about why we're here on this earth the deeper question about how we should be spending our life and the reason is that we're under pressure we're under the gun so much that we don't feel that kind of space in our life to pursue those questions I think a better way to ask this is to ask something like this why should anybody care if you disappear into a giant sinkhole in the earth I mean your family is going to cry a little bit right but I mean really what space do you occupy on this earth and have you really thought about that and are you building practices into your life to help you explore it one of my favorite thinkers was a 20th century mystic and monk named Thomas Merton and I think he nailed this create on-demand dynamic when he said this there can be an intense eagle ISM and following everyone else people are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular and too lazy to think of anything better hurry ruin Saints as well as artists they want quick success and they are in such a hurry to get it they cannot take time to be true to themselves and when the madness is upon them they argue that they're very haste is a species of integrity we live in a marketplace where everyone is chasing everyone else everyone is trying to be the next what's the next what was the first question that people ask when Steve Jobs died who's the next Steve Jobs I think that's a profoundly diss interesting question right who cares about the next I want to be the first I want to occupy space but in order to do that I have to begin to build some practices that give me the capacity to explore my deeper aptitudes so why since the beginning of our company we've had a saying cover bands don't change the world my cover band is a band that plays other people's music and you know what cover bands fill clubs cover bands even make a lot of money but at the end of the night people go home singing the music not talking about the band they remember the music and we each need to develop the capacity to find our unique voice our unique music so I'll leave you with one final thought several years ago a friend of mine from South Africa was leading a meeting and he asked kind of an out-of-the-blue question he said what do you think the most valuable land in the world is and we're all thinking it's a weird question I don't know like the oil fields of the Middle East diamond mines of South Africa Manhattan and it's like no no no no you're all wrong you know the most valuable land in the world is the graveyard because in the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels all of the unlaunchable all of the unreconciled relationships where people said I'll get around it at tomorrow I'll do that tomorrow and one day their tomorrows ran out and so that day I went home and I wrote two words and then put those words on my wall and I've kept those words in my notebook ever since and those two words are die empty because at the end of the day today I want to know that I have done everything in my power to empty myself of whatever is in me today not tomorrow's work but today's work so I can lay my head down satisfied that I have done today's work because I have built practices I've created space in my life to think about why I'm here not just what I have to do but why I'm doing what I do on a daily basis so friends I want to challenge you that each of us have a creative mandate we have a mandate upon us in the context of of the society we live in in the context of the workplace the marketplace to bring ourselves fully to what we do so build practices around your creative process treat your life with purpose with structure so that someday when your days run out you can say I died empty thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 67,175

Keywords: xavier, marketing, art, tedx, innovation, pressure, service, creativity, ted talks, university, society, ted, empty, healthy, prolific, ted talk, creative, leadership, Henry, tedx talks, die, brilliant, tedxxavieruniversity, tedx talk, design, accidental, Todd, ted x

Id: 7hWRva_sPeE

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2012