Categories
Accountability Creativity Knowing yourself

The past couple weeks have been weird

The past couple weeks have been… weird. I started blogging again this Summer like I always do, with renewed energy, but also — this time seemed different. I have been intermittent writing over the years for a myriad of reasons, from keeping quiet while in certain jobs to not having an interesting life. But my blog has always been that space on the Internet and in life that was mine, a place to be fully expressed. These are my guts on a page, or screen, as it is, and I like scooping them all up to make sense of it all.

So, anyway, this time seemed different. I sensed it. Ryan sensed it. I had commitment and dedication I haven’t felt in a long time. And I still feel that way, which is why it was all the more disappointing when I didn’t write last week. Part of the deal I made to myself was to write every week, or at the very least, be in touch with you guys once a week. But last week had several things going on that a normal week does not; there was an event, extra tasks, a trip out of town, and before I knew it, I was deeply upset for not keeping this super-important-this-time-is-different-commitment-to-myself.

In the past if I missed a week posting, that would quickly devolve into such levels disappointment, I would move on to something else. This isn’t working, I would tell myself, time to do something else. This isn’t working, you aren’t cut out for this. This isn’t working, go make money like normal people. And move on I would.

But.

I’m not taking actions based on fear right now. Truth be told, I’m rocking the commitments right now. And I want to share about that process later, but a big part of it is I ask myself, what are you going to do when shit goes wrong? And my answer is to cry, feel down, ask Why? What happened?, reassess, align. Get back in the f*cking saddle. It’s all important to recovery. But the biggest is to revel in being human. A human with control issues, yes, but mortal nonetheless.

Then we left for our weekend trip. What is it about road trips? The long, deep conversations, the gazing off far in the distance, the gas station peeks into the middle of America. The blanketing of peace, all under the open sky. You are not larger than yourself. You just are.

This tiny break opened all sorts of depths. I came up with an idea for a new personal project, a variation on something I had been working out, rolling between my two fingers, and I am excited about it. REALLY EXCITED GUYS! There’s alignment. And shit is crazy scary. There’s a precipice; I’m there on the edge, and I like it.

Told you. These couple weeks: weird. And wonderful.

Categories
Creativity

Specialize in the Mission, Not the Medium


Photo: Scott Belsky

You probably know Scott Belsky from his bestseller Making Ideas Happen. But before the book, there was Behance, the company that led him to the book. What follows are the best parts from our recent interview.

By the way, at the end of the interview, Scott mentioned these were some of the best and most thought-provoking questions he’s received. Oh Scott, I bet you say that to all the girls.

1. I read that your business model is unlike anything you learned in business school. Can you elaborate?
Well, technically we are a technology and social media [company] that develops a paper product line, runs a think tank, and produces an annual conference. This pretty much defies everything they teach in business school about specialization and operations management.

But, in the era upon us where the barriers to developing new technology are low – and operations management can be more automated – it is easier for a business to attack their mission from various angles.

For Behance, our specialization is OUR MISSION rather than OUR MEDIUM. We want to organize the creative world, and we’re open to using every/any medium to do it.

2. What are your strategies to make the Behance network of sites grow? Are you focused on one site or another?
(Behance, Action Method, The 99 Percent, The Served)
Early on in the history of Behance, we realized that “organizing the creative world” would require a focus on both the MACRO and the MICRO needs in the creative community. We structured our team accordingly. The 99% and Action Method initiatives help creative individuals and teams get organized. While the Behance Network is a powerful platform all about organizing the creative world’s work.

The sites have grown organically through word-of-mouth. We feel extremely fortunate to have a community of extremely talented participants that care about developing the platform organically. We get a lot of feedback, which we take into account.

3. How would you define your core audience for Behance products?
Our core audience is made up of people and teams that generate ideas for a living. We serve an audience that, in most cases, has too many ideas to begin with and wants help in organization, promotion, and ultimately making more of their ideas happen.

4. Describe your vision for Behance. In what ways is it rewarding or difficult to stick to that vision? How does the company fit into your longer-term plans?
We believe that, with better organization and platforms for navigating creative industries, there will be more of a “creative meritocracy.” We imagine a day when the greatest talent gets the best opportunities (rather than be at the mercy of antiquated systems).

This has always been our collective vision for Behance – a more organized and empowered creative world. Our challenge is not falling into the trap that plagues most creative teams: doing projects because they are fascinating rather than because they achieve the mission. At times it is difficult to ground our excitement with sound judgment about WHY we do what we do, and to stick with it.

