Want To Be More Creative And Successful? Fight The Urge
To Focus
A wandering mind can be an asset if you learn how to use it.
In 1987, Mark Frauenfelder read an article
in Whole Earth Review about the indie magazine revolution and
thought to himself, “I’ve got to do a zine.” The next year, he and his wife
started Boing Boing, a pop culture and technology publication.
Frauenfelder was a mechanical engineer at the time; when Boing Boing launched
in 1995 (first in print and then online), he kept his job in the disc-drive
industry—and this was after he had joined the editorial team
at Wired magazine two years earlier.
Frauenfelder did all this on the side and
without any formal journalism experience, learning as he went and having
fun every step of the way. He went on to found Make in 2005, a
magazine that covered the growing “maker movement,” and a decade after that
Frauenfelder self-published a book on magic tricks. He’s also an artist whose
work graces the cover of Billy Idol’s 1993 album Cyberpunk.
This is just how Frauenfelder’s brain works;
he can’t stay stuck on one thing for too long. “For better or for worse,” he
told me, “I am really interested in a lot of different things, and trying
things out myself to see what it’s like to actually experience producing media
or other things is always interesting.”
That’s an underappreciated hallmark of
successful creatives—they’re rarely specialists in just one thing. In
fact, too much focus can prove risky.
THE RULE OF THE PORTFOLIO
When asked, “What do you do?” most of us tend
to answer with a one-word reply or start describing our work duties. But since
when does a single job description define what a person is capable of? Whether
we realize it or not, many of us assume that we’ll eventually have to commit to
a certain path in life, spend most our career doing that one thing, and not
veer too far from it or else sabotage our professional success. This, we think,
is what mastery is all about.
It isn’t. Your career can always change and
evolve—in fact, the most creative ones need to regularly. In order to thrive,
you have to master more than one skill. In the Renaissance, people embraced
this intersection of different disciplines, and those who blended them best
were rightly called “masters.” Frauenfelder says he has a hard time answering
when people ask what he does. “What I do is just pick one thing, and I’ll say,
I’m a magazine editor, or a writer, or a blogger . . . I’m just generally a
person who will do things that require creativity and communication.”
While it doesn’t fit neatly into a job
description, Frauenfelder’s career rests on a rich, diverse portfolio that
allows him to do interesting and creative work for a lifetime—even though it
isn’t what you might call “focused.” But in order to thrive in new creative
age, you have to master multiple crafts; one former Ideo designer writing
for Fast Company last year, described the competitive
advantage of the “comprehensivist”: Would you
rather hire a writer who’s only good at crafting prose, or one who also
understands marketing? Would you prefer to work for a boss who only knows how
to treat people with respect? When we develop a diverse portfolio of work, we
do better and more interesting work, and we tend to avoid becoming obsolete so
quickly.
A DISTRACTIBLE MIND
That doesn’t mean creative professionals
don’t genuinely struggle with a lack of focus. Sometimes it’s hard to commit to
something and see it through to the end—but even this isn’t necessarily a bad
thing. A wandering mind can be an asset if you learn how to use it.
In 1985 Michael Jackson famously paid $47.5
million for a music catalog that included 250 songs by the Beatles. At the
time, people in the industry thought the deal was crazy, but Jackson knew the
Beatles catalog was invaluable. In the decades since Jackson’s purchase, the
value of those songs has increased more than 1,000%, to over $1.5 billion.
The acquisition was one of the greatest deals
in music business history, but it wasn’t initiated by a producer or label
executive. Had Jackson been focused solely on writing and performing his own
music, he’d never have orchestrated an eight-figure acquisition of somebody
else’s. But he was doing just what thriving artists do: He wasn’t going all-in
on one big bet—he was diversifying his portfolio.
To spot the right places to invest your time
and resources, you need what Darya Zabelina calls a “leaky mental filter.” A
researcher who teaches at Northwestern University, Zabelina says there’s a link
between creative achievement and the ability to hold multiple, conflicting
ideas in mind at once. This preserves the tension between those ideas so that
they naturally build upon one another. “People with leaky attention might be
able to notice things that others don’t notice or see connections between
things,” she told me, “which might lead to a creative idea or creative
thought.”
That’s what allowed Michael Jackson to see
something nobody else saw. It let Mark Frauenfelder work on Boing Boing and Wired at
the same time, not to mention countless other projects. Both pursuits competed
with each other for his time and energy, and both flourished. Under the right
circumstances, being distractible can be a strength.
“If you think about the most creative people,”
therapist Chuck Chapman told me, “they’re the ones who innovate. They come up
with the ideas, and I think the fact that your brain is going so fast all the
time and seeing so many possibilities—that’s what creates innovation.”
BY JEFF GOINS https://www.fastcompany.com/40427609/want-to-be-more-creative-and-successful-fight-the-urge-to-focus?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fcdaily-top&position=1&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=06242017
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