When Right Brain Left...

When you think of the word "creativity" where does your mind go first?

Does it go directly to an individual person, a style, a work of art, an idea, or a song?

If you're like most people, you've yet to navigate to the person in the mirror as one of your primarily thoughts of creativity. Don't worry, it's not just you.

Now, what are you doing when you get your most creative ideas? This was a question asked to me this past year by Duncan Wardle, former head of Innovation & Creativity for Disney. Think for a second, before reading on... Was your answer when you're showering, running, just waking up, or something similar?

Duncan's workshop blew the doors open for me! His stories and teachings confirmed a lot of my own beliefs but also proved to me that creativity can and should be infused into every aspect of life. There was a pleasant, yet embarrassed exhale of laughter from the workshop attendees when Duncan remarked how no one said they get their most creative ideas "At Work."

I've always pegged myself as a creative individual, yet never to my own credit. I've verbalized to few where my inspiration for my cleverness and creativity may stem, but I've never penned it down. So what better time than the here and now of this new decade to share. I hang my creative hat on 3 hooks of inspiration; the first being my family, second being music, specifically hip-hop and third being bullied. No matter what, I've always credited my creativity, ideation, or wordplay to an external source rather than giving myself the credit.

My Family

My grandpa was a fantastic commercial graphic design artist. He proved to all of his children and 20 grandchildren that success in life and in business doesn't always have to be buttoned-up and corporate-y, so to speak.

Granpa Knut was an unmatched mind when it came to creativity. He never lost his inner child and could turn anything into a playful opportunity. Duncan preached this necessity to "Stay Playful" during his innovation workshop. Think back to the days when the cardboard box was more exciting than the actual product inside of it. The box was anything your imagination could think of until the day an adult told you it's just a box. Once imagination and creativity became associated with being childish or immature, we lost. It makes it exponentially harder to welcome those traits back into the business world!

Music

I've been an audiophile my entire life. I'd consider myself a human jukebox to some extent! Music, especially hop-hop has been a major influence on my outlook on life, style, and vernacular. I rock more adidas than all of Run-DMC combined, I've had dogs named BIG and Juicy, and I love twisting words and phrasing to be as clever as possible. Artists like Eminem, Mos Def, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, and countless others showed me that the English language is meant to be bent, beat up and broken, that words are meant to be played with and from that, endless creative thoughts can flow. They've intertwined lyrical stories in their songs that have helped motivate me and get me through hardships in life.

"Hip Hop Didn't Invent Anything. Hip Hop Reinvented Everything"

The above quote encapsulates the lesson that I learned from this diverse genre. Hip Hop is full of wordsmiths and lyrical acrobats who sampled old blues, jazz, and funk tunes to create what now the most popular genre in all of music. Hip Hop taught me that anything and everything can be innovated or reinvented, but you need to have imagination and creativity to do so.

Bullying

I'm not one for public affirmation as I draw the dislike of the experience to the same place I credit some of my creativity, which was in being bullied. I try to speak very matter of factly on the topic, since its not my favorite life experience. Nonetheless, it is an important one as it shaped who I am today. I was picked on at an early age for countless reasons, always for things I was told that I lacked, such as height, confidence, athleticism. I was and still am an introvert who was bullied into becoming an extrovert, so it's not all bad. I A-B tested a lot of methods to overcome my bullies, few rarely worked. What I learned was cleverness and the creativity in my comebacks to the bullies were the tricks to overcoming their insults. It'd be nice if they didn't treat me how they did, but I can't change that. What I can change is my perspective on every venture, project, or idea that I am apart of. Everything can be looked at through a creative lens, even the parts that suck. Embrace your inner weird because "the things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful."

I hope you leave this blog with a new willingness to embrace your own creativity as well as building up the creativity of others! Welcome the thoughts that come from your right brain, you might surprise yourself!

"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

Let's create, Brendan Doyle