Creativity is a natural part of who we are as human beings. Children in particular are naturally creative. They live in a dream world where they're absolutely open to everything; their minds are like little sponges. But as we get older, we lose some of that creativity. In the process of maturing, we're encouraged to be serious; and ultimately, we get the idea into our heads that we're not very creative, and that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We tend to lose our creative edge.
Another thing that makes people turn away from creativity is that it's not neat, clean or pretty. It's dirty, messy, disorganized and chaotic, like child's play. It's filled with all kinds of unrelated ideas, which get mixed together in a special way. It's deciding to do something, without knowing how you're going to do it, and then figuring it out as you go. It's putting the why before the how.
Ultimately, the important part of any endeavor is just setting the goal first. Sometimes, the crazier the idea, the better; just write it down. Get it out of your brain; just stay open and receptive. And then later, as you continue developing the idea and the subsequent process, you'll come up with the "how" part of it.
My company uses direct mail as its primary marketing method, and here's the thing about direct mail: when you receive it, it often looks like it was done from start to finish in one piece. It begins with a salutation and then launches into the text, which flows on until you hit the "Sincerely" and then the signature, which is sometimes followed by a "P.S." But they weren't put together like that -- not by a long shot. We don't waste time sketching out a careful outline that the then refuse to deviate from. Most direct mail letters are created in little pieces, then stitched together using a special format, like the seven-step formula that I discussed in one of my earlier articles.
It's a very creative process, it's very messy and piecemeal, and we run into frustration and confusion all along the way. I feel that a lot of marketers and would-be markets want to avoid all that, so they avoid doing the kinds of things that create frustration and confusion. And yet, I believe firmly that in some ways, these things can be your friends -- just as fear can be your friend, as long as you're using it as fuel.
Frustration and confusion are part of every promotion we've done in the 25-year history of our company. There's been a point during every promotion when I've said, "Oh my God, why did I even start this thing? Why?" But that point has been short-lived every time. You get through it, figuring things out as you go. That's part of the creative process.
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There are a couple of dangerous things involved with this confusing creative process, and I've already revealed the first: that you don't even try. If you back off and don't move past your confusion the moment you become confused, you can stall. The second danger is to think that other people are more talented than you, or more skilled -- so why should you even try? My counterargument is that there are people out there who want you to think they're somehow special. A lot of the experts who do expensive marketing seminars want you to think that they have some natural gift at marketing, because they want you to give them more of your money. Well, I've had the privilege to get to know quite a few of these people, and they're not superhuman. They just work hard, unleashing their creativity.
Entrepreneurs tend to be very creative, whereas chief executives of big corporations don't think that way. I believe that the analogy of comparing a new business to a baby, versus an adult, is apt here. When your business is brand new, you get creative and spend a lot of time thinking about creativity as it relates to your business. How can you creatively bring in customers? How can you be creative as you're getting your business launched?
And then, as that business develops and grows into a more established enterprise, creativity tends to wither away. You get mired down in the day-to-day, and want to do things the fastest and easiest way... and so you lose your creative edge. Pretty soon the business is old and established, and maybe it's been taken over by a board of directors instead of that entrepreneur who started it. (Apple was a good example in the 1990s). It's even further removed from the creative process that got it started. It just rolls along on momentum, and eventually it dies unless someone comes along to save it.
The creative process is the soul of a business. Creativity is what drives innovation. It's people asking "Why not? Why can't we do something different? Why do we have to keep doing things the same way?" That kind of innovation especially drives technology. At some point along the way, someone asked, "Why can't we check our email on our cell phones?", and so today we have smartphones, which can do email and web browsing in addition to acting as phones. Before that, someone had to ask, "Hey, why can't we talk on a phone that's not connected to the wall?" At some point someone had to innovate and think, "Well, let's see if we can make a mobile phone that people can carry with them away from home, so they can answer the phone wherever they are."
My laptop computer is very thin, yet it's not the thinnest on the marketplace. There are some you can literally fit in a manila envelope. The first laptops were a couple of inches thick, at least, and they generated a lot of waste heat. If you actually dared to put one on your lap, you'd get your lap burned! But the reason they existed at all was because someone thought, "Why do we have to be tied down to a desk to use a computer? Let's have one that we can take with us." And of course back then, you still had to plug it in to the wall to get an Internet connection... but now they're all wireless.
