We are brilliant at developing permanent solutions to temporary problems. And we waste a lot of productive organizational energy making contingency plans and preparing for the worst rather than aggressively pursuing our work. Do you waste time in your life and creating “planning for doomsday”? If so, how, and what are you going to do about it?

In sound recording there is something known as the “noise floor”. This is the amount of constant ambient noise in the recording environment or that results as a function of the method of recording.

The goal for any recording  engineer is to maximize the amount of signal recorded in comparison to the amount of noise. The more noise is present, the more difficult it is to discern the signal, or the subject of the recording.

I’ve noticed this same principle playing out in my life as it relates to the kinds of stimuli I allow to take root in my mind. The more “ambient noise” that’s allowed in my environment, as defined by potential distractions or by less-than-purposeful stimuli, the more difficult it is to sort through it all and discern that which will be useful in my life and work.

I’ve had to develop the purposeful practice of sorting through stimuli and putting it into a “stimulus queue” in order to ensure that I’m not haphazardly absorbing stimuli without thinking through how it will benefit my creative process. I’m always trying to ensure that the stimulus in my life is high quality.

What are the characteristics that mark higher quality stimuli?

1. Relevant. When we are creating we are combining bits of stimulus into something new. The more relevant the stimuli the more likely we are to have a conceptual breakthrough. This doesn’t mean that we should be looking for stimuli that resolve the particular problem we are facing, but it does mean that we should be purposeful to limit our stimuli during certain seasons to elements that are more likely to focus our thought toward desired ends.

2. Diverse. While carrots are healthy for me, if I eat nothing but carrots for a month I will probably find my body in serious disrepair. Similarly, we must diversify our diet of stimuli by exploring divergent topics of interest, varying forms of media and by ingesting the opinions of others we may be inclined to disagree with. This will expand our capacity to process information, help us form new and interesting patterns and stimulate different parts of our brain than will be triggered by staying in the same stimulus rut.

3. Challenging. We need to ingest stimuli that cause us to think and that challenge us to grow our skills. While consuming pop culture can be helpful is staying abreast of trends and keeping us squarely in the flow of cultural relevance, we also need to ensure that we are communing with the great minds and experiencing mind-stretching concepts and stories.

Develop practices around the stimuli in your life. It will help you better prepare for the work you face day to day and will increase your capacity for insight and brilliance when you need it.

Organizational creating is difficult. We live in a create-on-demand world, and the expectation is that we will be able to produce consistently brilliant work, essentially on-demand, over long stretches of time and with little reprieve.

While this is certainly not a reasonable expectation, it’s a natural result of attempting to systemize the creative process, which is inherently conceptual in nature, by establishing highly concrete expectations and processes. Many organizations treat creating just like assembly line work, or as if it’s simply a matter of assembling the right pieces in the right order to turn out the final product. It’s the only way the organization can deal with the inherent complexity of managing conceptual work.

Adding to this complexity is the organizational infatuation with rapid problem solving. It can be very uncomfortable for us when there are open loops, or problems inhibiting productivity. We grow so uncomfortable, in fact, that we often will do nearly anything to resolve the dissonance these problems introduce, which usually means inventing some new system or developing a process to deal with them. But not all problems are equal. Some problems are temporary in nature, and we’re ultimately left with the permanent systems even after the problem is long gone.

But not all problems are equal. Some problems are temporary in nature. Unfortunately, we are often incapable of discerning a temporary problem from a permanent one in the moment, and the result is that we create a system or a process that ultimately inhibits our future creating.

The more structures we have to navigate in order to do our work, the more difficult it is to do our best work. When we are required to resolve the dissonance of complex systems, reporting relationships and accountability structures just in order to get our objectives and check off our direction we will begin to lose our drive to do brilliant work. Over time, this complexity only pulls entire organizations toward systematic mediocrity.

We also do this in our personal creating. Have you ever found something that worked for you once, so you started to incorporate it into all of your future work? Have you ever set up a recurring one-on-one meeting with someone to resolve a specific work issue, and then it stayed on your calendar long after that issue had been resolved? These examples follow the same “permanent solution to temporary problem” mindset that we must be careful to avoid.

Each time we add a system or process to our creating it increases the amount of energy required just to get to the actual work. These sub-problems that must be solved significantly zap our ability to engage effectively, especially in a create-on-demand role.

