The Accidental Creative

by Todd Henry

  Who are the people you will be setting head-to-heads with this quarter? Have you thought through how this will happen? What is the best timing for your meetings? What kinds of things will you discuss? Take the opportunity afforded by your Quarterly Checkpoint to do an audit of all your relationships and to set new expectations around them. Perhaps you have standing meetings that need to be reevaluated. Maybe there’s an old friend or colleague whom you’d like to spend more time with. Maybe there are some relationships that need to be put on temporary hold in order to account for the rhythms of the upcoming season. You have total permission to evaluate all your relationships with a clean conscience, then to make decisions strategically.

  To some this may sound a little harsh. After all, how can we treat our relationships as a matter of convenience and discard them when they become cumbersome? To be clear: that’s not at all what we’re talking about. In fact, this is actually about making the relationships we choose to maintain more productive and meaningful. When we are selective about how and where we spend our relational energy, we find that our connections deepen and that we’re actually able to give more of ourselves to the people in our life. It’s when we’re not selective that we end up living on the margin and giving leftovers to others.

  Will you be meeting with a circle? If so, what will that rhythm look like for the upcoming quarter?

  Think about your core team. When will you meet with them? You need to give these people enough notice so that they are able to give you their full attention when you meet.

  Whom are you going to purposefully spend more time with this quarter? Are there people with whom you would like to spend more quality time in order to develop your relationships and possibly to gain mental traction on your work?

  Energy

  After you’ve listed each of your commitments for the upcoming quarter, you will begin to gain a sense of what you’re expecting of yourself, or others are expecting of you, in the next few months. If you’ve never performed this exercise before, seeing the entire scope of your work laid out before you can be an eye-opening experience. It may even be a little overwhelming to see all your work and personal creative aspirations listed side by side. Not to worry—that’s precisely the reason we’re doing this exercise. A little discomfort now will save you a ton of stress down the road.

  Each of these commitments represents not only time and creative work that you’ll be accountable for but also energy that you’ll be required to expend. As we discussed earlier, sometimes projects—even very good ones—can steal needed energy from more critical, productive projects. Many people don’t realize the cumulative effect of their choices on their workflow. Ongoing, recurring creative commitments are often the result of a decision made once upon a time that continues to require energy and focus many months, even years, later. As these commitments begin to show up on your list, you see the true effect of choices you’ve made and how they may still be limiting your ability to engage with more pressing work.

  Are there any projects that need to be pruned? Of all of the things on your list, is there anything that needs to go away this quarter so that you can focus your efforts on more productive work?

  Is there anything else coming up this quarter that is abnormal but that needs to be considered? Are you taking vacation, or are there any other trips on the calendar? You need to take these into account, because they will affect your workflow and your energy. Often we don’t look at how things like trips, time off, or family commitments will affect our ability to engage, and as much as possible, it’s best not to plan our critical work around times when it will be difficult to mentally engage, like the last few days before a critical trip or the first few days back.

  Remember that the purpose of looking at the scope of your commitments through the lens of Energy is to identify any easy decisions about what needs to be scaled back or where you may have unwittingly made long-term commitments that are becoming unwieldy.

  Stimuli

  What kinds of stimuli will help you with the projects you’ll be working on? Can you identify any knowledge gaps in the commitments on your list? Are there any projects that will require special information? Now is the time to identify those needs and to list a few resources that may be able to help.

  What are you curious about right now? List a few subjects that you’re curious about or that you’d like to explore. If you can, list a few resources that are interesting to you and that you’d like to add to your Stimulus Queue.

  How will you challenge yourself to grow? List a few items that you are going to study or experience this quarter as a way to grow your mind and stretch your experience base. These can be books, places you’ll visit, meetings you’ll attend, or anything else that causes you to see the world in a new way. The important thing is that you’re listing concrete items and at least tacitly making a commitment to them.

  Hours

  Which of the projects on your list will require the most creative thought time? Can you identify four or five projects that will require an extra amount of creative effort? Not that you are going to do anything about it at this point, but it’s good to begin identifying them now, in advance, so that you can earmark Idea Time against them.

  What will your Unnecessary Creating projects be? Some of these may be listed already on your commitments list, but spend some time thinking about the kinds of projects you would like to initiate or continue this quarter. These items will be added to your Project Queue, and you will work on them during your Unnecessary Creating time. Again, it’s not critical to get these exactly right. The whole purpose is simply to do an analysis of the kinds of things you’re currently interested in working on and to make a commitment to trying new things and creating unnecessarily this quarter.

