Kindle Notes & Highlights
Born to Create: How Creativity Sparks Connection, Innovation, and Belonging in our New World of Work
by
Anne Jacoby
Started reading
March 7, 2024
As it turns out, it’s hard for a lot of us to see creativity as a skill. Yet defining creativity and making it a disciplined part of our work is precisely what’s needed.
We need creativity to adapt. To grow. To thrive. And yet . . . we resist it.
Like I said, our cultural picture of creativity is pretty flawed. Plus, plenty of people associate creative pursuits with shame or falling short—a few early dabbles with art or music that fizzled out, or a one-time passion extinguished by a don’t-quit-your-day-job attitude. These can leave us feeling lacking and closed off. But by the same token, this misconception about creativity is part of why I’m so passionate about teaching creativity as a personal mindset and leadership practice. There’s so much room to grow once we shift from “I’m uncreative” to “I’m a beginner.”
we must be willing to see creativity as a skill. All of the high-achieving leaders I’ve worked with are skilled. They have learned countless complex concepts, procedures, theories, and practices. No matter how good with numbers you are, no one’s born with an inherent understanding of corporate tax strategies! So I know they can acquire skills. And I know they can learn creativity.
Even without knowing specifics—your industry, your role, your team—I can say with confidence that creativity is what you and your organization need. One way or another, no matter the challenges you face, creativity will be a part of the solution.
So that’s why I was asking those rocket scientists how they’re creative in their work. Not for any woo-woo notions of the inner self. Not to get them to loosen up and break the ice before the real work started. But rather, because finding creativity is the real work. I believe creativity at work is essential to doing whatever your organization does, but doing it better—more effectively, more joyfully, and more authentically. And while the upshot of creativity at work might not be predictable, it is provable. Forrester Research found that companies that cultivate more creative workplace
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The New York Times reported that mandatory in-office work hours can “drive out innovation,” but flexible online collaboration can allow ideas to easily “bubble up,” as well as enable a more diverse workforce.5 Nevertheless, creativity still feels risky. It can easily come off as naive to suggest—let alone insist—that...
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We need creativity at work not because our teams need to express their inner Picasso, but because creativity is, at its core, innovation. It’s novel solutions to pressing problems made with unexpected connections. And in these volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous times, it’s hard to overstate the need f...
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Whatever the reason, creativity feels out of reach. It’s not that we don’t have it but, for whatever reason, we think we don’t.
A huge part of this problem lies in that cultural conception we have of creativity—that idea that it’s a gift from the gods. We see creative ability as squishy and undefinable in the abstract, but obvious (or obviously lacking) in the individual. In other words, it’s a hard binary: you’re creative or you’re not. The big missing realization is that creativity is accessible to each of us.
how to trust your instincts. What did surprise me was his powerful and provocative challenge to the audience: The role of an artist is to work to return to the moment when our heart first opened. That was it. The creative spark. And to me, the sound of that moment is still clear.
But tapping into that creative spirit, the moment your heart first opened, may just bring you closer to what you were put on this earth to be. That moment can signal the very essence of who we are and what we value. (And if no clear moment is coming to mind, that’s okay, too. You may stumble upon it as you read this book.) That’s the spark that lights us up in our work.
As humans, creativity is what fuels us. When our creativity is expressed and understood by others at work, it nourishes our souls. It binds us to each other, something our business world desperately needs. As we all wrestle with the why and how of work, creativity helps us reimagine our unique path or feel more connected to the one we’re already on. It helps us stay agile in a jungle gym career or finally get the courage to launch our own company. Our workforce is experiencing a profound revolution.
Workers want choice. They demand greater flexibility
Instead, we value greater purpose in our work. We want alignment with our values and belonging within a community that supports us. We aspire to feel safe to show up authentically at work, tapping into that moment our heart first opened. We long to learn from diverse colleagues who inspire us.
It’s the shared human experience that differentiates us from the robots.
What we’ll discover in Act I is how this kind of individual creative thinking is exactly what’s needed in our workplaces. We all encounter situations where the door we thought was open is unexpectedly locked. It’s up to us to find a new way in.
“If you’re worried about being mocked, or concerned about the consequence of sharing bad ideas, you hold back,” he elaborated. “It takes someone confident in the process to create the right kind of environment that enables creativity.”
What’s special about this school—as is the case with many creative communities and organizations—is its unyielding commitment to inviting in personal creativity. By design, creativity isn’t a nice to have. Creativity is the solution.
We want to be recognized for our unique strengths and talents yet committed to operating cooperatively as part of a bigger organism. As we improve our ability to tap into our individual creative energy, we elevate the creativity of all of those around us.