Do you see this playing out in your life and creating? Where is your organization developing permanent solutions to temporary problems? Where are you doing it?

Photo credit: Tiger Pixel

My family just returned from a week-long vacation on Lake Erie. It was good to rest and get away from the fray, though anyone with small children will agree that vacations often feel more like packing up your life and moving it to a less convenient place. Still, the break from things like e-mail, the pressure to produce and the relational demands of everyday work was welcome.

Now that I’m back, the challenge has been regaining traction. Re-entry always feels a bit like sitting in a car on a patch of ice hoping for any kind of opposable surface. This is the same feeling that is often present at the beginning of a big project. Where to begin?

First, I’m so thankful for the practices I’ve built into my life. Without them, I would be awash right now in a sea of e-mail and tasks. These practices in the areas of time, energy, stimuli, focus and relationships are like salt on the ice, giving me points of friction.

Second, I’m thankful for the people in my life who help me stay focused in the midst of what often feels like chaos.

Finally, I’m thankful to the great AC community and the very kind e-mails I’ve been receiving lately. It means a ton to know that the podcast and site are helpful.

I’m wrapping up the first draft of the AC book. It’s due to the publisher on September 1, and I’m hoping to have it finished in the next week so I can sit with it for a while. If there is anything that’s been helpful that you think MUST be included, please let me know.

In my Stimulus Queue: I recently read The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working by Tony Schwartz. Many of you heard our recent interview with Tony, and I can’t recommend this book enough to anyone who is feeling a little…stretched…thin. I’ve been interested recently in the effects of celebrity culture on the American mindset, so I’ve just begun Empire Of Illusion by Chris Hedges. More to come on this subject.

It’s great to be back, and as always, it’s great to be creating with you!

In this interview, Chris Guillebeau of The Art of Nonconformity shares insights on community, goals and living life on purpose rather than by default.

Think about how you’ve spent your last 24 hours. How much time did you spend on building something rather than on maintaining something that already existed? Most of us spend the majority of our lives in maintenance mode, whether it’s professionally or personally. We are hired to maintain a system that someone else invented, we maintain our relationships rather than leading them, or we reactively do what we have to in order to get the work done but we don’t spend much time thinking about building capacity for future work. We live lives of obligation.

The shift from obligation mode to opportunity mode is critical for any creative who wants to be prolific, brilliant and healthy. We must be thinking regularly about how we are investing in our capacity to do better work in the future. We must be personally accountable for our own growth. We must build practices into our life that make us effective rather than obsessing on efficiency.

Are you living your life for obligation or for opportunity? I’d challenge you to do something today that is forward-looking and increases your capacity to do brilliant work.

In this interview Tony Schwartz, author and CEO of The Energy Project, discusses his new WSJ and NYT best-selling book The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working [amazon link] and shares why energy management trumps time management in terms of doing more and better work.

This morning we launched our new 12 week course called Everyday Brilliance. At the heart of it, that’s what we all want, right? We want to be able to show up each day, spout off brilliant insights, create loads of value, and do it effortlessly and perpetually.

But it doesn’t work that way.

If we want to do brilliant work on a consistent basis we must establish practices in our life to keep us engaged and inspired. We can’t drift. We must be purposeful in the areas of time, energy, stimulus, focus and relationships. It’s tempting to believe that our best work will always be either a function of (1) sheer accidental insight or (2) sheer persistence. In reality, it’s neither. It’s most often a function of how we’ve invested our efforts to increase our capacity to do great work. Our greatest creative achievements will most often result from investments we made in ourselves days, months or even years ago.

Be aware of how you’re investing in yourself. Are you drifting, or are you being purposeful? Are you establishing practices around the kinds of stimulus you absorb and how you apply it to your work, or are you carelessly feeding your mind “junk food”? Are you setting aside time for important capacity-increasing activities? Don’t drift. Be engaged. And if you want to know what some of those capacity-increasing practices are, check out the course.

A few years ago I noticed that something disturbing was becoming re-occurring pattern in my life. It was a tiny sensation, or a little “pin prick in my gut” that popped up every so often.

I called it the “ping.”

It’s that little sensation that occasionally prompts me to check my e-mail or my social media accounts. It’s the impulse to mindlessly surf news sites on the web when I should be doing something much more important.

