Creative @ Work
()
About this ebook
Creative thinkers are all around us, from creating a cupcake store to founding the world's largest marketplace. Business is more than profit, and entrepreneurship is art.
What do you think of when you hear the words business and entrepreneurship? Does creativity come to mind? Too often, we look at business as a rigid,
Related to Creative @ Work
Related ebooks
Superhuman by Design: Keys to Unlocking Your Creativity for Life-Changing Results Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Creative Process Illustrated: How Advertising's Big Ideas Are Born Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everyday Creative: A Dangerous Guide for Making Magic at Work Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYou Are Not an Artist: A Candid Guide to the Business of Being a Designer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAPPLIED CREATIVITY: Your guide to revolutionary thinking and the six skills to unlock your creative potential. Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUX Personalization Standard Requirements Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll the World Is a Product:: Be Creative and Come up with Ideas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow To Be Creative Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCreative Culture: Human-Centered Interaction, Design, & Inspiration Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIdeation A Complete Guide - 2021 Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnticonventional Thinking: The Creative Alternative to Brainstorming Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCreate: Repossible, #5 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIdeaSelling: Successfully Pitch Your Creative Ideas to Bosses, Clients & other Decision Makers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Graphic design The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLess Web Development Cookbook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unleash Your Creative Genius: Tapping into Your Innate Imagination and Innovation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDesign Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life's Golden Nuggets: Lessons to Live By Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsResearch Development A Complete Guide - 2021 Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDesigning UX: Forms: Create Forms That Don't Drive Your Users Crazy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDesign Thinking in Banking A Complete Guide - 2019 Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsManaging the Creative Process: Tools for Individuals & Organizations: MINDRAMP Creativity & The Arts, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIdea Hacks: Come up with 10X More Creative Ideas in 1/2 the Time: Master Your Mind, Revolutionize Your Life, #7 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVaadin 7 UI Design By Example: Beginners Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMe, Myself & Ideas: The Ultimate Guide to Brainstorming Solo Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Identity Design: Design the Identity You Need to Get the Life You Want Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSolving Problems in 2 Hours: How to Brainstorm and Create Solutions with Two Hour Design Sprints Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUser Experience Design Complete Self-Assessment Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPractical User Research: Everything You Need to Know to Integrate User Research to Your Product Development Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Small Business & Entrepreneurs For You
Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Grow Your Small Business: A 6-Step Plan to Help Your Business Take Off Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Company Rules: Or Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the CIA Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Real Artists Don't Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Small Business For Dummies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Robert's Rules of Order: The Original Manual for Assembly Rules, Business Etiquette, and Conduct Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Overcoming Impossible: Learn to Lead, Build a Team, and Catapult Your Business to Success Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Side Hustle: How to Turn Your Spare Time into $1000 a Month or More Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dream Big: Know What You Want, Why You Want It, and What You’re Going to Do About It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Never Get a "Real" Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business and Not Go Broke Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nine-Figure Mindset: How to Go from Zero to Over $100 Million in Net Worth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lead It Like Lasso Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStarting a Business All-In-One For Dummies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ultimate Side Hustle Book: 450 Moneymaking Ideas for the Gig Economy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What Your CPA Isn't Telling You: Life-Changing Tax Strategies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The LLC and Corporation Start-Up Guide: Your Complete Guide to Launching the Right Business Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/548 Days to the Work and Life You Love: Find It—or Create It Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe to Turn your Passion into Profit Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business (HBR Guide Series) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Without a Doubt: How to Go from Underrated to Unbeatable Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selling 101: What Every Successful Sales Professional Needs to Know Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Working for Yourself: Law & Taxes for Independent Contractors, Freelancers & Gig Workers of All Types Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Creative @ Work
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Creative @ Work - Andrea R Lirio
Creative @ Work
Andrea R. Lirio
new degree press
copyright © 2021 Andrea R. Lirio
All rights reserved.
Creative @ Work
ISBN
978-1-63676-715-4 Paperback
978-1-63730-052-7 Kindle Ebook
978-1-63730-154-8 Digital Ebook
Thank you for believing in me Mom & Dad.
This book is for you.
Contents
Introduction
Part 1
THE ART OF CREATIVITY
CHAPTER 1
The Entrepreneurial Mindset
CHAPTER 2
What is Creativity?
CHAPTER 3
First Things First: You Don’t Have to Be a ‘Genius’
Part 2
Get In, We’re Going to Create
CHAPTER 4
The Art of Being Disruptive
CHAPTER 5
Manipulate Your Motivation
CHAPTER 6
The Power of Perseverance
CHAPTER 7
Embracing Authenticity
Part 3
Entrepreneurship as an Art
CHAPTER 8
Creating Your Own Luck
CHAPTER 9
Go Together & Go Far
CHAPTER 10
What Would an Entertainer Do?
