Be Creative With People

“That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.” – Tom Kelley

Telling yourself you’re not the creative type is just not true and a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believe every single person is born with a degree of creativity. It’s in our DNA and it is how the human race has evolved and gotten to where it is now. You may not be the prolific artist, painter, designer, musician, or photographer but you are someone with imagination and the ability to bring things to life. So the problem doesn’t lie in actually instilling the creative talent in yourself, but rather the ability to have the confidence to exercising your creative muscle. Because of the negative self-fulfilling prophecies of not being the creative type, we never really use this muscle!

Let me dive deeper into why we lose our “creative confidence” as we grow up just to rant. Go into any kindergarten class and ask them who is the creative type? I guarantee you almost everyone will raise their hands. Go into any upper level high school class and ask the same question. Do you expect the same results? I don’t think so. Why is the creative confidence level higher in the kindergarten class than in the high school class? As we grow older, we become more socially conditioned which hinders our ability to exercise our “outside the box” thinking. Growing up, the majority of our work is to stay within the lines and be “safe” and to not venture out with our given tasks. I don’t need to go into too much detail, but understand that over time our creative confidence muscle becomes dormant. Its there, but dormant.

Business owners, entrepreneurs, product managers let me tell you the biggest and best way to exercise your creative talent. PEOPLE. Yes with people. Not with business models, strategy, or sales funnels (although they require creativity as well) but with who you surround yourself to work with. Investing your creative talent into your team and employees is the best way to set yourself up to win in the long run for your business. If you can be creative with your team building, you’ll end up with a machine, an engine, aka your business that you’ll use to accomplish whatever you want to accomplish. It is people that make up the gears and parts of the engine.