The “ping” wants to be my master. It wants to own me. It wants me to serve it.  And the “ping” even has a ready-made life philosophy for me:

Something “out there” is more important that something “right here.”

If a meeting gets even the slightest bit boring, I reach into my pocket to grab my phone and check my email under the table. If I have a few minutes in line at the store, I pull out my phone to check my feeds on Google Reader. Rather than being “heads up” and actually paying attention to what’s happening in front of me, the “ping” whispers to me, “Hey…you don’t have to be bored. You have options. Yep – there’s an app for that.”

The net result? I’m finding that it’s more difficult to be fully in one place and to focus on what’s in front of me. I’m losing the capacity to think deeply about whatever I’m experiencing because I tend to gravitate to whatever feeds the “ping”. I default to whatever will entertain me right now. Neil Postman’s 1985 work Amusing Ourselves To Death [amazon link] is more relevant than ever in the “fiber-optically wired to our every desire” era.

The truth? We need to learn to pay attention to what’s in front of us. The “something out there is more important than something right here” prompting of the ping is eating away at our ability to focus. This is not an anti-tech rant, but we must endure that tech is serving us and not the other way around. Our creating is largely defined by our ability to process and assimilate our experiences. Are we experiencing life, or are we always living “out there” somewhere?

A few questions: how have you experienced the “ping”, and do you have any strategies for dealing with it?

In this interview, Kristian Andersen of Kristian Andersen + Associates shares insights into staying inspired, dealing with clients and getting moving on what’s important. In the interview Kristian mentions his agency as well as their new product, Tinderbox.

In a podcast interview with Kristian Andersen (to be released on Monday) he said something that caught me off-guard and caused me to think about my day-to-day work. The gist of his comment was that we need to decide what what we want to be known for, and then get working on it. In other words, we need to make sure that our daily activities line up with where we want to be headed.

I’m going to build on his comment: The question I’ve been asking myself (since the interview) is,

“Would I want to be known for the work I’m doing today?”

If today was going to determine for all time how people would perceive my work, would I be satisfied with my efforts?

This doesn’t mean that I have to hit home runs everyday. I think it’s more a matter of how I engage the work rather than what I do. I want to make sure that I’m pouring myself into my work and not doing the bare minimum required to “get by”.

So, I pose the same question to you: would you want to be known (forever) for the work you’re doing today?

Every time I speak to a group of creatives or sit with anyone one-on-one, I challenge them that their end goal should be to be brilliant, prolific and healthy:

Prolific + Brilliant + Healthy = producing great work consistently and in a sustainable way.

Many (MANY!) people don’t care about the “healthy” part. They just want to crank out as much great work as they can, make a ton of money, and deal with the consequences later. If that’s you, that’s fine. That seems to me like an incredibly unsatisfying way to live, but that’s your choice.

(I want to be able to sustain my work over the long-term. As I listen to the wise advice of a lot of successful people, a consistent theme is that the race belongs to the persistent, not to the ones who are quick out of the gate. I want continue to get better and be more prolific and produce better work over time, not to burn out on the altar of short-term productivity. But that’s just me.)

Most people perform well in two of these areas, but not in all three:

Prolific + Brilliant – Healthy = producing great work consistently, but our life is a stressful mess.

Brilliant + Healthy – Prolific = producing great work sustainably, but not enough of it to justify keeping our job.

Healthy + Prolific – Brilliant = producing work consistently and sustainably, but it’s crap.

This is just a quick challenge to do a gut check about where you stand with this. What do you really want out of your life and your creating, and are you building your life in such a way as to get it?

In this interview from the Innovation Uncensored Conference, Nike President and CEO Mark Parker shares some advice Steve Jobs gave him shortly after the release of the Nike+ gear, developed in collaboration with Apple.

One of the most difficult things for an organization is to let go of projects or products that might be past their prime, ineffective or slightly off-strategy when they are still contributing to the “bottom line”. It’s even more difficult when the decision is personal. We often have months or even years vested in a project and it can be tough to cut ties, even when it makes the most sense to do so.

Upon seeing this video, I was challenged to take a hard look at everything happening in my life and work and identify the “crap”, or the stuff that might be adequate but not really representative of the best I can do.

