The Accidental Creative

by Todd Henry

  Knowing When to Reach for the Shears

  In a good vineyard, the vine keeper is constantly pruning, but it’s not that the pruned branches are dead or diseased in some way. Rather, the keeper removes young, unproductive branches so that much-needed nutrients can get to the older, fruit-bearing parts of the vine. If the young growth isn’t pruned back, the vine will bear less fruit and eventually produce none at all.

  Doesn’t this seem strange? It’s a bit counterintuitive to cut away healthy parts of a vine to increase its overall longevity and productivity, but this practice has been employed for centuries in vineyards around the world because it is effective.

  This same principle of nature applies to the natural rhythms of your creative process. Every day there are little sprouts of growth that emerge in your life. New opportunities, new projects, new ways to expend our energy. Distractions. Temptations to divert our resources or attention. Many of these “sprouts” are very good things. But for some of us, these little opportunities continue to pile up until every crack of our life is full. Soon these very good but nonessential distractions are diverting our energy away from the tasks that are really crucial to our productivity and momentum. This is the beginning of a downward spiral of productivity, and it stems from a lack discipline around where we choose to expend energy.

  If the young growth isn’t pruned back, the vine will bear less fruit and eventually produce none at all.

  Pruning Can Be Painful

  Beyond obvious time wasters, like excessive TV watching or Internet browsing, which can be pruned without too much of a struggle, some of the things we need to prune from our life are very good things. They are projects we enjoy, new ideas we are excited about, or relationships we would prefer to continue.

  It can be difficult to eliminate things from your life that are giving you immediate joy and seem to be doing no harm. In fact, it can seem downright sadistic to deny yourself the pleasure of working on a project that you love and to which you can add unique value. But just as the young, fruit-bearing branches on a vine must be pruned back in order to provide needed resources to the critical sections of the whole plant, you must learn to identify the activities in your life that seem to be providing good results in the short run but will eventually decrease your effectiveness in the most critical areas of your life.

  Many people don’t realize how strangling the cumulative effect the semiproductive activities can have. Louis, a lifelong financial planner working to reinvent his career, went through one of our courses about establishing Creative Rhythm. A few months later he relayed that—after being painfully choosy about what to work on—he had already begun to see a lot of new opportunities emerging. “I’ve realized that this is really about the long term, like my whole life.” While before Louis was a bit paralyzed because of the vast opportunities in front of him, after establishing some guidelines for how he would engage, he says that he found increased focus and experienced life-changing results. Once he chose to say no to some opportunities, others began to grow.

  In many ways, you are defined by what you say no to. In design, they call this “negative space.” It is the part of the composition or sculpture that contains nothing. This negative space is what balances a work of art and gives it visual continuity. Similarly, music is defined as much by the silence as by what is actually played. Without the spaces in between the sounds, music would be one deadening roar.

  As you craft your life and make decisions about what to act on versus what to abstain from, you must recognize the importance of negative space in developing creative ideas. The time between your active moments is when ideas are formed, insights are gained, mental connections are forged. If your life is a constant blur of activity, focus, and obligation, you are likely to miss critical breakthroughs because you won’t have the benefit of pacing and negative space. What’s not there will impact your life as much or more than what is.

  Identifying Your “Red Zone” Activities

  In American football, the red zone is the area on each end of the field inside the twenty yard line. What happens in this area is a key determining factor in a team’s success or failure. Teams that easily advance the ball down the field but can’t score in the red zone will lose games. Teams that play great open-field defense but can’t prevent scores in the red zone will lose. Performance within this very small sliver of the field often determines the overall success or failure of a team.

  As you examine your life, and especially your creative work, it’s important to be able to identify the red-zone activities that will really make a difference and generate forward momentum during the particular season you’re in. Some qualities that mark red-zone activities are the following:Activities that you can uniquely do or add value to because of your position or expertise and that move a project forward. While there are a lot of ways you could be spending your time, there are a certain number of activities that you are probably the best person for. Maybe it’s because of your experience, or because you are the one most familiar with the situation, but there are certainly a few situations that are mostly dependent on you to move them forward.

  Activities that increase your personal capacity to generate ideas, such as study, purposeful ideation, or intelligence gathering. These are typically the first activities to go during a busy season, but you must ensure that they find a place in your game plan. If you neglect them for too long, you will find your effectiveness decreasing across the spectrum of your life and work.

  Activities that provide cohesion or creative traction for your team in such a way that it increases future capacity. For leaders, these activities include such things as regularly clarifying the objectives and organizational priorities, clearing obstacles for your team, or taking time to celebrate when the team experiences a success.

