Being a Creative in a Corporate World

As college students, we’re often told myths when it comes to the world of work: if you’re a liberal arts major, you’ll struggle to make a good living. You need an MBA to get far in the corporate world. Or, a JD is the way to go. What will you do with an English degree? And so on. Sure, business and law degrees are valuable and helpful to hone the way one thinks and problem solves, but there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to career prep.

?According to David Epstein, the author of Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, after researching the top performers across a multitude of professions, he found that in most fields, generalists – those that juggle many interests rather than focusing on one – and not specialists, excel most frequently. Epstein claims that “generalists are more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.” What does this mean for professionals? For one thing, it creates a case that diverse backgrounds that include a variety of studies, interests, experiences, and career moves may be the key to success versus a one-track career journey.

As a professional with undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature and writing – in addition to three distinct career paths to date – I’ve often struggled with my “generalist” background and sought to sum up my path. Outside of work, I write stories, articles, and poems, all of which have taught me about the need for clarity, conciseness, and connection. I am not the typical corporate profile and yet I have thrived in a variety of corporate settings for over 25 years. I’ve often attributed my passion for the business world to treating the day-to-day as if it’s a narrative I’m constructing: ?What’s at stake? What should come next? When things are not falling into place, I consider what steps may have been missed along the way. How can I make the project or learning more accessible, more interesting, more engaging? How can I get people invested in a way that’s authentic and meaningful? Am I including my audience in the discussion and taking their needs into consideration?

Throughout my academic career, writing and reading inspired my path. I didn’t have any intentions of working in the corporate world. As an undergraduate, and later as a graduate student, though, one thing was clear to me: I was more interested in pursuing a career in publishing than serving as an adjunct professor like many of my grad-school peers. Perhaps it was the blend of the “Sex and the City” craze, or my personal fears of being a struggling writer living on an adjunct salary. I was cognizant of arming myself with alternate career paths so that I never became a struggling writer: cue terminal graduate degrees to be a professor, certifications to teach high school English, and yoga teacher certification. For me, that was the cost early in my career for choosing to pursue degrees that were not perceived as “acceptable” when it came to the professional world.

And yet, my degrees, as self-serving as they may have appeared, enabled me to understand and experience the power of creation and its subsequent vulnerability, and provided me with the tools to make ideas into reality, and to appreciate and value reflection, revision, and persistence. My MFA forced me to showcase my creative output in front of an audience of fellow graduate students and mentors who were invested in helping me to improve my creative projects. There was nothing more grueling and cringe worthy than to hear my MFA professor read my stories aloud to the class. And yet, it helped me to become better, to take ownership, to understand that feedback was valuable – even if it stung at times – and that art and creativity were a process of revision, resolve, and teamwork if I were to create anything worthwhile. How incredibly valuable to learn those lessons in my early twenties, when I was in earnest and impressionable, and when I was deciding what mattered in my life, and how to achieve it.

I am always energized and excited when I encounter another creative in a corporate seat. Perhaps what makes creatives different is that they see beyond the moment, envision ideas and possibilities, and tend to have a quiet confidence and know-how when it comes to birthing ideas into reality: if you can think it, it’s possible of becoming.

It should not be confused that creatives cannot ground in facts and reality. Data, metrics, and research are all part of the creative process. Before embarking on a story or article, I tend to commit to research and uncovering any data I can to either add to the creative process, or better inform my story. The commonality for me between creative and corporate is story telling. If you can create the narrative and back it with empathy, honesty, facts, and emotional depth, too, anything is possible. Seeing, hearing, feeling, knowing the story, and envisioning it unfolding is, for me, what it’s all about whether I’m writing fiction, or creating the strategy for my team or clients.

When we’re children, we tend to grasp the power of our imaginations, and the sheer awesomeness of being able to imagine things that do not exist, whether it’s superheroes or cars that have wing contractions to make them fly, or making up characters whose voices we hear and whose images we see vividly. As adults, it’s fascinating that we cling to reality more than our imaginations. Many rely on facts, numbers, revenue,?sales forecasts, ________, ?fill in the blank that you use to guide your career or personal life. And yet, if we are not dreaming and imagining – if we are not letting our creativity take a front seat in our lives – are we missing out? If you look up the antonym of creative in a thesaurus, you’ll see words such as uninspiring, conservative, common, bland, boring, predictable, lackluster, uninteresting, and so on. What a great PSA for being creative and surrounding yourself with creative colleagues!

There are many quiet creatives out there who choose not to share their art because they fear how they may be perceived alongside their more “serious” colleagues. Perhaps moving forward, we can strive to welcome creatives into the mix, and utilize their goldmine of ideas and innovation to help organizations dwell in possibility versus miss it while they are only looking at the facts. Next time you seek to hire that MBA or JD, take a second look at a liberal arts major or professional who’s in a play, wrote a novel, makes furniture, is a chef, etc. – you may be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.