7
Creative Capacity—Your Ability to See Options and Find Answers
In 1965, I was a freshman in college. One day in my Psychology 101 class, we were tested for creativity, and when I got back the results, I was shocked to learn that I had tested at the bottom of my class.
I was devastated.
I’ve taken a lot of tests in my life. I have three college degrees. But of all the tests I’ve taken, this low score was my greatest discouragement. I knew I was going to be communicating to people in my career, and the idea of being a boring speaker was unthinkable to me. What do you do to become creative when you’re not a creative person?
Walking away from that class, I had two thoughts. First, I would never reach my capacity unless I increased my creativity. And second, I would find a way to become creative, no matter what it took.
Fast-forward fifty-plus years. Today, many people tell me that they consider me to be pretty creative. My team often comes to me to discuss creative options and find creative solutions. And I’m known for my creativity when communicating. All of these things are evidence that I’ve made great improvement in this area. And so can you.
Developing your creative capacity can greatly improve your life. People who have creative confidence make better choices. They set off more easily in new directions. They are better able to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. They continually see new possibilities and effectively collaborate with others to improve the situations around them. A person who develops creative ability discovers newfound courage to approach big challenges.
Keys to Increasing Creative Capacity
Is it true that some people are born highly creative? Of course. There are the rare few who breathe to create and are gifted to change the world in that regard. In fact, some argue that all of us are born creative, but most of us lose that creativity as we grow up. Novelist Madeleine L’Engle said, “All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.”
You can rekindle the creativity that’s already in you, plus cultivate new pathways of creativity. If I did it, so can you.
I want to walk you through the eight keys to increasing creative capacity that I’ve used to go from bottom of the class to top of my game. Embrace each of them, and you will immediately see an increase in your ability to see options, solve problems, and find answers.
1. I Believe There Is Always an Answer
The words reactive and creative are made up of exactly the same letters. The only difference between the two is where we place the c. The first decision I made on my journey toward greater creativity was to change my c—that is, how I see challenges. I determined to believe that there is always an answer, not matter what the question or situation was. It meant practicing possibilities. It meant changing the question from “Is there an answer?” to “What is the answer?”
That change in mind-set has brought me criticism from some people because they see it as stubborn. But that attitude has served me well. And I’ve had it confirmed in me when I’ve heard people like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos say, “I’m a genetic optimist. I’ve been told, ‘Jeff, you’re fooling yourself; the problem is unsolvable.’ But I don’t think so. It just takes a lot of time, patience and experimentation.”1 Creativity is changing the question from “Is there an answer?” to “What is the answer?”
Why are creative people like Bezos willing to give time, patience, and experimentation to “unsolvable” problems? Because creativity always takes time, patience, and experimentation. You just have to enter into the process believing there is an answer.
Holding this belief has led to some fantastic experiences and given me some great stories. For example, one year Margaret, my brother Larry, his wife, Anita, and I went on a cruise, and one of the stops was in Melbourne, Australia. We hired a van with a guide and were on a city tour when we passed Rod Laver Stadium, and our guide said the semifinals of the Australian Open were being held that day between Roger Federer and Andy Murray.
“Stop the van,” I said. “I want to get off. I think I want to go watch that.”
I had gone to the U.S. Open up in New York City, and I’d always thought it would be fun to go to Wimbledon, the French Open, and the Australian Open—the rest of the major four tennis tournaments. And I knew the boat didn’t leave port until eleven o’clock that night.
“Do you have tickets?” the guide asked.
“No, I don’t have tickets.”
“You won’t be able to get in, because it’s sold out,” she said. “And most tickets are held in families for generations here, and they’re just passed down. It’s not possible for you to get a ticket.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Just let me out here.”
“You want us to wait so that you can continue the tour after you find out they’re all sold out?” she asked.
“No, you go on ahead without me.”
“Text us when you get in,” Larry said to me before the van pulled away from the curb.
I walked up to the ticket window and said, “I’d like to buy a ticket for the semifinals.” When they explained that there were no tickets available, I pointed inside the fence where I saw literally thousands of people mingling around and asked, “You mean all of those people have tickets to get into the match?”
