BOOK SUMMARY 161
The Accidental Creative
·
Summary written by: Andy Budgell
“Working harder and staring more intently at
the problem to achieve better ideas is like trying to control the weather by
staring at the clouds. Rather, you need to incorporate practices that instill a
sense of structure, rhythm, and purpose into your life.”
The Accidental Creative, page
11
Todd
Henry is the self-professed “arms dealer for the creative revolution”. Author
of The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at Moment’s Notice and
founder and CEO of Accidental Creative (a company that helps its clients
achieve many of the same goals that this book promises), Henry reminds us that
we are living in a create-on-demand world, where we are forced to be creative
and come up with knock-your-socks-off-amazing work at a moment’s notice (as the
book’s tagline says). And if we can’t follow through, we will likely be
replaced by someone who can. This well written, comprehensive book offers
practices to help stoke the fires of your creativity, but wisely does not
promise any quick fixes. Rather “[y]ou will unleash your latent creative
ability through regular, purposeful practice of the principles in this book,”
writes Henry. “There are most certainly insights and ‘aha!’ moments to be found
in these pages, but knowledge alone won’t do the job any more than knowing the
fundamentals of how to exercise will keep you physically healthy. You must be
purposeful and intentional. The results are worth it.”
Indeed
they are.
Golden Egg
Newsflash: You’re a Creative
“In some circles, the word ‘creative’ has
recently morphed from adjective to noun. If you are one of the millions among
us who make a living with your mind, you could be tagged a ‘creative.’ Every
day, you solve problems, innovate, develop systems, design things, write,
think, and strategize. You are responsible for… creating value that didn’t
exist before you arrived on the scene.”
The Accidental Creative, page
1
I fear
that many won’t read this summary, and even worse, the book on which it is
based, because of our existing conception of who is creative. Creatives aren’t
limited to painters, writers, graphic designers, architects, etc. While Henry
defines these jobs as traditional creatives, any other job
where you’re expected to create-on-demand (come up with great ideas on short
notice), but do not fit into the traditional mould, is a nontraditional
creative. These jobs can include (but are not limited to) managers,
strategists, consultants, salespeople, and client service reps. One the surface
it might seem as though traditional and nontraditional creatives don’t share
much in common. When we think of traditional creatives, such as writers or
painters, we think of individuals toiling away in solitary isolation, trying to
create their art. But in reality, traditional and nontraditional creatives are
more alike than they are different. “Astonishingly,” writes Henry, “I’ve found
little difference among the pressures experienced by these diverse groups of
people. They each use a different set of specific skills in their work, of
course. While a designer will solve a problem visually, a manager may solve it
by developing a new process. But they’re both employing the same creative tools
and wrestling with many of the same obstacles.”
Now
that you’ve realized that you are indeed a creative, the following GEMs will be
beneficial to you regardless of whether your occupation defines you as a
traditional or nontraditional creative. If you’re the former, the GEMs will
help you to make the most of your time for maximum creativity. The latter group
(aka, most of us) will be able to unleash the creative potential you didn’t
realize was lurking inside you.
GEM #1
Avoid the Ping
“You don’t need to get rid of technology; you
just need to use it in a way that increases your capacity to do what matters to
you. You need to set priorities and home in on them rather than living in a
state of continuous partial attention. You can’t do your best and most
insightful work when you allow the Ping to rule your life.”
The Accidental Creative, page
75
We all
do it. You’re hard at work, but suddenly, for whatever reason (and it doesn’t
even have to be boredom), we check our e-mails or Facebook, and our work is
disrupted. I’m guilty of this. I even experienced it completing this summary.
Referring to my Kindle highlights on Amazon necessary to write this summary,
the lure of Facebook proved too difficult to resist, especially when I saw the
blinking number in brackets in the tab I had opened notifying me of a new
message. (Okay, it wasn’t blinking, but it felt like it was!)
You get the idea, and can probably relate. This lure is what Todd Henry
has termed the “Ping”, and it’s a big threat to our daily work. It seems like
these little interruptions aren’t major time wasters, but they are. If you need
proof of just how much of a time waster it is, this calculation is quite
sobering: “if on average we work an 8-hour day, 50 weeks per year, and check
our e-mail every 5 minutes—just to see if anything is there—we check our e-mail
24,000 times per year”. That amounts to 66.6 hours per year of just checking your
e-mail and doesn’t actually include the time it takes to answer the e-mails,
and is low-balling the amount of time it takes to recover your focus after the
interruption (Henry factored in 10 seconds, when it’s arguably anywhere between
30 seconds to 3 minutes!)
There
are some easy ways to avoid the Ping, and it starts with giving some
consideration to where in your life you Ping the most. If it’s e-mails, perhaps
designate certain times to check them, like the beginning of each hour. Or
maybe one day a week leave your Blackberry at home. Whatever it is you decide
to do to avoid the Ping, the fewer interruptions will allow your creativity to
flow rather than be constantly interrupted.
GEM #2
Study the Supertexts
“I’ve… found that reading great works not only
stretches my creative expression but also helps me identify patterns in human
behavior that haven’t changed much over time.”
The Accidental Creative, page 145
This
was my favourite practice in the entire book. Whether it’s the works of
Shakespeare or Plato’s Republic, it’s important to read the
canonical works of literature, plays, spiritual texts (such as the Bible or
Quran—in fact many of the great Western books contain allusions to the Bible,
including John Steinbeck’s East of Eden). I myself try to read
these great “supertexts” in order to improve as a writer. (My Amazon “to read”
book list is now swelling with over 800 titles, and I look forward to reading
them over my lifetime…I’m realistic enough to know it’s not going to happen
overnight!) While this may seem like a practice more suited to the traditional
creative, it can benefit both traditional and nontraditional creatives. Henry
writes, “In many ways it’s like communing with the great minds of history and
allowing them to illuminate your understanding of how the world works. This
improved understanding increases your platform for expression and creative
problem solving.” These books demonstrate that human behaviour is essentially
standard, more or less, and remarkably unchanging over time. The philosophies
in these books are the basis of many of the books we read today, so instead of
reading distilled versions, why not read the originals?
To go
a step further, you can create a Stimulus Queue of the
“supertexts” you want to read. But most of all it’s important to set aside some
time, perhaps an hour a day in the evenings (any time that is most convenient
to you), to study these texts, or study anything that will continue your
learning. Just because you’re done school doesn’t mean you’re done learning.
When you stop exposing yourself to new ideas, you become stagnant and so does
your creativity. You can’t allow that to happen. Stay curious!
Todd
Henry’s The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s
Notice is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Whether we
realize it or not, we’re all expected to create and add value every day in our
jobs. If we can’t do that, we will be replaced by someone who can. It’s as
simple as that. If you work hard to implement some of the practices in this
book, there is little fear of that ever happening.
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