5. What is it like working as a young entrepreneur? Talk about your strengths and weaknesses.
My greatest weakness is impatience. I have so little patience for standard procedures and the long process of development. In my mind, I always want everything to be “done” until I realize that rushing the process is, in fact, rushing life…and I certainly don’t want to do that. Luckily I have a team of people who are better at setting the pace and ensuring that a process is tempered with the right questions.

As for strengths: I try to do a realistic gut-check every night about where everything REALLY stands. I try to identify where I screwed up that day, what I would change if I could, and I try to keep learning amidst the blur of every day.  I think this is an important strength that every aspiring leader should develop.

6. Describe your philosophy on work and life. Boundaries? Balance? Blur?
Realistically, I think balance is not an every day achievement, but rather something achieved over time. Busy periods in life come and go. Right now I am in a busier period. But if you love what you do, such periods are easier to manage. I try to listen to my body. When it tells me to slow down, I try to obey. But it’s not easy.

7. Describe a good team member. How do you recognize those qualities?
The best team members take initiative. When we bring on new members of a team, we look more for evidence of “taking initiative” than past experience and skill sets. Our mentality is that, as a growing company, we are developing each other. Past knowledge is less important than the tenacity to help make Behance happen.

We also ruthlessly fight apathy at Behance. We have many heated arguments about features, systems, and user experience. Sometimes we fight, but we stick with it. We don’t tolerate apathy, and we think it is the biggest detriment to reaching the best solutions.

8. Is there a question I should have asked, but didn’t? Please let me know, and answer it.
Other entrepreneurs ask me if one needs start-up capital or personal wealth to start a business. Behance is actually a bootstrapped enterprise! We did do a very small friends/family round to get us off the ground, but we decided to bootstrap the business instead of raise major financing.

Why? Partly because we were selling some products from the very beginning and didn’t require too much capital. Partly because we wanted the team to become owners of the business. But the major reason is that we wanted to feel the texture of the business, work within our means, and develop a sustainable business model rather than lurch toward an uncertain future.

Categories
Career Creativity Design Inspiration

3 Ways to Design Your Career

John Besmer confirms our meeting with “Word,” and signs off with, “Yup!” like he’s in the middle of a Jay-Z video. At the corner of corporate and hipster, I arrive to his office to discover him in a plaid button-down shirt, designer-rimmed glasses and a whole lot of Midwestern charm.

I first saw Besmer in a similar uniform on stage. Ten designers shared twenty inspiration slides for twenty seconds each, but Besmer’s stood out; he was the only person to play electric guitar, read from a book and live-tweet during his – he later told me – “horribly lashed-together” presentation.

Besmer, Principal and Creative Director of Planet Propaganda, is one of the creatives that has been paving the way for design to take a front-seat in how we approach everything, from education to careers to business. His client list includes long-standing relationships with big-timers like Jimmy John’s sandwiches and MTV to the young and hip Trek bikes and Red Wing shoes.

“Design is becoming more relevant because things are becoming more complicated” Besmer tells me. And with that, a relative army of people are now claiming the term designer of one sort or another.

Should you need a speedy determination as to whether you’re business or creative-minded, take my test. Ask yourself, what time do I rise and fall?  Scoring: Businessmen get up early. Creatives stay up late.

What links designers today “is their belief that everything today is ripe for reinvention and ‘smart recombination’” Warren Berger reports in Glimmer. And such foundational values are the backbone of innovation and business. Here’s how to take advantage:

1. Reframe your job, your tasks, your day-to-day. The concept of job titles are horribly outdated. Accept whatever title you’re given, but expand and burst the borders into far-away corners. Do as designers do and switch up “a familiar problem or challenge [like your job] in an unconventional way…. often the way a problem is framed will determine the solution,” Berger suggests.

Most successful people do this automatically. I know a young lawyer that was just recruited as partner at a prestigious law firm – this, at a time when lawyers are hurting badly – and it’s because he never saw himself as just a lawyer. He was always a leader first, the contracts and depositions came second.

So reframe your career in a new way. Ask stupid questions: Where should I really be living? Could I work from home? If I ate tuna for lunch every day, would that increase my productivity? What makes me happy?

2. Problem-solve to success. “I’m here to help my clients sell stuff,” Besmer tells me, but later admits that problem-solving is what really drives him. When you solve a problem, you get more responsibility, more challenge, new problems to solve. And that is what’s so exciting about successful careers. You solve lots of problems one after the other. It’s the difference between working hard and working smart, between an empty job and a fulfilling one.

