UNCLE SETH ON CREATIVITY

When I was working in the corporate world, a dear friend and colleague nicknamed Seth Godin "Uncle Seth." He always has something brilliant to say, he always has great advice, and he seems to find the words for things that are incredibly hard to put words to. 

Here are a couple of favorite posts from Uncle Seth on creativity. 

• Creativity and Stretching the Sweatshirt. 

• Highlights: "For me, creativity is the stuff you do at the edges. But the edges are different for everyone, and the edges change over time." 

  • 1. If you want to be creative, understand that you'll need to get to the edges, even if the edges have moved. Being creative means immediately going to the place the last person left off.

    2. If you are "not creative," if you are the sort of person that gets uncomfortable being creative or has been persuaded you're not capable, don't worry about it. Just stretch the sweatshirt in your spare time, watch the creative things other people have done, keep up with the state of the art. Then, when you do your "not creative" thing, most people will think it's pretty creative indeed.

• Real Creativity. 

• Highlights: "Real business creativity comes from boundaries."

  • Inventing something cool that can’t be implemented isn’t creative. It’s mostly a waste.

  • See the rules. Keep most of them. Break one or two. But break them, don’t bend them.

In my course on Innovation, Agility, and Leadership I talk a lot about the fact that being innovative is a whole lot more than coming up with great ideas. As Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson write in Rework, “ideas are cheap and plentiful. The real question is how well you execute.”

If you’re interested in learning more about this course, please feel free to drop me a note and I will put you on the early notification list for when it opens.

If you’re interested in reading more from Uncle Seth, I encourage you to check out his blog and possibly subscribe to his daily emails. They are the only daily emails I allow in my inbox along with a recent addition of Morning Brew - which is a very well written, very well curated (and often quite funny) daily news round-up.

Thanks for reading and here’s to creating, stretching the sweatshirt, and expanding our view of what creativity looks like.