What I told our new students ... or, 4 ways we can all be creative

This week I told our new students to be creative. At our convocation / welcome party, I said if you see something you care about, pursue it. I'm president of Thomas Jefferson University, a pre-eminent professional university headquartered in Philadelphia, and I believe that the key skill for careers of the future is creativity.

But I also gave their parents the same advice - you can be creative at any stage of life, and in many different ways, personal, problem-solving, professional or artistic.

 Here's what I told the students:

Every one of you has a plan for this next stage in life, but I want to offer some personal advice. My "major" in college was as a disc jockey. I was well known in Philadelphia especially on late-night, top-40. I was perfectly happy thinking the rest of my life I'd be a DJ - and that was before DJs were cool. Then one day I got fired. That's how I became a doctor and president of this university. There's are a couple lessons I've taken away from that. 

First, be creative. If you see something you care about, do it. What I believe you will learn at Jefferson is how to be creative across disciplines through our transdisciplinary, nexus learning approach. You will be an expert in your chosen field, but I hope you will leave here with an appreciation for all the other experts. You can work with them to cross boundaries. Creativity by definition is bringing things together that other people don't expect to see in the same arena. 

Second, be open to change, and be excited about the future. Jefferson this year is a new university. It brings the best of two historic and powerful universities together to create what we believe is the nation's pre-eminent professional university. What you will find is that we're madly excited about this merger and about what we can create to anticipate the future of work. You have joined that revolution, and there’s never been a been a better time to join our community.

To our incoming class: you will be challenged in your programs here. Work hard to achieve your goals. Sometimes you’ll struggle, but you will learn and grow as individuals and as professionals. You will be prepared to be leaders in your industries. You will be the innovators who can work creatively with experts across many professions.

Here's what I told parents, and I think it's true for everyone:

To the parents with us today – I just told your kids that they could aspire to be DJs and end up as doctors…the same is true for you. Your students are in good hands. Ninety-six percent of our 2017 graduates got jobs or got into grad school. Now I want you to take a deep breath. You got them here! Work with me to be creative about the future we want them to have. Read something you never imagined you’d read. Drive a different road home. Try something new.

Here's the key:

Creativity is something that can be taught, and that we can all learn. All of us. There are four stages of creativity that can help us all think about it:

1 - personal creativity. We can all do this. I call it "getting in creative shape." Try different things every day. Read deeply on a topic you wouldn't think of reading. Check a magazine or website you'd never have thought to look at. Do something new. Even take different routes home every day.

2 - everyday problem solving. I've written about being a "changemaker." It means seeing a problem and organizing the resources (maybe people) to solve it. You can do that at work, but you can also do that at home.

3 - professional creativity. This starts by asking "what are the many ways we can do this," instead of saying, "there's no budget for that." If you can see what's obvious in ten years, then let's figure out how to do it now.

4 - there's a level of "big" creativity - where everyone says, "that's creative." It's why a Van Gogh painting or an Aretha Franklin song or Beyonce video really wouldn't work if you changed the color or the key or the choreography. My advice, however, is that if you're passionate, you can do this too. We forget how young our favorite artists were when they created our favorite pieces.

For further reading, here's the research - lots of gold nuggets in this: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f4fc/c5125a4eb702cdff0af421e500433fbe9a16.pdf