Why Highly Creative People Are So Valuable

Highly creative people are extremely valuable to any organization because they are capable of approaching issues and problems differently. They understand a couple of very important contradictions about life that non-creative people don’t get.

The first is that the world is absurd and logical at the same time. This contradiction, which children also realize and accept, spurs the creative adult to approach issues differently.

Most people approach a problem or a project by going 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. which means they move little by little from their starting position, mindset, or solution to one which is progressively different. It’s a cautious, logical, highly accepted approach. They start logical and stay logical. They’re inching toward the absurd, toward the radical, toward solutions which are vastly different than the one they first envisioned, but because of time and other constraints, they never get there. Their ending point may be solution 22 or 23 on an open ended scale. Their final selection is thus only between 23 variables.

Creative people do the opposite. In innovation, they call it using the reversal method. They start at the absurd, the impossible, the radical, and work backwards towards the logical. Their starting point may be at 100 or at several thousand. Their final selection is obviously between many more variables, and their final solution is usually one which non-creative people never got close to imagining, because they were plodding along in their thinking while the highly creative person was running.

Most people also self-censor all their thoughts and ideas. It’s what they’ve been taught to do. Children and highly creative adults do things without always having practical reasons. Non-creative adults, however, are guided by the god of practicality. As adults, they rarely paint or draw or play music or spend time on activities they fully enjoyed as kids because they found they weren’t very good at them. Therefore you’re wasting your time, is what society told them over and over. Their ideas suffered from the same judgment. Absurd or radical thinking is a waste of time. Stay practical, stay conventional, always.

The 2nd big contradiction that highly creative people realize is that everything is separate and also connected. Creativity is one thing and life is another, although they frequently collide. Creative people thus have several personalities, which they effectively keep separate. It’s similar to what an actor or actress does. Actors, (or writers), are like everyone else, except when they walk onstage or when the cameras roll, then they shift into their creative personality mode. In this mode there are no social rules, no need to judge or to try to appear cool and in control. Anything goes.

What highly creative adults do whenever they need to be creative, is shift mentally. Instead of plodding along, they run because there are no obstacles (rules) to mentally hinder them. This process, which highly creative people find to be wonderfully liberating, scares non-creative people.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle awakens. It knows it must run faster than the lion that day or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion awakens. It knows it must run faster than the gazelle that day or it will starve. The message is a simple one. “When the sun comes up, you better be running”

Today, because the world of business is moving so incredibly fast, when the sun comes up, you better not be mentally plodding, you better be mentally running, and that means you better have more highly creative people working for you than your competitor does.