Secrets to Long Haul Creativity – Secrets 5 & 6

If you’re just tuning in, these tips are part of a week-long series on “The Secrets to Long Haul Creativity” that we launched earlier this week on Monday.

Five: Sir Ken Robinson Weights In On Frustration

I just returned from presenting at the World Business Forum in Milan, where I spent some time with creativity expert and all-around great guy Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken pointed out that long haul creativity requires a low-level, near-constant sense of frustration — which is different from the just-discussed moment-of-madness version of frustration.

Moment-of-madness frustration makes you punch the ground. Ken’s version is about motivation. It’s a constant, itchy dissatisfaction, a deep sense of what-if, and can-we-make-it-better, and the like.

To illustrate this, he told me a story about George Lucas. Robinson, apparently, popped the question: “Hey George,” he said, “why do you keep remaking all those Star Wars movies?” Lucas had a great answer: “In this particular universe, I’m God. And God isn’t satisfied.”

Six: Everybody’s Got A Job To Do

There’s this mistaken assumption that creativity is a solitary pursuit. This may be true, but the business of creativity is always collaborative. Every journalist has to brave a gauntlet of editors, copy-editors, managing editors ad infinitum. Movies and books and plays and poems are more of the same. Startup entrepreneurs always have investors — etc.

And this brings me to an important point: everybody’s got a job to do. And everybody wants to keep that job. In writing, this means that even if I turn in something perfect, my editors are still being paid to edit — so they will. This is why, I discovered, every time I turned in a piece of finished work I intentionally include a few horrible lines. It gives my editors something to do. It lets them feel useful. It keeps their grubby little hands away from my damn perfect sentences.