Part 4
The Power of Creativity
CHAPTER 11
Patience Is Your Pal
CHAPTER 12
Believe & You’re Halfway There
CHAPTER 13
Reflect So You Don’t Repeat
Part 5
Becoming a Master Creator
CHAPTER 14
Think Creativity, Not Productivity
CHAPTER 15
If You Don’t Know, Have a Go
CHAPTER 16
Why Now?
CHAPTER 17
You’re More Creative Than You Think
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Creativity.
A scary thought.
A splash on the page,
A forgotten idea.
Because when I think about it …
I wonder;
Where would we be without it?
Creativity is in everything, creativity is everywhere.
Creativity is art.
Creativity has no bounds.
You are creativity, creativity is you.
Embrace, learn, and believe you too
are creative.
Introduction
This book is about creators and artists.
But it starts with numbers.
Students are lining up to grab their undergraduate business degrees. Today, business is one of the most popular majors, with 386,201 business majors per year in the US.¹ This number doesn’t even include the many Liberal Arts students looking to pursue a career in business after college. In the US, 192,184 people with an undergraduate degree go on to pursue their MBAs every year.²
Worldwide, 582 million entrepreneurs are working on their businesses,³ and 62 percent of adults in the US believe entrepreneurship is a good career path.⁴ The number of entrepreneurs is ever-increasing, with more people hoping to find flexibility in their day-to-day life and the ambition to solve the world’s problems.
But despite its popularity, we have an incomplete view of entrepreneurship. Typically, entrepreneurship is defined as the following:
⁵
I also sat down with over forty college students and engaged in community forums about the view on business and entrepreneurship. The first words that came to their minds were: corporations, profit, finance, investing, numbers, computer science, data, math, and management.
But entrepreneurship, to me, is like art. Entrepreneurs, like artists, are unwilling to conform, and they create what they envision.
Sitting at our wooden school desks, my best friend Mona and I wrote short story after short story in our composition notebooks. Like many excited and creative fourth graders, we loved imagining an entirely new fictional world. We thought we were going to become the world’s next best authors. We loved every second of brainstorming new content and sharing it with our friends and family. But like many things, we let go of our dreams to become young adult novelists and left our notebooks in the box at the back of our closets. I’ve often looked back at my creations in that class. What would have happened today if we had decided to pursue it? My young dream of becoming a novelist died with my socialized belief that being creative wouldn’t lead to success.
Instead, I set my sights on business, a field that seemed more practical. What I found, though, is that my entrepreneurial pursuits are unexpectedly driven by the creativity nurtured by my childhood dream of becoming an author.
Most people believe only a select few have creative ability when, in reality, we’re all born creative. In a NASA study that measured creativity over time from preschool to high school, it was found that we’re all born with immense creative talent but lose creativity over time.⁶
School, work, and adult life wears down our minds to see creative goals as unproductive and unnecessary.
Many college students end up conforming and following what they perceive to be the correct path to success in business. All they can talk about is getting an analyst or associate role at a big consulting firm. Computer science majors gush about getting internships at the biggest names in Silicon Valley, and Finance and Economics majors fight for the top investment banking roles. They become obsessed with making big money
in business. As one of my friends put it, College students these days are so quick to sell out.
We’re always told one path in business: make a profit above all else. Still, so rarely do people highlight the creativity behind building a successful product or project. While roles in consulting, technology, and finance are notable, they only make up a part of all the possible business opportunities in the world. I believe the common perception forgets my favorite part of business: the art of creating and having the imagination and ability to execute on an idea. For me, being an entrepreneur is the ultimate creative experience. To me, entrepreneurship is a form of art.
Being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean you necessarily have to start a business. Entrepreneurship is far more than being a business owner. It’s a perspective. Like artists, entrepreneurs are creative non-conformists with grit and determination, looking to solve today’s problems.
We need to think of creatives less as a department in the workplace or a skill that artists have. Instead, we need to see creativity in its many forms.
Consider award-winning artists like Jon Favreau, Taylor Swift, and Mindy Kaling. While it may not seem like it at first, they are all full-fledged entrepreneurs. They’ve not only created something beautiful for movies, music, and television, but they’ve also developed technology to enhance their work and have set the stage for future artists to join and innovate. There’s a parallel between these artists and entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. They are all creative thinkers who created companies by finding a problem and addressing it.
This book is essential for businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and students thinking about what they want to do. This book will look at artists, examine how creativity works, and dive into what makes a creative businessperson. Creative thinkers are all around us, from creating cupcake stores to founding the world’s largest marketplaces. Business is more than profit, and entrepreneurship is art.
1 Erin Duffin, Number of Bachelor’s Degrees Earned in the United States in 2017/18,
Statista, November 30, 2020.
