by Todd Henry
I give quite a bit of latitude to certain people in my life to speak truth to me. Sometimes it stings, but the temporary sting of unwanted truth is much easier to bear than the harsh sting that comes after a prolonged period of living in a world of imagined invulnerability. I would much rather have friends inflict these wounds than cynics, critics, or competitors, all of whom want me to fail.
There are three people in my life who have full permission to speak anything they want to me and whom I regularly meet with in order to review my goals and my progress. I consider them my core team, and they are always my first e-mail when something good happens or when I need advice. (In fact, when I was offered the deal for this book, my first instinct was to send an e-mail to share the news with them. Even though I was inclined to accept it, I wasn’t going to make a move until the people I respect the most in my life had weighed in on the decision.)
Many of us have blind spots, especially as it relates to our creating. We will never be the most objective judges of our own work, and we will always have difficulty weighing big life decisions without bias. It helps to have people you respect and admire to shine light into dark places and help you see angles of a problem that you may otherwise have overlooked.
Whom can you trust to speak the truth to you, no matter how hard it may be? Whom do you trust to say the things that no one else will say? You must have these people in your life if you want to continue improving in your work.
Whom can you trust to speak the truth to you, no matter how hard it may be? Whom do you trust to say the things that no one else will say?
It’s critical to choose your core team wisely. You want people who have significant experience in areas where you may be lacking, and with whom you have a degree of personal rapport. You also want people who are likely to be vested in your success and who are willing to spend time to help you achieve your goals.
Right now you may be asking, “So how does this help me with my creative work?” We discussed earlier the importance of focus in gaining creative traction. When you have others in your life with more experience and a larger perspective, you can gain focus more quickly and get moving on what really matters. By learning from their experiences, you can avoid some of the mistakes that they made in their lives and careers. Having a core team in your life will help you prune your options and avoid the paralysis that often accompanies having too many choices in life. It’s much easier to redirect once you are moving, but often you may not move at all if you are overwhelmed with options. You sometimes need other, more experienced friends to help you focus on the right data points.
Here are a few tips with regard to meeting with members of your core team:If you are meeting for breakfast, coffee, or drinks, you should always pick up the bill. There are people in my core team who make much (much!) more money than I do, but I always pay any expenses related to our meeting. Why? Because I need to remind myself, and them, that I see this as an investment in myself and in our relationship. By picking up the check I am ensuring that I maintain the mind-set that my core team’s time is valuable and that my time with them is an investment.
Choose people outside your company. You want to feel the freedom to speak whatever may be on your mind, and if your core team member is in the chain of command where you work, you will always be tempted to soften your comments. You may also be unwilling or uncomfortable sharing thoughts about leaving the company or dealing with your current manager. You need to have complete freedom in these conversations to bring up your most pressing issues, regardless of the subject matter.
Choose visionaries. At least one member of your core team should be someone who is a dreamer or a visionary. You want the kind of person who makes others nervous with the intensity and scope of his ideas. You want at least one person who will push you and challenge you to think uncomfortable and challenging thoughts.
Choose people from a variety of industries. Whoever is on your core team, make sure that they are a fairly diverse group with varied experiences. It’s important to maintain a balanced diet of input from others. Advice from diverse perspectives will build a more solid foundation for your decision-making process. You are also much more likely to hear about new and interesting stimuli that may otherwise never show up on your radar. Consider your core team to be your personal board of directors. They are there to help you sort through important decisions and also to challenge and stimulate your thinking. You should choose these people as carefully as a public company would choose its own board. There is nothing more critical to your success than the people you surround yourself with.
Question: What are some issues you need help sorting through right now? How may a core team be able to help you process through these issues?
Your relationships provide the stability and clarity you need to do your best work, and they are also the key to staying emotionally engaged. For creatives, slipping into an overly conceptual mode and ignoring your emotional intuitions, or simply becoming emotionally numb to your environment, is a very real danger. Maintaining deep, vibrant relationships is a way to stay emotionally engaged, in tune with your environment, and poised.
Additionally, surrounding yourself with bright, motivated people will challenge you regularly to step up your own game. It is inspirational to hear what others are doing and to redirect some of their energy into your own work. It’s also very motivating to be that source of inspiration and energy to others. When you give of yourself and are generous with others, filling their buckets, you will often find that you leave with more insight and energy than you came into the interaction with.
I realize that it can be challenging to apply each of these practices immediately. In fact, you probably want to start with forming a circle of likeminded creatives. Once you do, this circle can form the candidate pool for your head-to-heads and perhaps even your core team. At the very least, your circle will likely be able to introduce you to potential core team members in their own network.