“No, most of them don’t have tickets to the match. They paid thirty dollars to get on the grounds. They’ll watch it on the big screens.”
I paid the thirty dollars to get inside. It was the first step in solving the “unsolvable” problem.
I found another ticket window inside the grounds, and tried again. Again I was told there were no tickets for the match for sale. “But if you go over to that other window, they may have some return tickets if somebody has turned theirs in.”
I went over to that window and said, “I would like to buy a ticket that somebody isn’t going to use this evening.”
“I’m so sorry, but that is not going to be possible,” the man said.
“Don’t you have any?” I asked.
“Yes, I do. Right now I have twelve,” he replied. “But you see that line of about two hundred people?” he said, pointing. “They’re waiting for them. And at most, there will be about twenty tickets available. People just don’t return them.”
I walked clear to the back of that line, but I thought, There’s no chance here. So I started exploring my options. First, I walked up to the front of the line to see if I could make friends with somebody there who might be willing to help me. I was going around talking to people and kind of feeling them out, but it didn’t look good until I talked to the fifth or sixth person. After talking for a while I said, “Boy, I really would love a ticket. If you get tickets and get one for me, I’ll give you three times the price. I just want to get in,” and the person said, “Okay, I’ll do that for you.”
I was feeling a bit better, but I wanted to have a backup plan. I just wanted to make sure that I got in. So I went to an usher at one of the gates and asked, “When the match starts, will there be any people who don’t show up in your section?”
“That’s possible,” he said.
“If someone doesn’t show, would you let me buy that seat?”
“Well, first of all, I would have to wait until the first set was over, because sometimes people come late.”
“That would be fine.”
“You hang around here, and let’s see what happens after the first set,” he said.
I had my second option in place. I figured that I might not get in for the whole match, but I could get in for part of it. I continued looking around for other possibilities. I talked to a lot of people, but I kept hearing the same thing: “You can’t get in if you don’t have a ticket.” I must have heard that fifty times.
So I started looking around for a scalper, but I quickly found out that it was against the law there to sell tickets for a profit. Still I didn’t give up. Remember, I believe there’s always an answer.
It was getting close to time for the semifinals to begin, and I had been at it for more than two hours. At that point I was beginning to worry that I might not get in. But suddenly, while I was still looking around trying to solve the problem, a woman singled me out. She must have passed fifty other people as she walked straight up to me and said, “I have to leave. There’s an emergency. Would you like to buy my ticket?”
“I would love to buy your ticket,” I answered.
I saw the face value and asked if I could pay her more. She said, “I don’t want you to pay me more. I just want you to buy my ticket, and I’ll be happy.” We were both happy.
As I walked into the stadium, I wondered where the seat would be. The ticket wasn’t all that expensive, so I thought I’d be somewhere up in a top section. But when I went through the gate, they directed me downward, and I kept going down. I ended up only twelve rows above the court. Wow.
I’d been there only a little while when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It turned out to be my friend Nabi Saleh, chairman and CEO of Gloria Jean’s Coffee, based in Australia.
“John, how in the world did you get this seat? This is where the season ticket holders sit!” he said. It turned out that Nabi’s family had had season tickets for over forty years. He laughed as I told him the story.
I can tell you, I had the time of my life. And I don’t know if it was more fun actually watching the Australian Open, or just knowing that I had used my creativity and defied all the odds to get in.
As you read this story, you may be thinking, I haven’t been to Australia, and I don’t have extra money to buy sports tickets at the spur of the moment. My answer is that creativity is a mind-set. You have to believe that answers and solutions are out there if you’re willing to keep fighting to find them. If I had listened to the tour guide, I never would have gotten out of the van. If I hadn’t gotten out of the van, I never would have found out there was a thirty-dollar ticket that would get me onto the grounds. If I hadn’t bought the thirty-dollar ticket, I never would have been able to talk to anyone in a position to get me a ticket, and I never would have gotten the ticket that eventually got me in to see the match. Each door you open leads to another door. One of those doors will eventually lead to an answer.