What do you think about Jobs’ comments?

I was having a chat the other day with a peer about the struggles we each have with “meeting creep”.

This is a medically diagnosable condition with the primary symptom being the inexplicable expansion of meetings into every crevice and corner of your schedule.

Meetings are fine if they (a) serve a specific purpose, (b) will provide you or the team with something needed in order to get the job done and (c) are the best way to disseminate important information that is timely and urgent. But some of us collect standing meetings like baseball cards and soon our entire schedule is full of marginally useful conversation about projects we’re loosely attached to.

Here are a few thoughts to help stem meeting creep:
1. Set a specific time frame for the meeting. Once that time expires, meeting over. Period. Honor this – no exceptions. It will keep people engaged if they know when the meeting will be over.

2. If you’re leading a meeting, start the meeting by asking what everyone needs out of it. Once everyone has what they need, the meeting is over. Tell participants that it’s their responsibility to get out of the meeting what they need.

3. Begin each week by looking at your schedule and asking if there are any meetings that could be canceled or handled with a quick conversation involving two or three people.

4. Give people permission to excuse themselves from a meeting if they don’t need anything or have nothing to add.

5. Reward especially productive meetings in some way. Meetings are an important culture-builder within our organizations and if we associate productive meetings with rewards we are more likely to gravitate toward more effective get-togethers.

Because of the highly collaborative nature of creative work, meetings are a necessity. This is not an “anti-meeting” rant. But we must do our best to ensure that meetings aren’t sucking the life out of us or preventing us from doing what we are really paid to do – create value.

Any other “meeting creep” tips? Anything you’ve found effective?

“Be reasonable.”

Those words are constantly being spoken to us in various ways.

Don’t take risks.

Better not to take a chance on that project.

Hug the shoreline.

Time to face reality.

Accept what is and stop thinking about what could be.

Pragmatics are more important than possibilities.

If it could be done, someone would have already done it.

Reasonable people don’t change the world.

Did you ever stop to think that people tell you to be reasonable so that they don’t have to face their own fear of failure?

Fireworks make my feet feel fuzzy? Sometimes we can develop a false understanding of what’s really happening in our life and creating. This can lead to systems that will make us ineffective in the long-run. In this episode, we’re exploring both the power and the problems of rituals in our creative life.

One of the central practices of a conversational team is that there is a high degree of trust, and that often stems from a culture of generosity.

Generosity is a word that we love to use in a theoretical sense but putting into practice can be a challenge. The real indicator of our generosity comes when we are faced with a decision to limit our own gain for someone else’s benefit. But generosity doesn’t always mean sacrifice. In fact, what we often find as we engage generously and release our grasp of things we think we need to survive is that other, unexpected benefits come our way. (Things like trust, confidence, collaborative energy and the satisfaction of a job well done.) And it’s hard to judge the overall impact of these things on our creativity and productivity. There is rarely a one to one correlation between these intangibles and our creative output but the influence is undeniable.

The difficulty of engaging in a life of generous engagement stems from our inability to make generous decisions in the moment. This is why I prefer to consider generosity a practice that must be developed. It’s something that we have to consciously engage in for a period of time before it becomes second nature.

In his book Change Or Die [amazon link] Alan Deutschman proposes that there are three elements present in any kind of lasting change: relationship, repetition and reframing of worldview. I think that this gives us a good framework for thinking about generosity and how to interject it into our daily thought and organizational life. We must (1) have another person (preferably a leader or manager) with whom we are sharing our attempts to be more generously engaged so that they can help us stay focused and keep us on task, (2) practice generosity as a core ethic until it becomes second-nature and then it will (3) reframe how we see the world.

The ethic of generous engagement is core to a healthy, thriving creative team and, more than that, is critical to our own ability to create at a high capacity over long periods of time. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more we give away the more we get in return. But we have to be watching for it when it arrives.

It seems that the times when we feel that we must be profound are the times when we find profundity to be most elusive.

In his book on the nature of procrastination called The Now Habit [amazon link], Neil Fiore describes an experiment he performs with his patients to help them identify when they are behaving irrationally because of fear. He asks his patients to imagine that there is a wood plank laying across the floor, six inches wide and about twenty feet long. He asks them if they would be able to walk across this plank without falling off. Inevitably, the patients respond that walking across this plank would be no problem. Fiore then asks them to imagine that the plank has been elevated to a height of one hundred feet in the air and is suspended between two buildings. He again asks the patients if they believe they could walk across the plank without falling off. This time, however, very few of the patients are willing to “walk the plank.”