2 Ibid.
3 Donna Kelley, The 582 Million Entrepreneurs in the World Are Not Created Equal,
The Hill, March 12, 2017.
4 Damien O’Brien and Brian Fitzgerald, Digital Copyright Law in a YouTube World,
Internet Law Bulletin 9, no. 6 (2007): 71-115.
5 Oxford Languages, Version 12.4., s.v. Entrepreneurship,
Oxford University Press, 2021.
6 TEDx Talks, TEDx Tucson George Lan the Failure of Success,
February 16, 2011. video, 13:06.
PART 1
THE ART OF CREATIVITY
1.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset
What do you think is the difference between business and entrepreneurship?
I sat down with more than forty students and engaged in student forums to understand college students’ overall perspectives on business. The first ideas that came to mind were often traditional corporate roles, working to make a profit, and strong management. Similarly enough, today, business is defined as organized efforts and activities of individuals to produce and sell goods and services for profit.
⁷
When I asked students about entrepreneurship, their perspectives shifted. To them, entrepreneurship was the pursuit of creating new value. They noted that it was a field with high risk and potential for high reward. In addition, they argued that entrepreneurship is the stepping stone to joining the world of business. As they saw it, the most famous businesspeople once started with lean and innovative startups.
Despite these positive connotations with entrepreneurship, students from the world’s top universities and colleges, interested in pursuing business, often target roles in the trifecta—consulting, finance, and technology. In 2017, fifty percent of Harvard University’s graduates went into one of the three industries.⁸ These roles don’t even begin to describe the array of opportunities in the world of business and entrepreneurship.
Most of our school systems and workplaces don’t support the creative mindset. With rigid hours, clear structure, productivity-run goals, there is little emphasis on arts and exploration. College prepares students to become young professionals. Even when art and creativity are part of the curriculum, they’re the first to go when the school or organization faces budget cuts. People generally think that the arts are nice and culturally significant and all that, but most people don’t have much of a vision of why the arts are really important in people’s personal, civic, and professional lives,
Professor David Perkins, a founding member of Project Zero said. From my point of view, engagement with art and the creating of art are opportunities for students to learn to think in one or another medium. After all, thinking in one or another medium is what we have to do every day as we engage the complexities of contemporary life.
⁹
Creativity is something we all take for granted. It’s often given a bad rap when we think of useful life skills, and it’s mostly due to society’s conception and bias that art—like paintings, sculptures, and music—isn’t practical. Instead, we like to focus on tangible things like money and belongings, and we reward those who are the most productive or achieve the most. Today, students view business as a respectable career path to become their own boss and make money.
But business is far more than that; it requires creativity. Creativity is the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.
¹⁰ And in a 2020 study by the World Economic Forum, creativity will become one of the top three skills workers will need. The definition of creativity is ever-changing, according to France’s Sciences Pro Professor and bestselling author Rahaf Harfoush: We’re no longer artists praying for divine inspiration; we’re productive creatives who are contributing to economics and markets that were built on the tenets of productivity.
¹¹ It’s often overlooked, but creativity plays a crucial role in any business endeavor. The question is, how did we end up where we are today? While students are rushing to get their business degrees—the top undergraduate and graduate degree in the country—we still forget to teach the importance of creativity in every profession.
We need to teach our kids to be entrepreneurs. I don’t mean we need to tell every child to start their own business and become CEOs and founders when they grow up. I mean we need to instill the entrepreneurial mindset of creative thinking.
Recognize opportunities, take initiative to pursue them, and execute those ideas.
According to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), these are key aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset:¹²
•Critical Thinking
•Flexibility & Adaptability
•Communication & Collaboration
•Comfort with Risk
•Initiative & Self Reliance
•Future Orientation
•Opportunity Recognition
•Creativity & Innovation
Like artists, entrepreneurs are creative non-conformists with grit and determination, looking to solve today’s problems.
I witnessed this first-hand from my aunt.
She was twenty-one and in college when she had her first child, and she still pursued an education through graduate school, getting both her MBA and JD. There, she had her second child, and with her workload and need to care for her children, she faced a somewhat common but dire situation: she needed a caregiver. It was her creative solution to a unique but widespread problem that led to the creation of Care.com.
Her ability to take a simple problem in her own life and create, fund, scale, and bring a company public has always inspired me. Her work was always mission-driven, which drove me to pursue a career in social entrepreneurship. She knew that the only way to make the world a better, more welcoming place was envisioning it as such and creating a path toward that reality. To this day, she continues to teach me about pursuing creative and purpose-driven projects. Creating Care.com wasn’t easy; she and many other entrepreneurs had to be scrappy. They needed to figure out how to raise money for their project and build a strong and passionate team. And once they had the resources, they needed to execute the plan and convince