How Creativity Fuels All of Us
In the next few months at TLA, we’ll be exploring leadership, business and ways to improve the two by taking on the core fundamentals of performance psychology.
Of course, with TLA, we do thing differently and we’re proud of that. A lot of the skills we talk about and teach have been tried and tested by ourselves. Sometimes when we test those things out, a few unexpected things happen.
Like many things, running a start-up is incredibly hard work. It requires constant risk management, focus, motivation, will power and dedication. There are constantly so many things to do around insurance, finance and intellectual property to take care of – and that’s just the business admin tasks (whilst also having a full time job for now and a new house to take care of).
TLA - like many start-ups and entrepreneurial ventures – is at heart a creative venture. In fact, it’s all about creativity. From the books to the courses, marketing and social media outlets, it’s utterly creative.
This makes us really tired. Then you do silly things like leaving things in stupid places, forgetting routine things and you start to get upset as a three year old after they’ve stayed up too late.
So, I as the founder, decided I would take three weeks off (an entire month sounded way too long but three weeks just makes it so feasible). Of course, within this time I would still be doing 38 hours a week for the day job and chores at the weekend as we all have, not to mention gym classes and socialising.
So I took a few hours off. Although sorting the garden and doing the housework didn’t seem like time off, though it was a different distraction.
Still, my creative streak had all but disappeared. I wasn’t coming up with any new ideas and had no inspiration (yes, we’re still talking after two hours which seemed like an eternity).
I decided to do my favourite thing – watch films non-stop. From moving house last year, I still had hundreds of DVD’s stored away in a cupboard. I switched on Amazon Prime and tried to find some quality films to watch. As is my absolute favourite past time, I watched two back-to-back and searched for another.
Four seconds into searching for that other film, ideas started to come through like a tap on full blast with a really great water pressure. So I wrote them down and continued watching films the rest of the day. With my laptop open at the same time, I’d managed to do two days’ worth of work within those hours.
Realising how important films, cinema, music and generally entertainment is to myself and the business, I watch films whenever I can.
It feeds my creativity and inspiration unlike anything else. I watch them whilst I’m getting ready to go to the day job. Most lunchtimes, I stay at my desk and have my home-made leftovers for lunch, whilst working and listening to soundtracks such as Mad Max and Wonder woman.
At the weekend, I try to watch as many films as possible. At night, I will always have something on in the background, even if it’s just for background noise whilst I make food or do chores, or research.
I may have only taken a few hours off instead of the intended 3 weeks but creativity has gone up 10-fold.
In fact, there are many people who say that creativity is central to business. In how we work, our surroundings, how we approach clients, marketing and advertising strategies and how leaders approach their teams. As such, what is creativity in business without revolution?
“Revolutionary ideas come about when we doubt our existing view of the world,” says Alan Iny, co-author with Luc de Brabandere of Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity.
“In this respect, true leaders must develop the capacity for radical originality: they must re-imagine and reinvent the world in totally unexpected ways. By doing that, they can create a culture that is open to creative risk-taking and an environment where failure is accepted as part of the creative process.”
Over the next few weeks we’ll be running some content on creativity and looking at how this can influence and improve business practices – for ourselves and our teams, contacts and plans for the future.