  Dream a Bit

  One additional exercise that has been effective for me is one I learned from my friend Lisa Johnson. She told me in an interview that once every several months she makes a list of all of the things that would “blow her mind” if they happened. For example, big business breakthroughs, people she’d like to meet or work with, or goals she’d like to reach. She relays that many of the items on these lists have actually happened, and she attributes this to the focus she gains from simply writing them down.

  I’ve had a similar experience with this practice. I work it into my Quarterly Checkpoint and spend about thirty minutes dreaming as I write things that seem beyond my reach at the present. Numerous things I’ve put on the list have actually happened, such as starting my company, a family trip we wanted to take, and even publishing this book!

  BEING INFLEXIBLY FLEXIBLE

  Life will change and priorities will shift. This is the nature of creative work. As quickly as ideas are formed and put in motion, the entire playing field will often change and require new insights, new executions, and maybe even different team members to be added to our efforts. This is why the strategy of regularly reviewing your practices and asking whether they are truly aligned to your priorities is so important.

  Some may be tempted to ignore this advice because it seems too obvious or irrelevant. I’d like to challenge you that life is too precious to allow for even a week of effort wasted due to being absent from the wheel. Once you get off course, a lot of energy and extra focus is required to bring you back to where you want to be. That’s effort that could be used instead for projects you’d like to initiate or to generate insights you need for your work.

  Once you’ve established deep patterns in your life around the practices, you’ll likely notice that insights and ideas are emerging that you’d not expected. This is because you are no longer living reactively but are instead filling your life with more of what really matters to you and piques your interest. You are finding Creative Rhythm, and that is a great place to be.

  10.

  COVER BANDS DON’T CHANGE THE WORLD

  “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popu
lar—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”

  —Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

  I’m hopeful that you’ve taken my encouragement throughout this book that the main reason to establish practices is to increase your capacity for insight and brilliance, not simply to cram more things into your life or to hack your creative process in some way. Again, there is no formula for effective creating and there are no shortcuts to experiencing brilliance when you need it. You will see results only when you are willing to let go of anxiety around short-term outcomes and pour yourself into activity that increases your capacity to experience future insights.

  Over time, many of the practices in this book will become second nature. They will simply become intertwined with your lifestyle and creative process. But like anything else worthwhile, your first efforts will require a tremendous amount of forethought and follow-through. Once you’ve persisted in these choices, however, you will likely begin to see some welcome by-products in your life. Though it may take time to see these results, effective creating begins the moment you decide to reclaim the natural rhythms of your creative process and structure your life around them. This will require intentionality, choice, and discipline.

  Intentionality means that you are approaching your life in a systematic way and not haphazardly. You know what you’re about and you’re working a system to make it happen. It means that you must constantly remind yourself of not only what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it (Checkpoints). You don’t want your practices to turn into unhealthy, counterproductive habits or for the system to turn upon itself because you’ve disengaged from the why behind the what. This is like poison to your creative process.

  Choice means that by saying yes to a set of practices, you are inherently saying no to a lot of other things. You can do almost anything you want, but not everything you want. What you choose to include in your life has consequences and immediately limits your other choices. Therefore, you must be careful when making commitments so as to not unintentionally limit your opportunities for engagement. Maybe you choose to create something or do a little reading instead of watching a sitcom. (Ooh . . . that hurts.) But you know that every choice you make affects everything else in your life, and you must therefore make these choices carefully. Choosing to establish study time, or Unnecessary Creating, or to set time for get-togethers with people who stimulate your creativity necessarily means you’re saying no to other activities that may bring you more comfort in the moment. You are trading immediate gratification for future insights. It’s an investment, and hopefully you’re discovering that it’s one worth making.

  Remember: Comfort is frequently the enemy of greatness. When you choose to default to comfort, you are choosing to be less effective in your life.

  Discipline involves establishing and hitting specific marks and doing what needs doing regardless of how you feel in the moment. It means that you make decisions when you have clarity and sufficient energy, then you follow through on them regardless of how you feel in the moment. It is human nature to default to the path of least resistance unless you make purposeful decisions to do what’s best rather than what’s most convenient. The time to decide to go on a diet is not when you’re craving chocolate and the desert tray is waved in front of your face; it’s when you’re in a place of contentment and are able to rationally decide that you’d like to lose a few pounds. Similarly, the time to choose to study, or to build into relationships, is not when we realize you’ve come upon some unexpected free time; it’s when you’re strategically planning your life.

  Comfort is frequently the enemy of greatness. When you choose to default to comfort, you are choosing to be less effective in your life.