Designers are extra good at this since it’s their explicit job description, but problem-solving is really the function of every job, of un-sticking yourself, of true creativity, regardless of the field you’re in – administrative to professional to creative.

3. Gain momentum by doing more and more. Berger reports this is the “’upward spiral’ of solving problems, wherein the more you do it, the more you can do it.” Solving problems, after all, is actually quite daunting and it can be paralyzing to jump in to such high pressure and stress. But once you’re guaranteed the win, it’s just as assuredly guaranteed that you’ll want another one.

“Through constant acts of creative [problem-solving], you also re-create yourself,” Berger continues. “You help propel your own growth spiral, feeding off the energy of creation. That’s not just a feeling, it’s a fact: Being in that state of “design flow’ raises the levels of neurotransmitters in you brain, such as endorphins and dopamine and that keeps you focused and energized.”

My friend Besmer is a testament to such endorphins and energy, and as we wrap up our conversation, he tells me the story of how he moved to a new house a few years ago. He relates that on each moving box, he would write what that box contained.  “I’d write ‘old photos, clothes,’ and whatever was actually in the box… then I’d add ‘glass eyes’ just to keep it interesting for the movers. I thought, why not make it interesting for those guys?”

Why not, indeed.

So, how do you make it interesting? Do you work only within the confines of your job title? Are you creative or business-minded?

Categories
Career Creativity

How to innovate your career

When careers were based more on hierarchy, and work was more about getting a paycheck than knowledge, it didn’t really matter what you did. But today’s worker no longer desires swanky salaries or titles (although those don’t hurt, certainly), but instead searches for work experiences that can contribute to their lives.

Today, experience is the product. And smart workers are building their careers in the same way innovators build businesses. For example, trendy Barcelona shoe company Camper diversified it’s offerings by plunging into the hotel business. People rightfully asked, “Why?” To which Camper replied, “You misunderstood what we’re all about. We don’t produce shoes. We produce comfort.”

And that’s good career advice. That is, you don’t produce marketing plans, you create connections. You don’t create paintings, you evoke emotion. You don’t deliver newspapers, you spread information.

It’s time to stop looking at your career as a set of skills applicable to a single position. You probably won’t use the major listed on your college degree. You’ll change jobs six to eight times before you’re thirty. And you’ll eventually get the urge to change the world, which doesn’t happen from a single pressure point.

If you can’t talk about how your waitressing job applies to architecture, how teaching kindergarten makes you great for customer service, or how your blog has prepared you to be a circus manager, you lose.

Instead, look at your career as a set of experiences in which there exist core ideas that can be widely applied across disciplines. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink argues that the majority of professions (doctors, lawyers, even MBAs) can either be automated, outsourced to Asia, or are abundant (it’s easy to make quality goods and services).

“The only thing these three A’s as he calls them cannot yet do well,” Bret Hummel reports “is bring ideas from multiple disciplines together. [Pink] argues that the person who understands the big picture, how to bring people together, and create a unique idea are the ones who will succeed in this global economy.”

Gen X and Y thrive in this regard. Occupations are no longer siloed, but instead individuals are cultivating multiple passions, talents and income streams to create meaningful work lives. Marci Alboher calls this becoming a “slash.” Being a Musician / Engineer / Bartender is encouraged and admired. I love design, marketing and database spreadsheets myself.

Working across disciplines “rather than climbing the career ladder within a corporation, facilitates flows of information and know-how between individuals, firms, and industries,” Wired reports.

Everything is connected. HR people call this transferable skill sets, theorists describe it as systems thinking, and poets recognize these ideas in the words of Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass.

Worker mobility gives flourishing industries “fluidity, velocity, and energy,” Wired continues. “It creates a culture in which people routinely jump from one job to another… And that lack of loyalty has been a key driver of the rapid innovation over the past three decades.”

Innovation isn’t a stickler for tradition, you see. It only cares that you bring it. In summary, to innovate your career:

1) Collect experiences, not titles.
2) Realize connections.
3) Apply those core skills and ideas across disciplines.

Are you talented in more than one area? Do you apply lessons from one place to the other? What’s your advice to bring it?

Categories
Creativity Generation Y Leadership

Is Gen Y teamwork killing creativity?

Generation Y is a kind generation. Our conservative lifestyles and penchants for quiet opinions have led us to work together happily with healthy doses of idealism. We are a teamwork generation, fully in line with each other.

Top-down management and the clutch of hierarchal authority no longer illustrate the strokes of success, but instead lead to siloed rows of depressed employees and opportunistic managers.

