Passion vs. Dedication

Which do you think is more important: Dedication or passion? Dedication sounds pretty noble. You see dedication all over the workplace. People spending going to work early and leaving late, because they are so dedicated to the job. These workers are noble and follow instructions. They do their job and are proud to do the work.

Striving passionately to work towards a goal is a lot different than being a workaholic. Part of learning how to be creative is learning how to have fun and fun leads to creativity.  Spending time having fun is where a lot of our creative energy comes from. For the workaholic, who doesn’t have time to have fun, we numb ourselves and tune out to any of our creative ideas.

When your work is about generating income or job security, you fail to work on things that matter to you most. Passion is about having desire and the persistence to do something you care about. There is two types of drive: intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivators like pay raises or promotions focus on understanding what I will gain by performing the work. Intrinsic motivators are focused on the task itself, because of the love of the task. 

People who work because of their passion about the task, tend to practice their craft more and eventually excel in their area of expertise. Much of this has to do with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow: the state where a person is so consumed by a task that time slows down, enjoyment increases, and the task seems effortless. This happens when the challenge matches the person’s skill. If the task is too easy then the task is boring, if it’s too hard it becomes frustrating.

Passion comes from within and helps with the creative process. Teresa Amabile from Harvard Business School proposed that the “intrinsically motivated state is conducive to creativity, whereas the extrinsically motivated state is detrimental.” I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone and it’s backed by a lot of research. Dedication, or even workaholism, can be pretty addictive, and there is no doubt that you can get a lot of “work” done by spending time doing the “work.” But is it the right type of work? Can you put your heart into it? Does the work change others? And are you a better person because you are doing it?

The key is to find what you are passionate about and work on those things. If your current job or role doesn’t let you do that, hopefully you have the talent and means to change your role or find a new job. Maybe this means working on those skills to get into a position where you can make those types of changes. Or maybe you just need to take a risk and start your own business or create your own art.

Howard Stern is a Creative Genius

This past Saturday, Howard Stern, the famous radio personality, revolutionized social networking by providing real time commentary on Twitter while his 1997 moving Private Parts played on HBO. It was the first time a celebrity provided behind the scenes commentary on Twitter while their film played on TV and I’m sure film/TV execs all over the country are wondering how to make use of this in the future. It’s obvious that having a film/TV star provide this commentary real time provides a compelling reason for viewers to watch broadcasts live instead of using their DVRs.

It’s interesting to think why such a simple idea took so long to take place. Twitter has been around since 2006 and video commentary on DVD has been around for well over a decade. What makes this so original is that it’s happening live, it’s easy to set up, you can interact directly with the celebrity, and it’s free. The funny thing is that Howard only recently started using Twitter and was actively trying to figure out how best to use it for his show. Yesterday, when he started tweeting, it seemed like something spur of the moment and unplanned. It turned out to be something that changed the world.

This isn’t the first time that Howard Stern changed the world. In the last 30 years, he revolutionized the radio industry. Prior to him, radio DJs were primarily focused on playing music, briefly talking about the music, and making people aware of the radio station’s brand. The radio stations wanted people to tune in because of the music, not the DJs. The DJs were a commodity, and for the most part, they still are. Howard completely changed the model and soon the radio industry discovered that someone with the right talent and creative energy could make people tune in.

What he is most known for is his brutally honest on air delivery, where he’s not afraid to say what he thinks. Others after him have imitated that approach, and many have become moderately successful doing it, but Howard was always and is still the world’s best at it. I personally think he’s the best interviewer on the planet. He has a way of asking questions that no one else will ask (because they are afraid to, or they aren’t creative enough to think of them). For some reason, even for the toughest, most personal questions, people will still answer the questions. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s a world-class interviewer.

However, the radio isn’t the only thing he does. He’s also a bestselling author, created a sitcom, starred in/co-authored a box-office hit film, and saved satellite radio, all of which require plenty of creativity.

Does Howard create art?

In my Skills to Pay the Bills post, I quoted Seth Godin: “Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient.” Howard’s art is that he makes millions of people laugh every day, which is ultimately a gift in happiness. His humor might be too crude for you, but you can’t argue that he makes a lot of people happy. He changed how people viewed the radio industry, how they think about entertainment, the meaning of being “brutally honest”, and the difference between a good interview and a world-class interview.

Seth Godin’s states in his book “Linchpin” that “passion is a desire, insistence, and willingness to give a gift…People with passion look for ways to make things happen. The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a Linchpin.” Howard has passion in droves. It’s probably led to the end of his marriage with his first wife. His insistence to stand his ground on what he believed in led to his firings at DC 101 and WNBC; while also leading to his battle with the FCC and ultimately led him to leave terrestrial radio to go to Sirius.

This passion to do what he believed is right and the art that he creates every day made him the King of All Media.