  As you engage with intentionality, choice, and discipline, the capacities that have been lying dormant due to misuse or neglect become unlocked. You may uncover passions that you’ve long forgotten or remember how it feels to be fully immersed in your work and know that you’re good at what you do. As these dormant parts of you come online, you will begin to see that your capacity to change the world is largely determined by your willingness to bring your unique abilities to the table every single day and to continually empty yourself of whatever’s inside.

  One of our coaching community members, Sal, shared how establishing practices and establishing Creative Rhythm unlocked new possibilities for him. He says, “I was going through changes and asking some important questions about who I am and how my work is supposed to reflect that. I was bouncing around between projects, tasks, and friendships, trying to figure out what I should be doing. Nothing was tied together. They were all individual and separate occurrences in time.”

  He continues: “For so many years, I had a wealth of creative talent built up inside of me. I would try to use a little bit here and there. Take a scoop off the top at work and apply it where I could. Try to start a new project to relieve some of the pressure building up. It was like I was drowning in a dull world and could only get a breath of creative oxygen every once in a while.”

  Sal says that once he became aware of how he’d been living without structure in his life, he began to establish practices that unlocked dormant parts of his abilities. He says, “Discontent is only a precursor for change and so it began. I began the process of starting a business. I wasn’t sure what that business would ultimately look like, and I am sure I am not where I will end up, but the fact is, I started. When the time was right, I left my job and have been emptying myself each and every day since then.”

  Not everyone will leave their job, nor should they, but for Sal, establishing practices led him to realize that he’d been living his life by default and not with purpose. Once he’d discovered this, he began to align his life with his strengths rather than with what was most comfortable.

  A LESSON FROM THE BEAVERS

  A while ago, my family and I went to see an Omnimax movie about beavers. (Yes, we like to live on the dangerous side.) I’ve heard the phrase “busy as a beaver” at least a thousand times in my life, but I don’t think I ever really connected with its meaning. Every day a beaver simply does what it’s wired to do. It diligently performs the task of cutting down trees and moving them around to create dams. While the day-to-day work a beaver does may be relatively unnoticeable, over the course of its lifetime, a small family of beavers will affect the environment around it more than any other creature (except humans). Simply through the process of building dams, which it uses for housing and sustenance, a beaver can (and often does) turn a river into a meadow, or farmland into a lake.

  Here’s the thing: The beaver doesn’t have some master strategy in mind for repurposing the surrounding terrain. This is not its intent. It is simply doing what it does, day after day after day, and the ensuing environmental change is simply a result of its activity. The beaver is just being a beaver, and it changes the very world around it.

  So many of us want to go straight to results. We want to know how and when something is going to pay off from the very beginning. But how many of us, like the beaver, would be willing to work a little bit each day on something, all the while not knowing when and whether we will see the results of our labor? This is the benefit of having practices in our life. They provide an infrastructure to keep us focused on the things that matter most to our creative ability and ultimately they help us bring the best of who we are to what we do.

  “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

  —Steve Jobs

  I was recently speaking at a conference and stepped out with a few attendees for a quick lunch between sessions. As we left the restaurant to head back to the convention center, one of our lunchm
ates realized that he’d forgotten something at the table, so the rest of us waited for him on the corner in front of the restaurant. As we stood sharing smalltalk, our conversation was interrupted by a gentleman standing a few feet from us and leaning casually against a lamppost. He shouted, “What are you guys doing, standing around on the corner, holding a ‘dirty shoe’ convention?” We chuckled, acknowledged that we weren’t, in fact, holding such a gathering, and went back to our conversation. A few seconds later, he interrupted us again, but this time his remarks were at another man passing by. “Hey! I thought that when the Romans fell, the sandals fell with them!” This quip also got a chuckle from us and caught the attention of the rest of the passersby as well. After a few more remarks about the footwear of people strolling by, the jokester retreated to a small shoeshine stand about twenty feet away, where he had a healthy line of patrons waiting.

  Intrigued, I approached him to get a little more background on his story. It turns out that this was not a one-time gimmick but that he had been doing this for quite a while. He loves people, he loves humor, and had found a way to weave both into his daily routine as a shoe shiner. As a result of bringing his unique gifts and perspective to what he does, he’d built a loyal clientele and provided quite a bit of midday entertainment to random strangers. Rather than seeing his work as a set of tasks to be accomplished, he treated it as an opportunity to bring his own personality and passions to the world. The result is that he has built a one-of-a-kind shoeshine experience and earned a place in the hearts of countless passersby.