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1-Page Summary of The Accidental Creative

Overview

Creativity is a part of everyone’s life. It can be applied to many areas, such as the arts or even just being creative in everyday situations.

Creativity is a great thing to have, but it can be difficult to maintain. There are pressures on you at work and elsewhere that can make it hard for you to keep being creative.

The following points will help you stimulate creativity. You’ll learn how to prevent creative block and unleash your full potential as a creator.

You’ll also discover how to prove that you’re a valuable employee. You can do this by staying FRESH (Focused, Relevant, Engaging, and Specific) in your work. This will help with creativity as well because it keeps you focused on the topic at hand. It’s important to eat healthy too; otherwise you won’t be able to stay creative for long periods of time.

Big Idea #1: The pressures and expectations of today’s workplace can stifle creativity.

Creativity is a valued skill in today’s workplace. However, unlike other skills, creativity fluctuates and can make it difficult for people to deliver when their employers expect them to be creative.

In order to prove your creativity, you need to be prolific and brilliant. Unfortunately, most of us are not that creative or productive. Therefore, we need to focus on becoming more creative and productive by using the author’s techniques.

Maybe you’re brilliant and prolific but you have an unhealthy approach to work. You might be at risk of burning out or overexerting yourself if you don’t change your ways. Maybe the opposite is true, too: maybe you’re not as healthy as others, yet you still manage to produce great work because it’s what people expect from a professional like yourself. However, this could lead to problems in the future since your output won’t always meet expectations when someone else could do better than you (and they will).

The modern workplace is under pressure to be both creative and innovative, while also always meeting deadlines. This means that most companies are more concerned with results than the creativity of their employees. For example, one client was worried about whether her managers would approve her work, so she played it safe instead of being creative. A CEO told us that he calls this method bunting for singles; just as in baseball, it’s safer to try for little things at work rather than risk striking out by going for bigger things.

Furthermore, companies also tend to focus more on predictable outcomes instead of giving room for irregular waves of creativity. This is because they’re focused on what’s going to happen in the future and don’t want anything unexpected. As a result, employees feel like they can’t be creative because it goes against expectations from management.

Big Idea #2: Beware of the three “assassins” of creativity: dissonance, fear and expectation escalation.

It’s hard to do good work when there is a lack of clarity about the company’s mission. A clear understanding of what the company stands for and why it does what it does will help eliminate confusion in the creative process. For example, if designers don’t understand why they’re doing something or are being asked to create things that don’t fit with their company’s values, then they’ll suffer from dissonance between their actions and beliefs.

The second reason why people don’t come up with ideas is because they’re afraid of how those ideas will turn out.

In an experiment, people were asked to imagine walking a twenty-foot plank along the floor without falling off. They confidently said they could do it. Then they were asked to imagine walking the same plank but this time suspended 100 feet above ground and most of them didn’t think they could do it. In short, when something is frightening or dangerous, we are less likely to believe that we can succeed at doing it.