David & Goliath (D&G). His firm was tasked with creating a new brand for LACHSA and conducted deep research to define what sets the school apart from others.
Bursting with possibility and potential. They were born to create. And you, starting your first job out of college, taking your first team leader role, or finally ready to launch your own firm: You were born to create. We are all born to create. We just have to muster the confidence to believe it.
Among them have been several undergraduate entrepreneurship classes full of bright-eyed, ambitious, and mission-driven young people ready to change the world.
The truth is, we live in an age where we’re all entrepreneurs. Even within a mature, traditional organization, knowing how to create, articulate an idea, build a vision, and execute against a plan can make or break your career. We are all builders.
Today, our very relationship with work is changing. That’s one of the big reasons I
believe creativity is such an in-dema...
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Creativity enables us to spot problems and view them as opportunities—and then imagine how we can be part of the solution. It helps us relate to and express our shared human experience in a fresh way, whether that’s to get along better with our colleagues to move a project forward, work collaboratively on a new hybrid team, or influence the shape of our career path.
Resilience and grit to push through the discomfort of making mistakes
An insatiable curiosity and appetite to learn
Resourcefulness and a bias toward action
The ability to be a talent multiplier, possessing a subtle magnetism to attract people to join in their journey (their creative confidence draws people in)
Don’t feel tempted to judge your creativity logs. Simply gather the data. Observe, like a scientist. Finally, at the end of two weeks, reflect on your responses.
This method to knowing how to access our personal creativity is a bit like cracking a code: We get curious, experiment, observe, learn, experiment some more, and we may discover an insight about ourselves.
Knowing ourselves better is our engraved invitation to more creative thinking. We’re priming the pump. Fertilizing the soil. Creating a welcoming space.
When confronted with a challenge, I see it from at least three different perspectives.
I routinely seek out a variety of feedback sources on my ideas.
We are all born to create. Creative confidence can be strengthened with practice. Entrepreneurial thinking requires a beginner’s mind. See the line before you start your creative act. Creative mojo can be developed by trying things that scare us and being adaptable. Creative constraints can lead to sharper creative output. Make time for Creativity Boosters. Know yourself, including how, when, and where your creativity shows up.
When we activate our imaginations, we’re creating a possible path forward. We’re building a vision.
Techniques can help us bring the intangible fragments of experiences into fleshed-out human stories. As we sharpen our imagination with detail, we can transform the seemingly banal to richly descriptive, captivating, and meaningful emotional journeys. Then comes the fun part: We get to bring our ideas to life.
Memory plays a powerful role in creative thinking, too. Harkening back to that moment our hearts first opened, we can draw on the details of past experiences to inspire more specificity in what our imaginations are creating. This value of using detail to activate our imagination is backed by scientific research. Dr. Roger Beaty, professor at Penn State University and leader of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Laboratory, has done extensive research on creativity in our brains. His research reveals that allowing our minds to wander and activating our imaginations are powerful tools to
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our brain’s connections between the default, control, and salience networks that serves as a strong predictor of creativity. The technique we can use is waking up our episodic system, the method of remembering things in great detail, which stimulates the same brain region that activates our imaginations.
“What are your biggest challenges? What are you struggling with these days? If you could fix one problem in your life right now, what would that be?”
CREATIVITY BOOSTER: Before tackling your next creative project at work, write down three to five emotions that describe what you want your audience (internal or external customer) to feel.
Living creatively calls us to keep taking the shot.
What’s my motivation? is a common jab at the acting profession. But it turns out motivation is a highly relevant factor in our professional
and personal lives, too. Knowing what drives us can have a big impact on our creativity.
Dr. David Rock, founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, breaks down social motivation into the following categories, known as SCARF: status certainty autonomy relatedness fairness5 We each care about these things to different degrees: Some of us strongly value the feeling of being in control, so we may rank high on the scale of autonomy and certainty. Others may value the feeling of being socially connected, so relatedness may rank higher. Regardless of where we fall on the spectrum, when we raise our awareness of these factors and see how they may play a role in our lives, we can start to
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Beyond a paycheck, what do I get out of my working experience? Do I miss my time in the office working with colleagues, or do I feel more productive and fulfilled working remotely? Does my work align with my values and wha...
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Let’s discover our ikigai. Ikigai is a Japanese philosophy around our life’s purpose.
Ikigai is the intersection of: LOVE (What I love doing) TALENT (What I’m good at doing) COMMERCE (What I can get paid doing) DEMAND (What the world needs)