2. I Believe There Is More than One Answer
My favorite word is options. However, that has not always been true. In my younger years I was always quick to give people what I thought was the answer to any question they asked. I was confident, opinionated, and certain about everything. Ask me about raising children, and I would give you the answer. Ask me about how to grow a church, and I’d tell my way, which I was certain was the right way. Ask me which was the best NFL team, best leadership book, best place to live, best way to do anything, and I could give you my one right answer.
Then I had children of my own and discovered that I had few answers. And I met church leaders more successful than I was, who were succeeding in a different way. And of course my pick often didn’t make it to the Super Bowl. And on and on it went. Slowly, with exposure to new ideas, self-evaluation, and hard-won maturity, I began to realize that for almost everything in life, there is more than just one answer.
Today as I near seventy, I have fewer certainties than I did at thirty. And I’m very comfortable with that. In my younger years, my approach would be to dig deep to fight for the one “right” answer. Today I think broadly and search for as many possible answers as I can find. Only when I develop a long list of options do I line them up and ask, “What is the best option?” I take great comfort in finding several effective ways to get things accomplished and seek to discover as many options as possible.
If you’re a leader, you may want to adopt a practice that I’ve used with my staff. Whenever people on my team come to me with a problem, I ask them to prepare at least three solutions to that problem. I do that to help them to become more creative, more open-minded and willing to consider different ideas and opinions. If they can become flexible and demonstrate the ability to adapt to fluctuating situations, they will be more effective and productive. I know from my own experience that I became more creative when I began to believe there was always an answer. That creativity multiplied dramatically when I discovered that there are many answers.
3. I Believe That Everything and Everyone Can Get Better
Creative people, whether they are artists, inventors, businesspeople, or teachers, believe there are always better ways to do things. And they search for them. Monte Haymon, former president and CEO of Packaging Corporation of America, advised,
Don’t cap your expectations! What you define as impossible today is impossible only in the context of present paradigms. But maybe we should let William Wordsworth have the last word on this subject of the untapped promise that lies within us all. Speaking of his fellow humans, he said simply, “We are greater than we know.” It’s true for us as individuals, as institutions, and as a society. We can only guess at our true potential. And we can only achieve it if we get past the paradigms and unleash our imaginations.
At my age, I have to deal with both reality and possibility. The reality: I am getting older and can’t do everything I once did. The possibility: I am getting better, including in the area of creativity. Will that always be true? Or will there be a day when I wake up and have no more creative ideas? I hope not, because as a writer and speaker, I need to remain creative. The good news is that while in my late sixties, I wrote my first children’s book, grew companies that are adding value to others every day, and discovered a way to transfer values by teaching them via roundtables, which may actually lead to the transformation of nations. That gives me confidence, and I no longer ask myself if I’ll ever run out of creativity. Instead, I ask, “Will I have enough time in my life to respond creatively to all the opportunities before me?”
When you believe that everyone and everything can get better, it gives you confidence that you can help people and make a difference. And it inspires you to keep looking for ways to solve problems and pursue opportunities.
4. I Understand That Questions Help Me to Be More Creative
Questions always spur creativity. Why? Because questions cause you to explore, to seek out. The phrase “what if” is one of my favorites, because it’s the start of a question that will lead to sometimes breathtakingly creative answers.
A few years ago I wrote a book called Good Leaders Ask Great Questions. In it, I describe some of the questions I ask myself as a leader, and some of the questions I ask my team members to make the whole team better. Today, I want to share some of the questions I ask that help us to become more creative.
How Can We Make Things Better?
If you’re already successful, this is a fantastic question to ask yourself and your team. Anytime we’re successful, there is a temptation to be lulled into a feeling of false security, to believe that we have arrived. But the greatest detriment to continual success is relying on past success.
The legendary coach John Wooden once shared with me that every day he asked himself the question “How can I make my team better?” Think about this: Wooden won ten national championships and was the most successful coach in the history of college basketball, yet he wasn’t satisfied. He kept asking that question and found creative ways to help his team.