Take your relationships seriously and treat them with purpose. You will be rewarded many times over.
6.
ENERGY: YOUR INVISIBLE ALLY
As I write this, the midwestern United States is digging out from “Snowmageddon,” as dubbed by the media. We have experienced snowfall unlike any we’ve seen in several years, and though my children love the sledding and canceled school days, for us grown-ups the snow means frequent shoveling and aching backs.
I have noticed two distinct strategies employed by my neighbors to deal with the snow. Some cleared it away a little at a time, shoveling a bit, allowing a few inches to accumulate, shoveling again, and so on. They opted for regular shoveling intervals with less effort required for each snow-clearing session. Other neighbors, however, would wait for the snow to stop, then clear it away a foot at a time. This approach required less continual effort and time, but the trade-off is that it required an all-at-once Herculean effort to clear the mountains of drifting snow.
For many of us, our workload feels a little like clearing snow in the middle of a snowstorm. Work continues to “fall,” and we are under constant pressure to determine how we are going to handle it. Are we going to pace ourselves, moving all our projects forward an inch at a time, just to stay ahead of the pileup, or are we going to alternate sprints of extreme exertion, punctuated by pause? Do we expend ourselves in one heroic effort, or do we parcel out our heroism over time?
Unfortunately, we often don’t have this choice because we’re living in one very long, unending Snowmageddon of work. As the work continues to pile on, we have to expend tremendous effort just to stay ahead of it, let alone to develop any kind of effective strategy for completing it. Given the pace many creatives keep, the key to regular insight is to be strategic not only about the work we’re doing but also about how we’re doing it. According to recent key research, the solution may rest in how well we learn to manage our energy. In this chapter, I will share some specific practices that can help you stay engaged and energized when your creat
ive work demands your best.
Imagine the perfect device, one that is maximally efficient and does precisely what it’s supposed to do with the smallest effort imaginable. It is truly a marvel of engineering. Unfortunately, no matter how well designed the system is, it is useless without energy—no energy, nothing happens.
Every system requires energy to function. Whether it’s a plant turning sunlight into sugar or your car burning gas on your daily commute, nothing functions without energy. But many of us overlook this fundamental law of nature when it comes to our creative work. Because the energy we expend shaping ideas is invisible, we fail to realize that there is a very real cost associated with every project we take on and every mental commitment we make.
Our brains are wonderfully efficient systems, but they require energy to forge ideas, memories, and thoughts—tremendous amounts of energy, actually. Although the brain is only about 2 percent of our body weight, it consumes about 20 percent of available oxygen and glucose. This means that when we are tired, our mind is less capable of functioning at its maximum potential. We are less likely in these times to forge connections and experience conceptual breakthroughs simply because our brain doesn’t have the basic energy required to perform the complex tasks required to generate ideas.
In his book How to Be Excellent at Anything, Tony Schwartz argues that energy management is at least as critical to success as time management:
“The real issue is not the number of hours we sit behind a desk but the energy we bring to the work we do and the value we generate as a result,” he writes. “A growing body of research suggests that we’re most productive when we move between periods of high focus and intermittent rest. Instead, we live in a gray zone, constantly juggling activities but rarely fully engaging in any of them—or fully disengaging from any of them. The consequence is that we settle for a pale version of the possible.”
What Schwartz articulates so well is that even if we effectively manage our time and resources, but neglect our energy level, our effectiveness will decrease over time. Today’s success begets tomorrow’s success, so for the creative worker, when you lack the energy to generate ideas today, it takes a toll on tomorrow’s creative effectiveness. The longer the energy drain continues, the more you dig yourself into a hole.
I’ve spoken with many creative leaders over the years who have felt this dynamic in a significant way. One man, a successful consultant who spent years building an innovative boutique consultancy, had simply lost all desire to generate new ideas for his business. In our conversation he told me that he was in a rut, but as I probed deeper I discovered that this rut was really just an aversion to innovating that stemmed primarily from his lack of energy management. Over time he had grown weary of being the sole standard-bearer for his organization (and its chief innovator) because he recognized that any idea he generated was going to fall onto his shoulders to execute. As a result, he unconsciously avoided forming creative solutions to problems because he knew deep down that he lacked the energy to see the idea through.
Because he had not been careful in choosing new initiatives and managing his own energy and expectations over a period of several years, he had dug a hole for himself and his organization. And as time passed, imagining a way out of the hole became more and more difficult for him, because any new potentially business-saving ideas would be his responsibility to implement. It seemed nearly impossible to generate any kind of momentum for the business.