  Activities that feed your energy, such as adequate sleep, exercise, or spiritual practice. While these should be obvious inclusions in every season, they are often significantly neglected during the busy times. But these are just the times when we need them the most. This is like a football team’s deciding not to block because they’re so close to the goal line. It’s self-destructive to ignore the fundamentals when you are at your most busy and critical times professionally.

  Your red-zone activities are likely to be made up of some combination of these qualities. Really pouring your energy into them not only increases your immediate productivity, but it also generates momentum in your life and work.

  Similarly, it’s important to identify the activities in your life that could be described as ineffective, unnecessary, or damaging to your overall productivity, and prune them out of your life. These can be time wasters, such as needless shopping, relentless gaming, and, as mentioned previously, excessive Internet browsing or TV watching, or they can be tasks that you’re doing out of obligation, habit, or routine. It’s not that these activities by themselves are bad or wrong, it’s simply that each of these activities is taking the place of something that could be more effective in helping you generate ideas or move your work forward.

  Getting Started with Pruning

  Pruning is best practiced in your monthly and quarterly checkpoints. You are looking for projects or commitments that you believe are inhibiting your ability to effectively perform the red-zone activities in your life. These commitments may be very good things that you took on with the best of intentions and sincere optimism but that are now beginning to become more obligation than opportunity. They may also be brand-new ideas or opportunities that you feel a strong urge to act on but that are ill timed because of the lack of hours or resources to devote to them.

  Some questions to ask when evaluating potentially prune-able activities are:• Is this having a negative impact on my red-zone efforts or my overall ability to stay energized in my life and work?

  • Has this become more obligation than opportunity? Have I lost my passion for and interest in this?

  • Could this be deferred until later and have a greater effec
t?

  • Am I unhappy with my current results?

  • Do I have a nagging sense that I need to go in a new direction with this project?

  If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then you may want to consider eliminating the project from your plate. As you do, you will likely find that the increased space in your life yields new insights and ideas for your more pressing projects.

  Another thing to consider is that saying no doesn’t mean forever. You’re just trying to make sure that the places where you’re choosing to expend your energy are appropriate for the priorities of the season. It’s likely that something you say no to today will become one of your top priorities next month. You need to give yourself permission regarding what you’re choosing not to work on as well as what you are choosing to work on. David Allen teaches a principle in his book Getting Things Done called the “Someday/Maybe” list that is an effective repository for projects that you want to begin at some point but not now. Keeping a list of “someday I will . . .” kinds of projects allows you to put things off without feeling like you are abandoning them forever.

  Pruning Yields New Opportunities

  One woman I worked with, a video editor named Susan, is an avid gardener. In a conversation about the principle of pruning, she observed that whenever she pruned back a single branch in her garden, two new growths would emerge. Pruning activities in our life often seems to work the same way. Don’t be surprised if your willingness to endure a little temporary discomfort by cutting away good but ill-timed projects and opportunities yields an abundant harvest of new ideas and exciting prospects.

  Be wise about the commitments you make and the way in which you manage your energy. It could be the single greatest determining factor in whether you are the superstar who burns out on the altar of short-term productivity or the one who thrives for a lifetime.

  It’s difficult to separate good energy management from the proper management of time, stimuli, focus, and relationships. Each of these areas of rhythm affects each of the others. Don’t be surprised, for instance, if your newly implemented practices around energy begin to give you a greater sense of enthusiasm to the relationships in your life.

  Similarly, without a good strategy for managing the energy in your life, there will be little you can do to maintain your effectiveness over the long term. The practices we’ve discussed in this chapter are a good starting point for preventing overload and staying creatively focused, but I’ve included a list of other resources at AccidentalCreative.com/book if you’d like further insights into the subject.

  7.

  STIMULI: WHAT GOES IN MUST COME OUT

  We are swimming in a sea of information. Every day, we are bombarded by thousands of inputs, from advertising jingles to plot twists on our favorite TV shows. Some of this information is received in the context of our daily work, and much of it is a result of our reading or viewing habits and the time we spend surfing the web or rifling through magazines.

  What we don’t often consider is how these messages affect our capacity to do our best creative work. It goes without saying that what we put into our heads will necessarily influence what and how well we create.

  In a famed illustration of how environmental stimuli subconsciously affect our mental processes, British “psychological illusionist” Derren Brown invited two members of an ad agency to pitch concepts for a chain of taxidermy stores he was proposing to build. The ad execs, with no prior knowledge of why they were being summoned, were taken on a long taxi ride, then escorted into an office building where they were given instructions and told they had just thirty minutes to develop a poster for the chain, including store name, a tagline, and visuals. Brown also placed a sealed envelope containing his own concepts on a table, to be opened later.