What Can I Do to Become Better?
I am obsessed with becoming better every day. I don’t spend time thinking about any honors I’ve been given in the past. I’m grateful, but I also recognize that awards are given for what we’ve done yesterday. The question I ask myself is “What am I doing today?”
In my lifetime, I have reinvented myself five times. What’s been consistent is that I write and speak on success, personal growth, leadership, relationships, and significance. But my companies and my roles with them have remained fluid to meet the needs of people and stay relevant with my message. If I want to keep improving and expanding my influence, I have to keep improving myself and my team.
Are the Right People at the Table?
In the chapter on People Capacity, I explained Jim Collins’s concept of who luck. The people around you make all the difference when it comes to creativity. You need people who are willing to prepare as well as to dream. And you need people who are willing to be as tenacious as you are in searching for answers. That’s why my friend, advertising genius Linda Kaplan Thaler, says that it’s in the second hour that the best ideas come out. But as she also says, you need to make sure you have people at the table who can recognize a great idea and run with it.
How Can I Connect Things with Creativity?
My biggest creative breakthrough occurred when I discovered that creativity is about connecting things. As a young theologian who would speak several times a week, I realized that I needed to read and file quotes and ideas every day so I would always have material for my lessons. As I accumulated more material and more knowledge, I began to ask more questions about how and where I could use my material. There was a point after years of gaining knowledge at which I began to connect ideas with one another, and what I knew with what I was doing. When that happened, my life opened up, and I began to think more strategically and creatively.
This graphic by Hugh MacLeod shows the impact that connections make between knowledge and experience.
As Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it; they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
For years, when I’ve tried to create or innovate, I have focused on a particular idea and then looked for ways to make connections to it. I call this connection creativity. With an idea fixed in my mind, I look for ways to connect it with experiences, people, quotes, stories, opportunities, questions—anything I can think of.
Recently I’ve been wanting to attract more builders—people who can drive business units and initiatives to success—to my companies. Every day I’m looking for builder thoughts, stories, characteristics, examples, experiences, advice, and questions. Everything that I do in this regard is to strategically connect what I know with new ways to accomplish what I desire.
My personal creativity has been stimulated more by making connections than by anything else. If you want to increase your creativity, begin looking for connections.
5. I Am Comfortable with Half-Baked Ideas
When I was young I held on to ideas way too long before I shared them with others. Why? I wanted them to be “presentable.” I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want my ideas to be rejected. And I wanted credit. Back then looking good was more important to me than getting good.
The catalyst for my change came when a man I greatly respected came to me with an idea and asked my opinion. He said, “I just started thinking about this idea and I wondered if you could jump-start me.”
Me? Jump-start him?
He shared his new idea and we talked for about an hour. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked him, “Why did you share your idea so quickly?” His response staggered me: “The sooner I can get other perspectives on my thinking, the closer I come to finding my answer.”
His confidence and insight inspired me to change the way I did things. And it also prompted me to develop my three-E formula for creativity:
Exposure of an idea to the right people
+ Expression from their different perspectives
= Expansion of that idea beyond my personal ability.
If you want to increase your creative capacity, I suggest you use this formula, too.
Today I’m in love with half-baked ideas, and am willing to ask for them as well as share them with others. Why? Because when we do, we gain at least these three benefits:
We Increase Our Odds of Being Successful
If you want to accomplish many things, you have to try many things—even if you feel they’re not quite ready. Dan Ariely, Duke University professor and author of Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pick-up Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles, says that if you try thirty new things this year, you might find that you racked up fifteen good experiences. But if you wait to try things only when you’re sure of success, you might experience only three good things.
We Gain More Practice with Creative Ideas
Keeping our imaginations sharp is essential to creative thinking and problem solving. That requires practice. Unfortunately, as we get older, most people practice creative thinking less and less. We stop using our imaginations. Stephanie Carlson, professor and director of research at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, says there are reasons our natural creativity wanes as we mature. One of the biggest is that when children are in school, they are forced to turn their attention to logic, reason, and facts, and they spend more of their time and brain power in reality—and less in imagination. As a result, they get out of practice.2 Working with half-baked ideas forces us to use our imaginations and practice creative thinking.
