#1 Greater than the sum

Super general creativity

Throughout my childhood I was told to pick a lane and work towards a career. And I chose the path of science (at first)

But I had an ADHD sort of curiosity which meant I kept bouncing around disciplines from engineering to product design to research, marketing and strategy within the span of years.

I could not stay still, I liked technology AND business AND design it was hard to see where I would fit in.

I was even told by my parents at first to stick to one thing and 'pick a lane' and it took them some time for them to understand and support me on the fact that I might never stick to one thing.

As I amassed knowledge from bouncing around each field I started to form connections between each of them and deliver 'well rounded' solutions to problems expressed in the form of my design and research practice because of the multidisciplinary knowledge transfer from me bouncing around.

This became a superpower that allowed me to morph my skillset based on the problem in front of me rather the me being limited by what I can do. It made my total skillset be 'greater than the sum' of every discipline I was curious about.

Now I could not only design products but also show clients how the product would sit in their long term business strategy and how particular design details were directly linked to a certain business outcome.

Or how I could create a vision of how a particular research paper talking about new advances in technology would create a new product category 10 years down the line and what it could potentially look like.

This kind of thinking allowed me to collaborate with some super talented people and firms that valued my divergent thinking in a relatively short time in the industry as a creative problem solver (I think saying designer is too limiting).

Rather than force fitting ourselves into the industry I want to show creatives on how to embrace their curiosities and apply them to create a fulfilling creative practice like I did. I call it the Superset mentality.

Invisible rebels

I have quickly realized this kind of viewpoint is very valuable in a world where humans are driven to specialize in a field and spend their entire careers in it. A macro vantage point is needed when you want to create your own rules in an industry. It makes you an invisible rebel who can see through the layers of complexity of our world.

We have seen this throughout history where polymaths like Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Buckminster Fuller combined their passions in disparate domains to come up with ideas that revolutionized and even birthed new industries and advanced us as humans.

I know there are many people like me who can not 'pick a lane' and want to continuously evolve without stopping. I meet them everyday and when we ask each other what we do it's hard to define exactly what because its a mish mash of so many things (much like the real world).

The value of divergent thinking has been further enhanced by the rise of the free market creator economy which has allowed creatives to don multiple hats for multiple clients. Even though I am a designer in my daytime job, I am a writer to all of you, a strategist to some and a researcher to someone else.

This newsletter is for those who can't sit still and pick a lane. I want to break silos and merge disciplines together to show that forming a Superset of skills is not just possible but it can lead to high value creative thinking that allows you to work on the problems you are passionate about while being rewarded by society for solving them.

It is a platform to expose more creatives to other disciplines like business and technology. There is no one thing I will write about. I'll write about things that when applied in your creative practice will allow you to amplify your value as a creative practitioner in the industry.

Be ready for ideas around science, philosophy and business along with design because everything is interlinked and I am tired of pretending that it is not. My hope is that more creatives will be comfortable with exploring and combining their curiosities in their careers to work on things they are passionate about.

Superset is the antithesis to being in a world full of subsets and siloes that prevent divergent thinking. It is for creatives who want to stay undefined and expand beyond what the industry told them was possible to do.

Welcome to a new era of super general creativity.

-Advait