Interview: Happiness Series Magazine
Interview with Nir Bashan
What is one thing someone could do, regardless of financial genetics, background, or education, to succeed in their given field?
The number one thing that somebody can do regardless of their background, their socioeconomic status, whether they were raised rich or poor or whatnot, is to embed creativity into everything that they do.
Creativity is the great equalizer. It does not care about vanity, it does not care about what school you went to, it does not care about what family you were luckily born into. It is in essence the ultimate anti aristocratic system, which gives whomever yields its power of meritocracy an advantage.
What does success mean to you?
Success is really about finding a way to use the power of creativity in your day-to-day life. It is also about making a lot of mistakes and learning from them.
As we enter what looks to be a great depression, how does someone survive and even thrive in their work?
In times of great hardships there is always a silver lining. Because creativity depends on positivity instead of negativity, to see the world as it can be not as it is, creativity gives us the ability to solve problems no matter what the situation is in front of us.
Today, our hardships are great. But so are the opportunities to triumph. We make the decision every day as to which road we choose to take and sadly most of us choose the road of pessimism and negativity.
Instead, choose creativity. Creativity gives us the opportunity to choose the road of optimism, hope and a world unbound by material limitation.
What’s your advice for someone recently laid off from work?
Getting laid off from work is really difficult. I’ve been there many times over my career as an entrepreneur, having started my own businesses and failed them, and also by working for someone else and getting let go for a multitude of reasons.
But this is also one of the best times to be reinventing yourself. There is so much opportunity in the job seeking community for those out there who are willing to think about it creatively. Redefining the way that we look at our resume or our history of employment and the way that we present ourselves is ripe for creativity to take hold, no matter what business you’re in and no matter what you do.
What’s one of the biggest threats to creativity?
Believe it or not, one of the biggest threats to creativity lives deep within our own DNA. It’s easy to try to ascribe our lack of creativity to an external force such as technology or being too busy or fill in the blank with some excuse — but it turns out that we are our own worst enemy.
The self-doubt monster that lurks deep within every human being on earth is the greatest threat to creativity ever. We are so good at turning up the volume on the analytical side of the mind and turning down the volume on the creative side of the mind that we self-edit ideas that have the potential to change the world.
We could have easily landed a woman on Mars by now or cured cancer. But those very people who work on those very projects have succumbed to self-doubt at every single turn because our infrastructure and systems are not built to encourage creativity.
They are built to encourage analytics.
And what we end up losing is the ability of humanity to fully execute its level of thinking to our God given abilities.
If instead we start to combine creativity with analytics, we have a shot at going headlong into problems of our society and our world of which none escape the ability to be solved with creativity.
Unfortunately, we are not currently set up to foster creativity in every endeavor. Part of my life’s goal is to embed creativity into our regimen the same way that analytics have been embedded into our regiment since the time of the ancient Greeks.
Kids from poorer families with less parental oversight and resources often exhibit greater imaginative capacities and resilience. Until, of course, the difficulties and disadvantages baked into the life of the working poor overcome them. Upper-middle-class kids with hyper-engaged parents often lose their creative momentum. How can we level the playing field for poor and rich kids? How can we maintain our imaginative powers?
Creativity is one of those wonderful things that does not rely on anybody’s background to work. No matter who you are or where you come from, you can take hold of creativity and use it in whichever way you see fit. It just takes the will to want to do it.
It costs nothing. Not a penny.
Yet most of us continually chase the easy low hanging fruit of get rich quick schemes. I know, because I have, too. But none of them work.
The only thing that really works over a longterm approach is learning how to operate our mind as a super unit, complete with its full potential of creative and analytical skills. And what I have found from what I have seen with my own eyes in business across the spectrum, from the single African American Woman who started her own business and has used creativity to reach unprecedented marketspace, to the farmer who had learned a new creative technique and patented it, is the power of creativity in business. It is a power that unites everybody on earth in their ability to think creatively about problems that plague their business or careers.
What does creative thinking mean to you?
Creative thinking is a type of thinking that allows you to see a problem and recognize a solution that does not fall within the realms of analytical thinking.
I’ve always found that a key to unlocking creativity is the time and space to get bored. Do you find boredom and the ability to sit in it critical to developing a more creative life/mind/work?