Energy management is critical to staying out of ruts. Like a gambler who falls behind and needs to wager bigger and bigger amounts to get back to even, the creative in the risky habit of ignoring energy puts himself in a seemingly impossible situation. But it’s never too late to build healthy practices around energy management. We can start making wise choices now about how and where we spend our energy to ensure that we’re not neglecting the important things in our life for the sake of what’s convenient. As productivity guru David Allen says, “Mosquitoes ruin the hunt for big game.” It’s all too easy to waste the energy we need for important creative objectives on unproductive or unfocused behaviors.
Like a gambler who falls behind and needs to wager bigger and bigger amounts to get back to even, the creative in the risky habit of ignoring energy puts himself in a seemingly impossible situation.
ISN’T ENERGY “RENEWABLE”?
Few of us think much about how our energy level affects our ability to create. Energy consumption is more difficult to measure than time management and other markers of productivity. Also, our energy is a renewable resource, so many of us believe that it is perfectly acceptable to race through our week until we crash, spend the weekend recovering, then start the cycle all over again.
But this mind-set is deceptive. Creative work requires that we stay ahead of our work. Tomorrow’s ideas are the result of today’s intentions. When you rely on a “just-in-time” workflow, you will quickly find it difficult to do quality work—and you’ll also find yourself lacking the drive to do anything about it.
What happens at that point? Many of us panic. If ideas aren’t flowing, we stare even more intently at the problem, pull late nights at the office, or pump ourselves full of caffeine in order to stay alert and hopefully shock our minds into generating something brilliant. This unhealthy cycle is the unfortunate reality for many creatives, and making the break from this type of lifestyle can be difficult. For some, this cycle is broken only when they lose their job or suffer some sort of mental or emotional breakdown. For others, it results in a helpless compromise, which could mean months or years of settling in and continuing to trudge along, cranking out mediocre work while feeling like they are betraying the best part of themselves. They have the energy to do only what they need to do in order to not get fired, but they have no excess energy for innovating or tackling personal creative projects.
This lifestyle and its effects on our creativity are cumulative. Creative insight is frequently the result of conceptual momentum, and the most difficult thing to do in the early stages of a project is to gain traction. Building momentum requires excess energy. When we lack the necessary energy, mobilizing around insights can be difficult. In fact, sometimes we overlook the small clues and stimuli that may yield insight because we simply lack the energy to pay attention to the nonessentials.
This is no way to live, especially when there’s something we can do about it. While I don’t believe that energy management alone is sufficient to set us up for creative brilliance, it is certainly the most neglected of the five areas of Creative Rhythm, and for many of us, energy management will require the most discipline if we want to change our habits and restructure our life in a healthy way. Striking the right balance when instilling practices around energy management will feel a little uncomfortable, perhaps even painful, at first. But experiencing the results of effective energy management makes these practices worth all the temporary discomfort.
“Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm.”
—Earl Nightingale
Rennata is a paralegal by day, as well as a wife and mother. She had always wanted to do something with her passion for art but couldn’t seem to find the energy to do it because of the multiple roles she was juggling. After applying some of the practices explored in this chapter, she was able to find new resources to help her pursue her dream. In an e-mail to me, she wrote: “I have come to accept that creativity has a rhythm, what I tend to think of as an ebb and flow much like the tides.” Rather than expecting to do everything at once, she began to put some practices into her life to help her consistently, and over time, work toward her goals with a keen eye on energy management. “I have found that by establishing the habits that support a creative individual, I was able to find the time that I never knew I had. I am now the manager of a co-op art gallery right across the road from the law office where I work.”
Rennata’s experience is one of many like this I’ve encountered in my work. Once creatives begin to put some structure a
round energy management, they often find that they have more energy and time available than they’d previously thought. It’s often simply a matter of ensuring that their available resources are being funneled into the most effective places.
While there are many practices I could include here that relate to managing energy through a physically healthy lifestyle, such as adequate sleep, a healthy diet, and abstaining from harmful substances, I’m not going to directly address these, because there are plenty of books and articles on the subject.
(Here’s the short version: eat a healthy and balanced diet, including lean proteins and lots of vegetables, sleep seven to eight hours a night, steer away from too much caffeine and sugar to avoid the accompanying crashes, don’t abuse alcohol, and no—other than pharmaceutical—drugs. For a comprehensive treatment on these suggestions, I recommend Tony Schwartz’s comprehensive book How to Be Excellent at Anything. I’ve also listed additional articles and resources at AccidentalCreative.com/book.)
Instead, I am going to address two often overlooked but highly effective practices that can set you on the path to having enough energy to generate brilliant ideas.