Creativity – Not An Option, Part 1 | Global Oil & Fats Business Online

I’ll deal with the first of these in this article. This is my list.

Know that creativity is key

The start of getting good at creativity is to feel a deep appreciation of just how important ideas are. Ideas are amazing things. They can change somebody’s life dramatically, and sometimes instantly too. Ideas can make bigger profits come out of the same old factory and workforce. Ideas can make millions, and sometimes billions of dollars in business. A super example of the latter is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea and became the youngest billionaire in history. One of the interesting things in his story is that he didn’t need to invent “the whole thing”. Other people had already invented the computer, programming, and the Internet. Zuckerberg’s role was to come up with the new idea that was just one extra step.
In fact, that last point applies to many other recent technological leaps – Bill Gates didn’t invent the PC or programming, Steve Jobs didn’t invent the MP3 player (that was Creative Inc), and the Google guys didn’t invent the worldwide web – also, there were other search engines (such as Yahoo!) in the market before them. But they all added their own creative input to make a new product, not to mention a lot of money. That’s just the business and technical side of creativity.

There’s also the personal business of feeling good about one’s own life. I don’t know you personally, but there’s a good chance that you’re familiar with that special kind of feel-good factor from coming up with an idea and then seeing it delivering a useful result – and that’s the case even if that result is not in the financial mega-bucks category.
It’s not just about ideas – it’s about managing the process
Being good in creativity is much more than simply coming up with ideas. It’s about getting the best out of all parts of the process, such as:
- Ideation: getting started and coming up with ideas
- Filtering: having a system for knowing which ideas have priority over others
- Execution: making that idea work is another. Oftentimes a 50% good idea well executed is more valuable than a 100% good idea badly executed. One of the best illustrations of this phenomenon is the video technology battle in the 1980s between Sony and Panasonic. Sony had the Betamax video cassette technology, whilst Panasonic had VHS. Of the technical experts that I’ve talked to, they all agree that Betamax was a better technology. If that’s the case, then why did Panasonic win, and VHS became the dominant technology in the market? The answer lay in the execution, particularly with how Panasonic focused on the video rental market.
- Scrapping ideas: One of the hardest things in the creative process is to scrap an idea. One friend wisely said that it was a bit like “killing your own children”. But, when an idea just isn’t right, or it’s the right idea but the timing is off, you’ve got to be able to drop it.
- Selling the idea: Once you’ve decided that an idea is good, and it works, the next step is the often difficult task of getting other people to think that the idea is good also. Great innovators are remembered because they were also great salespeople. Tesla made many great innovations in electricity, but he was smart enough to know that he also had to publicise it, which he often did very well. One example was by showing a crowd in New York, in the late 1800s, a radio-controlled electric-powered boat in a pond in Central Park. At the time, this must have looked like the most breath-taking magic.
Perfection ain’t excellence
A lot of people go nowhere because they try too hard to come up with the one perfect idea, and may well end up wasting time. This point was made very well by Max Levichin, one of the founders of PayPal. In a BBC interview, he said that with an earlier software product he had totally missed a market opportunity because he took too long trying to get a software product “just right”.
Stepping stones
Far too many people think of creativity as being a simple one-step dance (one minute you don’t have that one good idea, and the next minute you do). Often, it is not like that at all. Creativity is frequently a multi-step process:
- You come up with an idea.
- You try it and find it doesn’t work, but that leads on to…
- Another idea … that’s not quite right either, but you keep some parts of it and come up with …
- Another idea … and so on
The pressure paradox (necessity is / is not the mother of invention)
There is no doubt that necessity (or even desperation) often causes great leaps of creativity. Anything from writer Solzhenitsyn’s miserable time in the USSR, to me having the pressure of a deadline for writing this article can squeeze out extra ideas. Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, after being paid for a successful book, would go and blow all of his money in the casino! His logic was that he couldn’t feel motivated to write when he was comfortable. When he was broke he had to come up with good ideas for books in order to pay the rent.

On the other side of this issue is the copious amount of research about stress and its effects on the brain: a stressed brain makes dumb mistakes or goes blank. Several authors fit this model – people prefer to be in a relaxed frame of mine while ‘in creative mode’. Two examples are Ian Fleming writing the James Bond novels while relaxing in his Caribbean home; or the great novelist Johan Goethe, who enjoyed a very well-balanced life while producing some of the greatest literature of Germany.

Resolving this paradox is fairly straightforward: just notice what works. I mention it here because I have heard so many stories where people try to pressure creativity, and it doesn’t work. But they keep trying, sticking with the same formula. Also, I’ve often heard the line: ‘Come up with some good ideas, or you’re fired.” It’s an approach that generally doesn’t work with most people.
Your brain’s energy balance
Engineers often talk about an energy balance as a simple way of adding up inputs and outputs. Since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the energy balance equation can be summed up as: Input = Output

According to Scientific American (July 18, 2012), an average human brain consumes 20% of the energy we eat as food, which works out as 260 calories per day. And that works out as 12.6 Watts: which is equivalent to the electricity consumption of the light bulb in a refrigerator. That’s the energy input to the brain.

The interesting part is the output, of which some is the electrical energy of our thoughts. It’s microscopic, as a tiny impulse of electrical energy flowing along the dendrites that connect our neurons – and that happens every time we think. There is no doubt that our brains are continuously active (even when we sleep, by dreaming). The question is: where is that thinking energy going? It’s either coming up with creative ideas that are useful or it isn’t.

Another useful factor in this analysis is the fact that, nature cannot stand a vacuum. If something is removed, something else will take its place. There is a parallel process with how our brains use their thinking energy. If you stop thinking about one thing, the chances are you’ll end up thinking about something else instead.

One thing you can do to improve your idea generation capability is to follow the simple arithmetic process of removing items from your thinking time which aren’t to do with generating ideas. Methods for this range from Dr Gates in Napoleon Hill’s classic self-help book Think and Grow Rich where Dr Gates would sit in a dark silent room for hours, “waiting for ideas”, to someone just skipping a TV game show to think about ideas for half an hour instead. The critical thing to remember is that the time taken for your brain to produce a good idea and be processed and recognised is very fast – say one second. The scary thing is that it’s so easy to miss it by having your brain do something else instead at that particular second; even scarier is: once it’s missed, it could stay missed for the rest of your life.
Creativity and being an organised person
In order to have your brain be more creative, one simple tip is to be more organised. In this modern age, when people have many items to keep track of, it is easy to be disorganised. But the sad fact remains that every single second of frustration you experience looking for that lost item, could well be the one second when you could have had a good idea instead.

It may seem contradictory on the surface to say that a creative person is also the kind of person who says things like: ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ but the fact is that a creative person values his brain power and where that power gets focused. Almost anything is better than using your brain for looking for a misplaced pen or file or car-keys.
It all goes in – managing your inputs
Maintaining a positive mental attitude is a useful life-skill for anybody, but with developing your creative powers, it becomes even more important. A quote from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473-1530) fits this topic very well: “Be very careful what you put in that head, because you’ll never ever get it out.”

One of my favourite examples is on the topic of the news. How much (if any) benefit is there from the news? Its content (and I’m deliberately not using the word ‘information’) is generally negative and highly non-actionable to the audience. For the most part, all the audience does is mutter: “Oh, that’s terrible” and sigh. A brain that is focusing on negative news is, generally, a brain that is not doing something creative instead.

Creativity is a massive subject. One key point is that there is nothing in the world of creativity that can’t be taken in some form or other, and applied and used in the edible oils and fats industry. All that is needed is a decision to ‘go for it’ and to reward the folks who deliver it – even if they can be annoying sometimes!