We Become More Comfortable with Our Misses
If you throw a lot of ideas at the wall, you will have many hits and misses. And that’s good. You can’t succeed if you don’t try. And if you try repeatedly and miss but realize you’re no worse off for having tried and failed, it gives you confidence to keep trying.
Creative people fail, and the best fail often. They’re like children who try an idea before it’s formed, and if it doesn’t work, they move on to the next idea. And they keep moving on until they find one that works. If you want to be more creative, get used to missing the mark.
As the founder of five companies, I need to be an example of a creative leader who is not afraid to miss. If I am more tentative than decisive, more cautious than creative, I will not develop a creative culture. And any organization that doesn’t innovate is destined to die. Professor David Hills of Stanford University says, “Studies of creativity suggest that the biggest single variable of whether or not employees will be creative is whether they perceive they have permission.” As the leader, I have to model that permission.
6. I Am Comfortable Letting Go of What I Embraced Yesterday
Margaret and I had an interesting dinner conversation with Bob and Ann Hammer recently. Bob is the chairman, president, and CEO of Commvault, a company that creates firewalls and other data protection solutions for large companies. One of the things Bob does is hire people to try to defeat their own software. He knows that when they get close to breaking in, the company had better be ready to roll out the next solution. What grabbed my attention was something Bob said: “We stay in business because we continue to create. Nothing that worked yesterday will work today.”
Bob knows that to be successful, he has to let go of what worked last year. He has to continually create to be successful. The only difference between him and us is that he recognizes it, and often we don’t.
When we work hard on something, we usually have a hard time letting it go. Author and creativity expert Roger von Oech said, “It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of the things you have loved and that worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.” Nobel Prize–winning author William Faulkner called this process killing your darlings. Here are some examples of things I had to let go of:
I used to have a monthly tape club. The lessons helped hundreds of thousands of people and sold millions of tapes. Today I don’t have it. I had to kill my darling.
I used to talk a lot about my success and how I accomplished so much. Now I talk more about my failures and my struggles. I had to kill my darling.
I used to start my lesson-writing process by first going to my files and pulling together material, but now I try to write from my heart. I had to kill my darling.
I could continue. My history is filled with a lot of dead darlings. Is yours? When was the last time you said good-bye to something that was special that no longer works today?
Often I have been asked how I can let go of things so quickly and easily. My reply: “In the beginning, it wasn’t quick or easy.” But over time, I have been able to move on and let go because I’ve learned some lessons:
• It’s easier to let go of something if you’re going to get something better. You don’t let go just for the sake of letting go. You let go only because tomorrow looks better than yesterday.
• People usually cut their losses too late. My brother Larry, who is a fine businessman, taught me many years ago about cutting losses. He would say, “John, try to let your first loss be your last loss.” I haven’t always done that well, but I have gotten a lot better.
• Excellence is possible only with creative dissatisfaction. If we’re satisfied, we don’t try to get better. At the other extreme, if we embrace dissatisfaction but without a desire for excellence, we just become miserable or depressed. However, when you couple dissatisfaction with the desire for improvement, you become innovative.
• You can’t fall in love with structure. When your security is structure, rules, and regulations, you stop being creative. I love the way Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, puts this: “People often remark to me that it’s great how Virgin thinks outside the box. They are genuinely surprised when I tell them, ‘Actually we don’t! We just never let the box get built in the first place.’” You can’t love both boxes and creativity.
Are you willing to let go of some things you love? If not, you’re going to have a hard time being creative and becoming any better than you are today.
7. I Ask Creative People to Help Me
I mentioned in the previous chapter that I always like to bring people around the table to help me. That includes the times when I’m trying to be creative. For example, as I began working on this book, I asked a group of good thinkers and innovators to help me explore the idea of capacity. Some of the ideas were great. Some were good. Many were terrible. That’s what you get when you try to do something creative. And that’s okay. You have to deal with the misses to get the hits.