Howard’s left and right sides of the brain

In my post Left Brain vs Right Brain, I talk about the differences between the left side and right sides of the brain. The left side rationalizes and is analytical; it thinks in a linear fashion. The right side is creative and thinks visually using your mind’s eye. It’s where we get our great ideas and epiphanies. Most of us, only use one side or the other. The engineers, programmers, accountants, lawyers, and business men of the world are left brained thinkers. It’s what we are taught in school and is what was traditionally valued in the 20th and 21st centuries. The right brained thinkers are the artists, designers, writers, and musicians of the world. What’s rare is the person who can think with both sides of their brain. These are the innovators who can truly change the world.

Howard is one of those people. He’s both an analytical, logical left brain thinker, and a creative right brained thinker.

Left Side

Howard likes to analyze everything. He constantly does this on air and it’s the way he digs into the core of an issue. He’s also extremely organized. He has a great producer, but I feel that if Gary wasn’t around, Howard could still make everything work. To me, he seems like other engineers I know, very smart and logical. Howard even has a Radio Engineering Institute of Electronics degree. Both of his parents seem to be analytical, which seems to have been passed down to him.

Right Side

All of Howard’s bits are built from pure creativity. He has great instincts when creating something new, whether it’s creating new characters, scripting a bit, creating a new TV show, coming up with a list of interview questions, developing a new game, etc. I think the most powerful thing about Howard is that he sees the world more clearly than the rest of us. He has vision, and can see what the future will bring.

Howard early on started practicing transcendental meditation on a daily basis. Transcendental meditation has been known to stimulate creativity and has also been known to use both the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Although I don’t remember Howard stating that meditation was a factor in his success, I believe that the amazing work he does in the studio, the ideas that he comes up with, and his clarity of thought all has to do with his daily meditation regimen.

How did he become the best in the world at what he does?

The Skills to Pay the Bills post was about how being the best isn’t about genetics or innate ability. It’s really about taking the time to practice deliberately at your craft. To become world class, you need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Generally, that means 10 years of very hard work.

Howard’s father was in the radio business (he owned a recording studio) and Howard took an interest in radio when he was five. When he was a child, he would practice making recordings of himself on the radio. Eventually, he went to college to study Communications, worked at the college radio station, and eventually graduated when he was 22. By that time, he probably had well over 10 years under his belt of deliberate practice. His father mentored him before college, he had a lot of formal education, and then experience in the college radio station. He might not have been world class yet at that point, but he was close to it.

By the time he reached Detroit at age 26, I think he understood what he needed to do. At that point he understood the need to be honest on the air, which was one of his key innovations in radio. I feel that the many years of practice gave him the knowledge, experience, technique which eventually led to his innovations in comedy and radio. 

Evolution and the Adjacent Possible

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is based on the fact that certain genetic traits, especially the ones that help survival, become more common in a population as they are inherited by an organism’s children. Over generations of reproduction, the traits that affect survival become dominant in the population. As the traits evolve, they are always based off of the traits before them. A slow rabbit, may have an offspring that runs faster, which will have a greater chance of survival. These traits evolve slowly, but only after thousands of generations do they start showing up as different species.

In Steven Johnson’s fantastic book “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation”, he describes the initial state of the earth, full of gasses, water, amino acids, and organic compounds. These were the initial materials of life, which we now know evolved into the current state of life on this planet.

Think of all those initial molecules, and then imagine all the potential new combinations that they could form spontaneously, simply by colliding with each other (or perhaps prodded along by the extra energy of a propitious lighting strike). If you could play God and trigger all those combinations, you would end up with most of the building blocks of life: the proteins that form the boundaries of cells; sugar molecules crucial to the nucleic acids of our DNA. But you would not be able to trigger chemical reactions that would build a mosquito, or a sunflower, or a human brain…The atomic elements that make up a sunflower are the very same ones available on earth before the emergence of life, but you can’t spontaneously create a sunflower in that environment, because it relies on a whole series of subsequent innovations that wouldn’t evolve on earth for billions of years.

Ultimately, this is the basis of the idea of “adjacent possible.” With chemistry or biology, the adjacent possible means that chemical reactions or genetic changes are limited to a finite set of combinations, based on what currently exists. You can’t build a sunflower directly out of some ammonia, methane, water, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s theory of natural selection is just one example of the adjacent possible.

In his book, Johnson states “what the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen. The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible.”

So how does this affect innovation? All innovation can be viewed as pushing ideas against the adjacent possible boundaries, which will then create new ideas with new boundaries. As these ideas expand and connect with each other, they create new possibilities for change. James Watt didn’t create the steam engine, but he did create a more efficient steam engine which played a huge role in the industrial revolution. The Internet is based on a large number of foundational technologies and standards, with protocols, built on top of other protocols, and applications that make use of those protocols.

Johnson gives several great examples of the adjacent possible in practice where scientists across the globe simultaneous made important discoveries:

Sunspots were simultaneously discovered in 1611 by four scientists living in four different countries. The first electrical battery was invented separately by Dean Von Kleist and Cuneus of Leyden in 1745 and 1746. Joseph Priestly and Carl Wilhelm Scheele independently isolated oxygen between 1772 and 1774. The law of the conservation of energy was formulated separately four times in the late 1840s. The evolutionary importance of genetic mutation was proposed by S. Korschinsky in 1899 and then by Hugo de Vries in 1901, while the impact of X-rays on mutation rates was independently uncovered by two scholars in 1927.