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All these amazing advances in technology, and they all came from people saying, "Why not? Let's try something new. Let's think outside of the box. Let's be creative and innovate in the marketplace." That happens all across the technology sector.
And that creativity, that innovation, is far from neat. It's disorganized, dirty, and chaotic. The process can drive people who tend to be structured nuts.
But in the creative process, there's a time when things come together -- when you're working on a project and your scattered ideas begin to transform, slowly, into the end product. That's something you have to work toward; but sadly, many people that they have to have it all figured out in advance. Trying to bottle it up like that, trying to getting it perfect from the beginning, can break you. You end up losing your creative energy, because you're so focused on how it's going to have to end that you never start.
When I write sales copy, I just let the ideas flow. I'm not really trying to craft a sales letter at first; I'm just trying to get my thoughts and ideas on paper. If you were to look at one of my finished sales letters and then compare it to a version from two weeks earlier, you might not see many similarities at all. Sometimes a sales letter starts out at 70 pages long, and at that point it's not really a sales letter; it's a collection of chunks and segments strung together. There are ideas for headlines written up top, and several pages later and there are some notes about the offer and reminders not to forget to add this in there or to put this part together. And then, maybe, you'll see some order form copy that needs to be worked on. All of these things are just scattered randomly: it's like a brain dump. As we refine it, it starts to look more like a sales letter.
That creativity process is especially ugly in the beginning, but it gets more focused and neater as you move towards the finished product. And when it's done, you do it all over again. It's a constant state of multiple projects in different stages; some are always more nearly done than others. Some are ready for the marketplace, some are at the beginning of the creative process, and others are in all the stages in between. If you're too focused on the end result, you'll lose out on that process where you let your creative juices flow.
Too many people get bogged down in the details. That goes along with the whole concept of why the "why to do" something needs to come before the "how to do it." The "how to do it" is all in the details; the "why to do it" opens you up to many different possibilities and keeps you focused on your goals in general. First comes the goal; then you figure things out as you go along. A lot of new products are developed this way, we just don't know about it.
Here's an example from the music world: one of my favorite songs from when I was a teenager made the band really famous at the time. Years later, when I was reading a history of the band, I found out that that song was actually three songs in one. They had three different ideas that they mixed them together to create a hit song.
Think about creativity as it relates to money. The whole money-making process is a very creative one, especially for those people involved in the information market. People who sell informational products can, in a sense, create it all out of thin air. But even in traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, a lot of creativity is involved. You can invent all kinds of cool, creative ideas for a business, including special events designed only for our best customers. That's part of what innovation is all about; and as the late Peter Drucker once said, everything in business is an expense, except for two things: marketing and innovation.
There's a great book by David Schwartz called The Magic of Thinking Big. I'd recommend that book to anyone, although it was written in 1959. It changed my life when I read it. In that book, Schwartz talks about a successful business person who was asked about what transformed his business. And he said this: "At the same time every day, I close the door, unplug my telephone, and sit down with a little pad and a pencil or pen. And I ask myself: What can I do differently or better? What new ideas can I implement that will make the biggest impact on my business? I write down the ideas I have, and then I try to implement as many of them as possible."
So here's a simple idea: just spend a little time every day thinking about how you're going to improve your business. There's nothing earth-shattering about that idea, but very few people do this consistently. Most don't even do it at all.
As with many other things in life, if don't use your creativity, you lose it. Some say you stop being creative after the age of 40 -- which is the biggest lie I've ever heard. There are plenty of older people who are razor sharp, and they get more creative by the year. Like anything else, creativity takes time and work and focus.
Don't just think; do. This idea makes sense to all of us, and yet to actually do it on a consistent basis is the hard part. So we put it off, and our businesses stagnate. At one time they may have been very successful, but then we quit doing that innovative, creative thinking that brought in new business. If you let that go, the business just fades away -- or is devoured by younger, more aggressive, more creative, more innovative ones.
The key here is to never lose that hunger and the creativity that got you started in business in the first place. Whatever you did in the beginning, you've got to continue to do. Keep the hunger alive. Keep the fire and energy going. Don't get stuck in the doldrums, doing the same thing over and over, unless those things work and are profitable. Always be innovative, always be creative, and try to stay on the cutting edge of your marketplace.
Find a time of day that's magic for you, and then make it almost like a religion to spend that time working on your business, rather than in it. Keep trying to come up with as many ideas as you can to keep things moving forward in a fresh, positive way.
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