That is awesome. It is always interesting to hear how different people conjure up creativity. Most attribute it to a lightning bolt moment. They’re in the shower and they come up with a crazy idea. They are on a run or a walk or they’re bored and they come up with a creative thought. I love those stories.
But this is not a scalable or sustainable model. Creativity is far too important to be so intermittent.
There has to be another way. There has to be a way where we can continually make creativity happen and not just wait for it to come in isolated moment. And that is the recipe of what I’ve created in my book The Creator Mindset. It has a specific methodology that enables creativity to be repeatable daily. You don’t have to wait for those lightning bolt moments, you can literally manufacture creativity in everything that you do.
Is productivity the death of creativity? How are they compatible?
Good question. Not necessarily. While I am doing consulting work with amazing companies across the globe and speaking to different associations, trade groups and companies, I have uncovered a system that allows us to understand how creativity fits into productivity.
That system is called the four P’s of creativity. The first is People. People are the most important part of any company or venture because embedding the spirit of creativity within every single member of your organization is critical for growth and turning revenue into profit.
The second P deals with Process. Process is all about understanding how to embed creativity across the organization in repeatable and sustainable waves.
The third deals with Product. It turns out that a lot of companies don’t understand what product they make and how it affects the buyer in the marketplace or the buyer in a business to business transaction. Understanding what your product really means in the marketplace allows you to tap into latent creativity that is left on the table for the taking.
And finally, when all three other P’s line up you get Profit. Which is a word that we need to talk more and more about these days as profit and capitalism have become dirty words. They are not. There has been no system devised on earth that has lifted more people out of poverty then the way that we practice the free market system in the West. And maximizing profit creatively is a good thing not only for the company or career it touches, but for the echoes that manifest as a result worldwide.
How –besides fear or the motivation of big rewards — motivate someone to be more productive?
It was a dark and stormy night 65,000 years ago. And Harriet was an early cavewoman being attacked by a beast far more powerful and then her. But she had one thing the beast didn’t have. And that was creativity. She was able to take a stick that she found — nothing more than a walking stick. And an arrowhead that she found — nothing more than a berry picker. She put the two things together and created the world’s first spear. And she was able to stave off the beast.
Immediately she ran into her village to share this innovation with the rest of her people. And soon innovation became embedded into our DNA.
Therefore, creativity and the way creativity is expressed are as individual as your DNA and who you are.
When we look at issues of productivity, we are really asking the wrong question. And we need to redefine the question and look at it through a different lens. The question instead becomes how do we excite the latent creativity to motivate somebody to solve problems in a way that only they can solve it.
An amazing power comes from delegating problem-solving skills to someone who solves problems in a completely different way than you do. Just like Harriette fought off the beast many years ago in her own signature way, so too will your staff, your coworkers and others around you solve problems in their own way if taught the tools of creativity to do so.
What’s the one thing you’ve done in your habits or with your thought patterns that have truly changed your life?
I’ve learned to let go of the fear of making mistakes and embrace the principle that failure is part of the human experience. And what we learned from failure and how we use it moving forward is more powerful and potent then whatever the failure in the first place.
It seems that many of us are constantly trying to avert failure. I know I spent most of my career trying to do so. But what I lost in this futile effort was and ability to learn new and interesting ways of problem solving that were creative. And these creative problem-solving techniques could never have come from anyone else other than me making that mistake. So, the one thing that has really changed my life is recognizing that mistakes are normal, part of the process, and should be celebrated as such. Because deep within is a kernel of creativity as unique as anything that can be applied to solving problems as no other person on earth can do.
Nir Bashan is the founder and CEO of The Creator Mindset LLC, where he teaches business leaders how to harness the power of creativity to improve profitability, increase sales, and make work more meaningful. His clients include AT&T, Microsoft, Ace Hardware, NFL Network, EA Sports, and JetBlue. He received a Clio Award and an Emmy nomination for his creative work on albums, movies, and advertisements, and was one of the youngest professors ever selected to teach graduate courses at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He lives in Orlando, Florida. Learn more about his new book, The Creator Mindset: 92 Tools to Unlock the Secrets to Innovation, Growth, and Sustainability (McGraw-Hill; August 2020).on his site here. You can buy his book here.