Build Your Career, Master Your Craft, and Shape the Culture

Welcome to our Linkedin newsletter. During the course of a successful project, there’s often a moment where “the creative factor” of an individual takes the work from good to great. Our stories sit in the intersection of craft, career, and culture; highlighting smart solutions and innovative thinking that help remind us all: Creativity is a skill we can hone, and it is not only reserved for artists.

We believe you can cultivate more creativity through practice and exposure. But any creator knows we also need to constantly learn—new skills, ways of working, and career steps we never considered taking, such as the entrepreneurial path. Come to The Creative Factor to read and learn. Then go and do. On that note, here are some of our top recent stories and interviews.

1. Creative Ecosystems: A Space Dedicated to Collective Black Imagination

They say if you don’t have a seat at the table, bring a folding chair. And during the uprisings in 2020, New York-based writer, designer, and artist Annika Hansteen-Izora built her own table —? one for Black artists to connect and grow as they absorb the historical and contemporary work of their peers.

“I saw a lot of folks talking about — rather than being invited to — tables that were never meant for Black artists,” she said. “So we began to invest our energy in building our own tables and creating our own collectives where Black thought and imagination were at the forefront. I focused on communal creation rather than individual creation because I’m interested in how folks can grow together. I wanted this to live as a space online dedicated to collective Black imagination.”

Read the full story here, where Hansteen-Izora shares how she started Creative Ecosystems, a visually stimulating, yet streamlined immersive online platform for the Black community to share art and imagination in one place.

2. Elizabeth Gilbert: A Creative Life is an Amplified Life?

In her book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert weaves her own experiences into the paradoxes us creators experience daily: the feeling that what we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all; how we both are terrified and brave; how art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege.?

“The creators who most inspire me are not necessarily the most passionate, but the most curious,” Gilbert says. “Curiosity is what keeps you working steadily, while hotter emotions come and go.” For more insights from Gilbert, including her creative truths on courage and persistence, read our piece.

3. Reframing the Conversation: Why We Should Respect the Complexity of Art as Much as We Do Science?

There is a reason that so many of us chose the creative life, and that likely had to do with dissecting frogs in high school chemistry class when we realized, Maybe science isn’t for me. But it turns out we’re a lot more scientific than we might imagine.

In fact, by reframing the arts versus sciences debate, we can view our crafts through a scientific lens, according to Susan Magsamen , founder and Executive Director of the International Arts + Mind Lab . “Artists are very scientific in their own ways,” she says. “We’re not trying to push the arts into a scientific rigor. We’re trying to say that art is a very dynamic, interdisciplinary field. It's generative, not reductionist. So how do you study art in a way that honors the complexity of it? It's a wonderfully complex problem.” Read the full story here.

4. Introducing Our Storyteller-in-Residence Program (for Brands!)

While creative leaders tell other people’s stories all day, it’s hard for them to tell their own. (There is a reason biographies are better than autobiographies.) With our one-of-a-kind content experience we work alongside you, shadow you, and interview you (in person!) to help you find it and share yours. Let us tell your story.?

Newsletter written by Contributing Editor Madeleine Magill .