Gen Y, in contrast, is all about the team, preferring conformity inside the lines over pushing boundaries or ourselves. “In many respects,” psychology expert Jeremy Dean argues, “[these] norms have a beneficial effect, bolstering society’s foundations and keeping it from falling into chaos.”

We’re the soothing wall fountain over a fire of greed, instability and unethical behavior. We dislike ambiguity and risk and mitigate the risks that we have inherited accordingly. We “provide a stable and predictable social world, to regulate our behavior with each other.”

The world these group norms create are so safe and sound that one research study found that “groups don’t even need to be that well-established, people will conform to others with only the slightest encouragement.”

It’s incredibly easy for crowdsourcing and group-think to take over. The wisdom of the crowd is everywhere.

“The power of groups, the clout that crowds can exercise to get what they want, is nothing new,” one trend briefing reports. “What is new, however, is the dizzying ease with which likeminded, action-ready citizens and consumers can now go online and connect, group and ultimately exert influence on a global scale.”

We can no longer buy a camera without checking the product recommendations, go on a trip without researching hotel reviews, or visit a new restaurant without the prodding of a friend. Wikipedia is one of the best known examples of the concept at work. Revering social media “influencers” is another. Do other people like it? What do they think? Have they legitimized it, given it their stamp of approval and a gold star? And did their mother try it?

Such trends make it incredibly easy to live in society, but also threaten the individual mind, intuition and originality. Consensus isn’t all gravy.

“Unfortunately groups only rarely foment great ideas,” Dean reports, “because people in them are powerfully shaped by group norms: the unwritten rules which describe how individuals in a group ‘are’ and how they ‘ought’ to behave. Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations.”

Teamwork threatens creativity.

Reverting back to a command and control structure is obviously not the answer, but decentralized leadership doesn’t mean we all have to hold hands. We can’t let the pendulum swing so far from one extreme to the other that we miss that happy medium where innovation soars.

Groups do such a good job breeding mediocrity that we can’t be so afraid to be alone and listen to the sound of our own voice and let out a real note while we lip-synch. March to the beat of our own drum as it goes. We can’t be afraid to sit with our own thoughts where that nugget just needs some dedicated commitment to the state of flow to turn into something wonderful.

Groups are for brainstorms, not conclusions. Teamwork is for energy, not leadership. Conformity is overrated.

And while it’s important to be the healing generation, the calm ones, the group that will bring people together to make things okay again, there’s no reason not to leave some solitary footprints on another path for future generations to follow.

Breaking Out.

Categories
Creativity Productivity Self-management

Purge first. Creativity second.

For creativity, you need to get rid of the crap. Your surroundings are a reflection of who you are, and the state of your environment is a reflection of the state of your mind.

I work best when everything is in its proper place. At this point, I should make a disclaimer. Everyone works differently. You might work well in crap. I cannot. The piles and dust and general disorder weigh on my mind. Like a big stinky dump truck with tin cans tied to the bumper that clang against the sides of my brain. No, I do not work well with disorder.

Chaos and confusion within your to-do list will also make a mess of your mind. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. Get it out of the way. Right now.

For me, it’s tough to deal with accounting-related tasks. Not only because I am so clearly a right-brained person, but because I’m also directly responsible for my own salary. It’s incredibly stressful. So I sub-consciously avoid the numbers game because it’s difficult and hard and sticky.

But it’s also incredibly important, so I push it to the forefront daily. After all, the show cannot go on without money, and I really love that thing called eating. So while I would really prefer to be brainstorming the next big idea, finishing the accounting makes me feel just as good, euphoric even.

Purging your to-do list of items that bring you anxiety means not only crossing off the difficult and boring tasks, but getting rid of the items that suck your energy.

For instance, I have a habit of adding unnecessary to-dos to my list. Items that are so ridiculously broad such as “recruitment,” or so entrenched in abbreviation like “LM to SC and in DB & Ltr” that I have no frickin’ clue what I’m supposed to be doing or where to start. Such items are now banned from my college-lined notebook. Don’t let them show up in yours. Sneaky rascals, those to-dos.

It’s kind of like the style shows where they embarrass people into dressing properly. The fashionable teach the outdated, passé, and defunct how to rid their closet of negative energy and bedazzaled Capri jeans. By doing so they make the simple act of getting dressed a retreat of confidence, coolness and beauty.

Now, just think if your to-do list were that sexy.

Face your work woes. Creativity will follow the work that you do and the risks you take.

Work woe no more.