  After thirty minutes elapsed, Brown reappeared in the room to check on their work. The execs pitched a concept they called “Animal Heaven,” featuring an illustration of a bear playing a lyre and the tagline “the best place for dead animals.” After their pitch, Brown asked one of the execs to open the envelope he’d placed in the room at the very beginning. To their surprise, the envelope contained a nearly identical treatment of the poster, including a very similar bear holding a lyre and a similar tagline.

  Brown went on to show viewers that the taxi ride to the office building had strategically featured several items designed to draw the attention of the ad execs. These items, such as a conspicuously placed lyre, a poster with the phrase “The Best Place for Dead Animals,” and a trip past the London Zoo, had made subconscious impressions that were quick to reemerge as they scrambled to generate concepts.

  With the ever-increasing deluge of information we all face, the task for each of us is to discern which inputs are relevant to our work and which are simply noise. We face tremendous pressure to keep up and the vast majority of creatives I work with say they are constantly on the verge of information overload.

  But it’s not just the sheer amount of information that’s the problem; if it were that simple, we could just shut it off. The real challenge is that some of this onslaught of information is necessary for us to perform our jobs, whether it’s e-mail, blogs, trend reports, or industry news. We must somehow engage with the information that enters our daily lives, process it, and turn it into something meaningful.

  Bryn Mooth, editor of the design magazine HOW, told me in an interview that she compares this struggle to working with a food processor.

  “A food processor has a small intake, and a huge work bowl,” she says. “All of the food has to get through the processor, but there’s only so much capacity at any given time. This is similar to how we must deal with the overload of new information we experience every day. We simply don’t have the capacity to process all of the information in a timely way with our limited mental resources.” She continued that she frequently advises creatives to closely monitor the quality of what they choose to absorb because it is so closely tied to their creative process.

  While our minds are unparalleled in their capacity to experience and assimilate information, they also have a limited bandwidth for doing so. As a matter of survival, they tend to weed out information that is deemed irrelevant to our immediate needs. However, our minds are also capable of taking random bits of input and forging brilliant connections that are not apparent on the surface. This is essentially how the creative process works—it’s the connection of multiple preexisting patterns into new solutions. One pathway to creating more effectively and consistently is to be strategic about our inputs.

  While our minds are unparalleled in their capacity to experience and assimilate information, they also have a limited bandwidth for doing so.

  YOUR DIET OF STIMULI

  I call the information and experiences we absorb “stimuli” because these are the raw materials that stimulate thought. Each creative idea is the combination of previously existing ideas, or bits of stimuli, into something new. The stimuli we experience can stretch us to think differently, to open our eyes to new ways of seeing the world. But many creatives don’t give much thought to what they allow into their minds. E-mails, reports, web videos, TV, magazines, and more flood through their life with no one keeping watch of the gate. Over time this can result in an overall lack of focus or a general numbness to potential inspiration. Discerning what is useful and what isn’t in a world without filters on our stimuli becomes a difficult task. After all, a drowning man isn’t thinking about what he wants for dinner, he just wants a life preserver! In the same way, when we lack structure around the types of stimuli we experience, we lack the space and focus we need to apply our experiences to the work we’re engaged in.

  There is an old saying about health and nutrition, that “you are what you eat.” This means that the kinds of food you put into your body will ultimately affect your physical being and your mobility and interaction with the world. If you regularly consume junk food rather than healthy, nutritious food, your health will eventually fail. If,
however, you ensure that the staples of your diet are healthy and nutritious, you can occasionally snack on junk food with little concern. It’s all about choice and following healthy principles with regard to diet.

  This same principle applies to cultivating a healthy diet of stimuli in your life. Because so much of the information you must process in a given day is determined by the nature of your work, you need to be purposeful about including self-directed, thought-provoking, and capacity-increasing stimuli into your life on a consistent basis. Whether it’s in the form of print media, movies, web videos, conversations, advertisements, or anything else that is delivering a message you must process and assimilate, the stimuli you take in over the course of your day informs the quality of the insights you generate. Just like good food increases your capacity to be active and healthy, the higher the quality of your stimuli, the better you are setting yourself up for high-level breakthroughs.

  Larry Kelley, chief planning officer at Houston-based ad agency FKM, and author of Advertising Account Planning, says that he has used our methods for cultivating better stimuli to help FKM’s team generate more effective ideas for their clients.

  “Why would you go to the museum of art to learn more about a steak restaurant? Because it led to a breakthrough idea for turning a place you eat a steak into a place where you experience the finer things in the world. When we got stuck on the project we looked for different, but relevant stimuli that might give us a new perspective. In this case, rather than focus our attention on the restaurant category advertising, most of which is all the same, we brought in stimuli that offered a different viewpoint. I’ve learned from Accidental Creative that you are what you take in, so as a team we always try to take in the best.”