When we enter kindergarten, we are given crayons and pencils and colorful paper and we are told to create. We are encouraged to imagine and experiment. By the time we enter high school, creative writing in English class is usually all that is left from mandatory art classes. By college, if you are not majoring in the arts, our class work gives us little to no exposure to the creative activities we once started with. Let’s see why being creative outside work may help us at work.
Once we enter the current workforce, recruiters search for “rockstars” or “masters of their craft”. They search for candidates with “passion” who can “build creative solutions for their business challenges”. Being hardworking and logical will always be an essential skill for all companies, but most are always hunting for the unicorns. The ones that can adapt, imagine, enhance and solve complex problems that require more than just brute force. So if being creative is such an important and valuable business skill, then why is it stripped from our lives slowly over time? Why is its value not encouraged more by employers?
So much training and time are dedicated to the basics and repeatable tasks in an effort to gain efficiencies. But the gains we get are minimal and incremental at best. There is a better return on investment in automation and exponential improvement and those ideas come from the creative types. Business leaders love to quote Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Henry Ford was an inventor, a creator, a rockstar.
Rockstars are artists. Passion comes with craft building. Being creative does not mean we are good at painting or drawing, it can mean a million different things to all different people. In the workforce, it can be creating beautiful powerpoint presentations, writing elegant code, creating intuitive dashboards or even simply finding new ways to be organized and efficient in what you do. We all have the ability to be creative, but how good we are in our craft is dependent on how we flex our creative muscles. Those muscles can be worked on outside of the office in many different ways. Cooking a fancy meal, journaling, building crafts, working on puzzles are just a few ways we can expose ourselves to working on our right side of the brain.
If we want to excel in the workforce, we need to begin to take steps to take our crayons back. After self-experimentation over the last few months of trying to draw and paint after hours, I have experienced the following benefits outside while deep in creating.
1) Increased focus and flow in other parts of my life
2) Epiphanies on work and personal issues
3) Stress Relief and a new type of active meditation
4) Increased Confidence and Pride of Ownership
5) Realizations around being ok with mistakes, errors, and failures while having the ability to learn, correct and succeed in later iterations
6) Growing slowly as an artist and a professional
Don’t just take my word for it. Grab a pen or pencil, a sheet of paper, some spices or even a needle and some yarn. Whatever interest you, began experimenting with your creative side and flexing your creative muscles routinely and see if it does not help you in all other parts of your life.