What has changed? Certainly not the technical skill required to perform the task. It’s the same six-inch-wide twenty foot plank. But for some reason the respondents were now hesitant to walk it. The only thing that has changed is the perceived consequence for making a mistake. Suddenly, a slight misstep would mean more than starting over, it would instead mean death. (Or at least several broken bones.) The perceived consequence of a mistake caused the respondents to choose not to engage in an activity that, only moments before, they had said would be easy.

This same dynamic plays out in our daily creating. When we feel that we must be profound, we artificially elevate the stakes and the perceived consequences of not being profound. The unfortunate result is that we do mediocre work because we’re so fixated on the end result that we neglect the process.

I’m working to stamp this “profundity chase” out of my life and to instead give myself over to the process. I’m a terrible judge of the quality of my  work, especially when I’m in the midst of the process. I’d challenge you to do the same.

photo credit: @boetter

For those looking for a summertime creative “shot in the arm”, this is just a quick reminder about the InHowse Conference happening June 6-8 in Denver and sponsored by HOW Magazine. I’ll be delivering the Create-Or-Die talk on Tuesday, June 8th and  there will be a ton of other great and inspiring speakers at the conference (including one of our favorites - riCardo Crespo). In addition, the InHowse, HOW and Creative Freelancer conferences are all happening at the same time in overlapping fashion. It’s like a design invasion.

We’d also love to do a “meet-up” of AC community members while we’re out there, so if you’re planning to attend please let us know. If there’s enough interest we’ll put something on the calendar.

(Also, if you’re planning to register you can get $100 off the registration fee if you register by midnight on April 15th. You can tell them you found about it through AC by using the code THN10.)

Oh… and if you’re from the Denver area, I’d very much appreciate any tips on where to eat and things to do while I’m there!

I’ve had this formula on the door to my office for several years now. It’s there to remind me each day that I need to be pursuing simplicity in everything I do.

On dissonance…

Whenever we make things more complicated than they need to be we increase the chances that the system will erode or that we will experience a break between the “why” and the “what” of our work. When this happens, dissonance emerges and can kill our effectiveness. This is magnified many times over when there are multiple people working on a project, each bringing their own perspectives and adding new layers of complexity.

…missing the “main thing”

I’ve also experienced priority drift as a result of complexity. The more complicated the system we’ve built, the more energy required to maintain it. This energy comes at the expense of focusing on the “main thing”. If we’re an organization, we must hire people to keep the system running. Each of those people have a new “main thing”, which is to focus on the part of the system they’re responsible for. Oh, and to justify their job by adding even more layers of complexity. Fun.

…and the rebuild.

This is a big reason why we’ve chosen to rebuild the AC site. We want it to focus more on the “main thing”, which is freeing up creative pros to do their best work. The more complicated we make things, the more difficult it is to accomplish what we set out to do in the first place. The more hoops we have to jump through to engage in a conversation, the less we’ll want to.

I hope that you’ll join me in boycotting unnecessary complexity in your life. A few questions that have helped me are:

1. Is there a more simple way to approach this?
2. Where in my life/work am I wasting energy on maintaining the system?
3. As a leader, are there people on my team whose entire role is to maintain the status quo / maintain the system?
4. Is the “what” of my day-to-day work lining up with “why” I say I’m doing it?

I’d love to hear some ways you’re going to choose to boycott unnecessary complexity in your life and work. Let’s keep it simple.

You are not a machine, so you cannot expect yourself to produce like one. Machines are predictable and boring. You are not. You are capable of incredible acts of intuition, emotion and insight. You can create exponential value with very few resources at your disposal. But in order to do this, you must avoid the temptation to fall into the rote, unimaginative way of living that attracts so many.

All that’s required to avoid this “purgatory for creative workers” is some intentionality, a little soul-searching, and a willingness to come against the fear and apathy that wants to keep you in a place of living beneath your potential. It takes courage to go against the current, especially when drifting feels a lot better in the moment than exerting the effort to make a change and create forward progress. But if we don’t make the hard choices we will wake up one day and wonder how we got where we are. We will wonder where our years went. We will regret that we weren’t more purposeful about how we engaged.

Purpose and meaning are found in the way you engage your work, not just in the end product. That begins today. What do you think you should do about it?

We’ve used the tag “cover bands don’t change the world” for as long as we’ve been doing the AC Podcasts. A “cover band” is a band that plays other people’s music. The most extreme example is the “tribute band”, which directly copies another artist’s music and style in the attempt to pay homage to their art. More subtle examples are the college rock bands that fill clubs every weekend playing the radio hits du jour. Occasionally you’ll hear one of these bands rattle off something like “now we’re going to play something we wrote” and a collective protest will arise from the club goers.

Why?

Because no one came to the band to hear the band’s original music. They are there to dance, have a good time and hear music they know. The promise of going to hear a cover band is that you’ll be treated to familiar tunes in a dance-friendly format with little variation from the originals. This is the expectation that’s been set. It’s the “brand promise”, and it’s just been violated in a major way.

It’s incredibly difficult for a band to make the transition from “cover band” to “original band.” In fact, it rarely happens successfully. The band is always caught in the netherworld between making a living/earning money and wanting to express themselves through their art. Even if they are able to successfully slip some original music into the mix, they will always have to stare down the vocal requests for the latest top 40 fare.

The only way I’ve seen a band successfully earn a living playing original music is by choosing to do so from the very beginning and by building a loyal audience for what they do. They stay true to who they are and are willing to forgo immediate financial return in order to build a long-lasting and loyal audience for their music. They are patient enough to earn fans one at a time. They don’t imitate others for the sake of quick returns.

This is not to imply that there’s anything wrong with imitation. It’s one of the key phases of creative growth. We must imitate if we want to develop our skills. But it gets tricky when we start making money off of our imitation skills. There is always the temptation to go where the quick money is rather than patiently developing your craft and your audience.

There are a lot of “cover bands” in the marketplace today. If their goal is simply to make money, so be it. But the products and people who really change the game seem to be the ones who are able to stay true to a set of principles rather than being driven to quick returns. They develop a loyal audience rather than a fickle one that turns away the moment they “play an original”.

It’s my desire to continue to strive to find my own voice and to try to weed out all of the places where I’m being “cover-bandish”. In the consulting space, this can be a very tricky proposition because it often means turning down more work than I accept because it’s not what I’m best at. But my hope is that the original value that I bring to the clients I choose to work with will create raving “fans” who want to continue to work with me and trust me when I develop new products or ideas.

Are you playing it safe in your work? Are you going for the quick return, or are you building your following strategically? Are you developing your craft and identifying your unique contribution? By the way, it’s totally fine to do this “on the side”. A lot of musicians are in multiple bands. But somewhere in your life you need to be working toward finding an original form of expression.

Remember: cover bands don’t change the world.

We’re very excited about our recent interview with Seth Godin about his book Linchpin [amazon link]. There are few people who consistently bring the kind of energy and insight that Seth routinely delivers as a matter of course. I think that this book is destined to be considered one of his best, and it was a privilege to hear his perspective on it on the podcast.

It’s become popular these days to stir up visions of uniqueness, expression and individualism in all of its forms, but my encouragement to all of us is that the greatest (and most mature) expression of creativity will happen not as the result of eliminating boundaries, but when we are comfortable within them. We each need a container to fill, and as we grow comfortable within these limitations we can begin to stretch beyond them and expand our platform for expression. But first, we must grow comfortable with our skills and develop the right mindset. We must establish our practices (Time, Energy, Stimulus, Focus, Relationships.) And most of all, we must learn to bring ourselves fully to what’s in front of us. If we can’t be content creating in our current role, a change of scenery will not bring us freedom, it will only magnify our dissatisfaction.

Do something unique this week. Don’t be a cover band. Become a linchpin. And do it from wherever you are. Bring yourself to what you’re doing and make a difference.

As I was working on the AC book this morning, I was reminded of this quote from Orbiting The Giant Hairball by Gordon Mackenzie [amazon link]:

Orville Wright did not have a pilot’s license.

What are you waiting for permission to do in your life, work and art?

Scott Belsky (CEO of Behance) shares insights from his new book Making Ideas Happen.