Creativity thrives in a No Kill Zone.

Business economist and author, Tim Harford, recently did a TED Talk about how frustration leads us to more creativity. His first example explained how The K?ln Concert, the best-selling piano album and solo jazz album of all time, happened. Keith Jarrett played a late hour concert on a dismal rainy night in Cologne Germany, using an equally dismal piano. He had no intention of doing so until the pleas of a young concert promoter touched him. Little did Keith know that the mess she put him in would result in his greatest triumph.

Harford's account of embracing a mess to create the extraordinary should be an example to us. How many times do we throw up our hands at little messes? We need the mess if we are to stretch beyond our current limits.

Study the great artists, inventors, philosophers and scientists of history and you find their most outstanding achievements happened under duress. And yet, a lightweight strategy, a thin budget, a less than enthused team easily sway us from similar success.

Those I mentor first hear this simple rule: Creating is a “No Kill Zone.”

What does that mean? Purge all negative thought about what you're creating while you're creating. Negative words like “not” – as in, “That’s not any good” – are banned. Purging the negative thoughts about our effort requires practice. We’ve been taught to do it since we were four-years-old. Purge. Exorcise that demon. You will find your true potential when you do.

While creating, you and your team only create, you do not “kill” with judgment. When there is a mountain of possibilities, it's time for review. Even then, you only focus on those things that are working. You ignore the things that are not. You don't have time for them. You're too busy finding gold to worry about the quality of the dirt and gravel around it. 

Creating is messy, fraught with obstacles. Let your thinking flow around that clutter by never judging while you create. I equate creating to children making mud pies. They aren’t pretty. They aren't supposed to be. Kids aren’t thinking about pretty. They are just having fun. Play, and make, and enjoy the mess. Then, when you’ve made lots of pies, look through them. Slice them up, and find the one that has the nugget of gold scooped in with the dirt and mixed with your sweat.

You didn’t know where it would be. If you had not made mountains of pies, that gold would have remained buried in the ground. If you judged your first pies as ugly and you quit, that nugget would have remained in the ground.

Enjoy the mess. Never “kill” while your making. And you, like Keith Jarrett, may owe a masterpiece to one who brought you a mess.