A Curmudgeonly Contrarian’s Guide to Creativity – For Business Owners

Creativity! you say. Damn it, Jim, I’m an entrepreneur, not an artist.

But if you want to stand out in a world getting more and more ensloppified by tech giants whose key leaders actively hate humanity, you’re going to need some creativity. 

Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you have to create art if you don’t want to. 

But it does require you to think differently, especially about work and the harmony between work and life.

Why creativity is important for business owners

While we typically think of creativity in terms of art, music, poetry, etc., those fields are not the only ones that demand creativity.

Even dictionary.com will tell you the same thing: the second definition for the word creativity is “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination”.

Anything in there about marble, music, poetry? I bet you could easily think of something you don’t like in your industry that you’d love to remix into a new idea? Or do you have some … perhaps even contrarian… thoughts about things you’d like to change?

So, get rid of the idea that you can’t be creative because you can’t draw or paint or whatever. If you come up with something new for your business, you’re creative. That could be a methodology (like my LaserBrain® framework), a new way to interact with your community, or anything that your brain came up with.

Creativity is also good for your brain. Computers and technology don’t need creativity (and certainly can’t access it themselves.) So-called artificial intelligence is sucking up clean water and energy that could be going to households instead. Your brain doesn’t do that.

Our brains are not computers. A lot of work in and on your business requires executive functioning and a lot of activity from the prefrontal cortex. Which doesn’t perform well after a few hours of hard work.

Creativity doesn’t necessarily require executive functioning and it definitely doesn’t work in linear fashion. But it still keeps your brain active, and you might find yourself enjoying it – if you allow yourself to do so.

Which you won’t if you believe time is money. Or if you’re so freaked out by a moment to yourself that your hand is glued to your phone to make sure this dread state of affairs doesn’t happen.

Appreciating process and outcomes for improving productivity

Everyone, except some curmudgeons and contrarians, loves goals. SMART goals! Big hairy audacious ones (BHAGs)! Yearly resolutions!

Goals are about outcomes and measurements. If I wanted to lose forty pounds in five months, I need to lose eight pounds a month which is two pounds a week. 

If I wanted to make $15,000 a month based on an offer that costs $5K, I need to sell three a month to make that goal. If I close one sale on five sales calls, then I need to make fifteen sales calls in a month. 

If I want to retire at age 70 with $X, and to date I have saved $Y, I can look at the gap and see how much I need to save between now and then. This goal isn’t quite as exact as the other ones, because there’s no one number that is both achievable and guaranteed to produce the income I’ll need throughout my retirement. But I’ll know how far off I am and what I need to plug the gap for a reasonable possibility that I bounce my last check on the day I die.

These types of goals, especially revenue goals, are easy to break down and reverse engineer.

But what about goals that aren’t? That don’t necessarily have any metrics and definitely don't translate into revenue (or profit dollars)?

• Spending more time with loved ones and friends 

• Taking a break from caregiving so that you don’t get burned out

• Doing your favorite outdoor activity, whether that’s picnicking with a good book and good food, hiking, biking, rock climbing, skiing, running… etc.

• Doing your favorite indoor activity – including, but not limited to, sexy fun times

I’m just going to remind you real quick that all the interviews conducted with people at the end of their lives, to find out what they regretted, not a single one said “If I only I had worked more.” No one said, “I wish I spent my life at the office instead of being with my family.”

What do you do with these non-revenue goals? Ignore them since you can’t assign a dollar to them? If you actually think that’s a sane solution, I genuinely wonder what you’re doing reading this.

These types of goals are not predicated on a specific outcome. I don’t even want to call them goals, because this is stuff that we humans are already good at as long as we haven’t become pods in the greater corporate American machine. 

Our bodies and brains WANT us to enjoy time with loved ones and go outdoors in nature and do things that we find fun.

And it’s massively f*ed up that we have to “make time” for the things that nourish us as human beings. (While I’m here, absolutely nothing about so-called artificial intelligence nourishes us as humans. Absolutely nothing.)

Yet here we are. As messed up as it might be, most of us do need to take time away from our work in order to have time for the good things in life that don’t come from pressing buttons.

Which means that we need to make room for the process, or the journey, instead of thinking only in terms of outcomes. Make time for family and other activities besides work. That means not having every second of every day scheduled. 

That means putting the phones away out of sight when you’re with loved ones. No, you don’t need to pull your phone out because you’re looking for a video from some guy you thought of while someone else was talking. (Stop it. The conversation just grinds to a halt when you do this.)

These times won’t be “productive” in the sense of making money from them. But are they "productive" in the sense that they allow your prefrontal cortex to get a break and help you refill your productivity tank so when you go back to work the next day you’re all primed and ready to go?

Hell yes.

(Not to mention that when you retire, and yes I did say when, not if, you’ll have activities and friends that can help you exit without losing your sense of self and meaning. Just saying.) 

Time management for creatives (yes, that includes you)

When I returned from a business retreat, I filled up my notebook with a ton of ideas on the flight home. I numbered them so I could later put them in the right categories and prioritize them, and I ended up with something like 35 ideas. That’s a lot, even for me.

Most of them weren’t direct suggestions that someone made to me or that I read about. They came from my being immersed (NO PHONE) in the retreat, in the content, in the conversations. 

You might also find you get ideas in the shower, or maybe when you’re washing dishes. You probably don’t get them while you’re elbows deep in a tax filing or legal brief or financial plan. That’s because your prefrontal cortex is on and working linearly.

Creativity often requires ideas to connect across information silos. If all you ever read about or think about are tax filings, you might have a harder time coming up with new ideas compared to someone who has a few different interests and regularly consumes information about them. Or even someone whose main interest is tax filing, but likes to keep up with new industry trends and regularly updates their knowledge base with what’s new in the field.

And very often the answer is being built in your unconscious mind. Different ideas from the different information sources combine; I like to think my unconscious is percolating as it works on things.

Then it boils, sometimes at 33,000 feet in a plane, sometimes in the shower, and sometimes on a hike. 

You can’t cram “creativity” into a half hour block on your calendar. Creativity needs a lot of unstructured time, as do the creativity inputs such as reading, having conversations, listening to podcasts, attending webinars, and so on.

You won’t be creative if you’re constantly scrolling, whether it’s through emails or “social” media feeds. Random information doesn’t help, and the more you scroll the more you’ll need to scroll, for the dopamine fix.

Another counterintuitive thing that often feeds creativity is boredom. If you’re not scrolling or checking your phone, instead just standing in line at the store or staring out your office window, your mind will come up with something. 

Sometimes your brain will come up with a good idea, but not every time. Creativity is not goal-driven, and so you might not have anything to show for your boredom or the time you spent coming up with “what-if” questions. At least not at first. 

But these times of boredom away from your feeds can help you reconnect with your humanity. You might come up with something really great the next time you’re on a flight… as long as you’re not watching movies or working the whole time.

Recap (tl;dr):

Creativity is actually very important for business owners, even if you can’t slap a revenue number on top of it. It’s good for your brain and might be really good for your business.

Having trouble carving out time away from your business to do some of this creativity stuff? I got you. Grab the book on sustainable productivity by clicking here.

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash.