• Inspiration

Creative Risk-taking: Can I Actually Do That?

By Tyler Tervooren

Editor’s Note: Today’s feature is a guest article from Tyler Tervooren of Advanced Riskology.

You’ve probably noticed people around you quietly muttering “Umm…that’s not how it’s done” your whole life. For that reason, the more you hone your craft and the further down the path you go, the more important it becomes that you never stop daydreaming ideas that make you stop and ask yourself:

“Can I actually do that?”

Creativity — true creativity — requires risk. They’re undeniably intertwined, and to create something really meaningful, you must be willing to go outside you’re comfort zone in order to create it.

So, perhaps even more important than the question, “Can I actually do that?” is the answer: “Sure, why not?”

Here are a few of my favorite stories from my own life and from others far more brilliant than me that illustrate this principle in action.

“How’s My Accent? Does it Sound Russian?”

I just came home from a trip that took me all across Africa and into Russia to run a marathon and climb a few big mountains. I had a lot of fun, but trips like that always seem to come with their fair share of complexities. For instance, when I got to Russia, the police had closed the mountain I was climbing and the military was guarding the route to the summit.

Not even kidding.

In a previous life, I would have shrugged my shoulders and gone home. But this time I was committed to climbing, and I wanted a story I’d remember in fifty years. So I called the guide I’d hired and found out he was part of a mountain rescue team that was allowed through the police checkpoints and that there was one other climbing team on the mountain that had permission from the military to reach the summit.

*Bingo!*

It was a harebrained plan to be sure, but if I could pretend well enough to be Russian without actually speaking (I don’t speak a lick of Russian), we could still make this thing happen.

And we did! There were plenty of close calls and lots of confusion along the way, but we made it, and now I have a story that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

What could have gone wrong? Well, if we’d been caught, I could have been deported. But more likely? Probably just kicked out of the area.

People tend to think of the worst-case scenario when they take a risk rather than the more likely “just kind of annoying” ones. What crazy thing do you need to do to gate jump the hurdles in front of you? You already know the answer, you just have to do it now.

A Paperclip for a House. Want to Make a Deal?

What would you estimate is the value of a single paperclip? My educated guess is about one U.S. penny. What about the value of a house? On average, probably about $200,000?

So how could you trade one for the other? Can you really do that? This is the question that Kyle MacDonald tried to answer for himself in 2005. Remember him? You might not recall the name, but Kyle answered the question with a resounding “Hell yeah I can trade a paperclip for a house!”

It took him 14 trades and a year of diligent bartering, but Kyle slowly and carefully traded his paperclip for something slightly more valuable until he had something unique and invaluable—a contract for a role in a film. It didn’t take long for a homeowner with stars in his eyes to jump at the opportunity to trade.

Can you mimic what Kyle did? No, it’s been done now. But, there’s a lot to be learned about unconventional strategy from Kyle’s story. What do you really want? What’s your paperclip?

$100 to Read My Book!

When I started working online last year, I had a blog that nobody read and a fierce desire to … well … change that unfortunate situation. So I did what every other writer with a new website that wants more people to read it does. I wrote an e-book to be given away for free. Of course I didn’t call it an e-book. That term has become unremarkable. I called it a digital guide instead. Classy, right?

When I had a mentor read it before launching, he said what I knew all along but didn’t want to think about. “It’s good, but everyone has a free e-book. How are you going to get anyone to notice yours?”

Hmm, I guess I can’t avoid that part anymore. But then I got another harebrained idea: “What if I paid people $100 to read it?!”

It was brilliant! But … umm … where the heck am I going to get $100 for every person that reads this? Minor details, right? That’s when I remembered I’d just started learning about this thing called affiliate marketing. Apparently, some big companies are happy to pay for new customers and will send you money if you refer people to their free accounts or services. No one has to pay anything. What a deal!

So, I went out and found a few free offers that I could publish in my digital guide that added up to $100 in commission for me. Then, I published that if you took advantage of them, I’d send you the money.

Thus was born the first (as far as I know) e-book that literally pays you to read it.

Was it a bribe to get people to invest some time in a brand new author? Heck yes it was! And it worked. The guide’s been downloaded thousands and thousands of times since being released.

Can you actually do that? Apparently you can!

How About “Buy One, Get Twenty Free”?

The best sale I’ve ever seen done didn’t come from Macy’s or Apple or any other major corporation with deep pockets. It came from two average guys with a great idea and a drive to execute it. Karol, Adam — if you’re reading this, sorry for calling you average.

At the heart of the sale was innovation — taking a concept from one place and applying it to another. When retailers want to get rid of a lot of old stock, they’ll hold what’s called a “fire sale” — a limited time offer to get an enormous discount on a big package of goods.

What Adam and Karol did was coordinate with a big group of entrepreneurs — specifically writers that had created digital guides or courses for around $97 — and got them all to agree to adding their products to a 3-day-only sale where buyers could get all of them for $97 total.

For anyone even remotely interested in one of these products, buying during the sale was a no-brainer. So, of course, people went crazy for it. Buyers got an amazing deal with tremendous value. And everyone involved in the offer made healthy income. A genuine win-win: that’s how business is supposed to work.

This is called the 10% innovation method. You innovate by combining two differing ideas. Chocolate is not brilliant. Peanut butter is not brilliant. But whoever it was that put the two together for the first time? That was brilliant.

The Unforgettable Moral of Story

Creativity lives and dies by innovation. Innovation is the product of risk taking. To create, you must never let go of your risk taking spirit. You must never stop looking for the ideas that make you pause and ask, “Can I actually do that?” And most importantly, you must never lose your pioneering spirit by answering with anything other than, “Sure, why not?”

So now over to you: What’s your big idea? And can you actually do that?

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Image credit: teliko82

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