When you ask creative people to help you, your goal isn’t just to have people come together for a creative think session. Your goal is to have the right people in the meeting. What are the qualities of the right people? Here is what I look for:
• Fluency—the ability to generate a number of ideas so that there is an abundance of possible solutions
• Flexibility—the ability to produce many different kinds of ideas in varied categories for any given problem
• Elaboration—the ability to add to, embellish, or build from an idea
• Originality—the ability to create fresh, unique, unusual, or different ideas
• Complexity—the ability to drill down and conceptualize difficult, intricate, or multifaceted ideas
• Boldness—the willingness to be daring, try new things, and take risks
• Imagination—the ability to invent, see, and conceptualize ingenious new ideas
• Security—the willingness to appreciate others’ ideas and not protect their own
• Values—the ability to think and create in accordance with my values and priorities
These are the people who can help you create. Leave out analysts, critics, editors, educators, and implementers. Otherwise the group’s creative wings will be clipped before you are ever given any room to fly.
8. I Give Myself Creative Retreats
While I love bringing together a group of creative people to brainstorm, I also love spending time by myself thinking. Why? Because we need inspiration from within as well as from without. Solitude is the other side of the coin in creativity.
Creativity flourishes in solitude. For me it is essential. You will become as creative as the amount of time you set aside for it. I try to schedule time every day as well as planning extended times weekly, monthly, and yearly. There is a relationship between scheduling a time to be creative and being inspired to create.
Years ago I discovered that if I do the right thing regardless of whether I feel any inspiration, then I will become inspired because I did the right thing. The key to increasing your creative capacity is to schedule time for it, and then expect to be more creative during that time. The discipline of developing the habit gives you the results you desire. Perhaps that’s why many authors including William Faulkner have been quoted as saying things like this: “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine a.m. sharp.”
This morning I scheduled time to be at my desk working on this chapter. It is hard to describe how excited I felt when I walked into my office, picked up my four-color pen, and began writing to you on my legal pad. As I write these words, I’m filled with anticipation that these words will help you increase your creative capacity. I am the only one in my office, but I am not alone. In my imagination, I am with you, sharing the things that have helped me, and I feel certain they will help you. As you read this page, we are taking a journey together, one that I believe will help you blow the lid off your capacity.
Why do I believe this? Because hundreds of times I have been on the receiving end of this process, reading words from another person’s hand and heart. I’ve felt connected with those authors and been grateful for the help I was receiving. But I only benefitted because they took the time to be alone and write.
What do you have to give that you can create only in solitude? If you’re like me, you need time alone to think and create for yourself and others. That creative time of retreat can give you the greatest ROI—return on investment—in your life.
My life has been dedicated to leadership, and my observation of leaders is that most do not schedule enough creative thinking time alone. Most leaders have a bias for action, and too often solitude gets pushed off their calendars because action calls out to them. But when that happens, not only do the leaders suffer. So do their people, because their leaders aren’t at their best and most creative. People deserve a leader who emerges out of solitude with solutions.
There you have it. These are the things that have helped me transform from the guy with the lowest creativity score in the class to someone who has leveraged his creativity every day for fifty years to earn his living and try to make the world a better place.
If you desire to increase your creativity capacity, you can do it. You can train yourself to see possibilities. You can learn to find answers. You can become someone who always offers options. And you can work with others to become inventive and innovative. If you can harness that with productivity, which is the subject of the next chapter, you’ll really be able to increase your capacity.
Creative Capacity Questions
1. When it comes to problems, challenges, and obstacles, do you believe there is always a solution? Explain your answer.
2. Do you find it difficult or easy to let go of old successes and solutions? Why? How could you leverage a stronger faith in the future in order to let go of the past?
3. Are you better at pulling together a group of creative people to get ideas, or at retreating into solitude to think? What could you do to improve in the area where you currently don’t do as well?