All of these independent discoveries were made because they were all based on the same technological advances at the time, i.e., they were all made out of the same existing parts. So let’s bring this back to my last post about deliberate practice. For the innovator, deliberate practice in a specific domain, brings about domain knowledge. That domain knowledge is essential to understand the boundaries of the adjacent possible. The successful innovator knows to push up against those boundaries and connect to other ideas to make something new. That’s easier said than done and this is where most innovators get stuck. My future posts will dive into this and show you how you can tap into the right side of your brain to make those connections in the adjacent possible.

Skills to Pay the Bills

All artists, whether it’s a painter, draftsman, writer, musician, actor, or anyone else, need to have a certain level of proficiency before creating their art. For art at the highest level, art that changes the world, that proficiency will likely be at the world-class level. Even for art that changes a single individual or small number of people, the artist will need to have some skill. That skill involves technique that is learned over time.

Time to develop that skill is crticial for developing artists. Geoff Colvin’s excellent book  “Talent is Overrated” and Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” both describe that many years (10 actually)  or many hours (10,000 hours actually) of deliberate practice are required to become world-class at anything. This theory contradicts the prevalent assumption that the people who are the best in the world at something got that way from genetics or innate talent, not practice. I’m fully convinced that this deliberate practice is necessary for excelling at anything that requires skill, including art and building innovative products.

I view that the artist needs to develop his craft prior to creating good art. I personally try to do this when drawing by focusing on specific techniques when I practice. For example, lately at least twice a week (I wish I could do this more, but I have a day job), I go to Starbucks and spend an hour working on either an “angles and lines” technique to practice proportions, modeling factors to practice realistic shading, or anatomy. The deliberate practice can occasionally get boring, but I know I’m stretching my skills and I’m getting better.

It’s actually the same when I train for triathlons. Six days a week I work out by either running, biking, or swimming, and I’ll also lift weights three times a week. All of these activities are deliberate practice activities. Sometimes I’m working on a “fast” run to build up my speed. Other times I’m intentionally running slow, but for a longer distance, to teach my body how to properly use fat, while maintaining a low heartrate. My swim sessions are full of drills that focus on technique. In all cases, the end goal for all of my workouts, is to get better – either through technique, speed, or endurance.

To become world class takes time. I started drawing a couple years ago and I started training for triathlons last year. Based on Colvin’s book, if I consistently practice drawing for 10 years, I might become one of the world’s best. I don’t doubt that is true and I feel I could do it if I keep it up. Unfortunately, I’m getting older and I regret that I didn’t start when I was a lot younger. I don’t plan on changing careers – although it would be interesting to retire from my current job and work on creating world-class art in my retirement. Triathlons, and pretty much any other sport that requires strenuous activity, are different. Since we are all fighting age and the human body typically peaks for most sports in the late teens or early twenties, that makes it difficult for all of us to take up these sports at an older age, and expect to excel at them. In this case, for triathlons, I’m happy to just slowly improve over time while keeping in shape.

Deliberate practice also affects the innovator. In this case, the software developer, the program manager in product development, or designer can spend many years working on their craft. Part of this is acquiring domain knowledge. Darwin spent many years studying geology and biology before coming up with his theory of natural selection. Most people assume that innovation happens in a “eureka” moment, where the inventor comes up with the idea out of nowhere. In some cases, the innovator themselves, think that’s the case, because they happen onto the idea while they are daydreaming or doing something else. Einstein said that his best ideas came from when he was shaving. I’ll describe why this is the case in a few of my future posts, but for now I’ll simply say that the years of acquiring domain knowledge in their area of expertise directly affected these “eureka” moments.

But technique and skill doesn’t make art. It is just a foundation to build on. As Seth Godin writes in “Linchpin”

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient.

An artist is an individual who creates art. The more people you change, the more you change them, the more effective your art is.

Art is not related to craft, except to the extent that the craft helps deliver the change.

I personally believe that you need both technique/skill and this other thing, which I’ll call creativity for now, to create art. The next few blog posts will build up to a framework that describes how you use both to become more innovative and creative by tapping into the artist in all of you.

Left Brain vs. Right Brain

You can think of the brain having two hemispheres, one on the left and one on the right. The left side of the brain typically controls language and verbal functions, and is considered the analytical half of the brain. The right brain uses spatial and perceptual processing which tends to be as complex or even more complex than the left side. It’s also interesting to note that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, while the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. If you have a stroke on the right side of the brain, the left side of your body will be the most traumatized.

The left side of the brain will process visual information differently than the right side. It will create tasks, plan, verbalize, rationalize, and analyze. It’s what Julia Cameron in “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” calls the Logic Brain. She states that “logic brain is our brain of choice in the Western Hemisphere. It is the categorical brain. It thinks in a neat, linear fashion. As a rule, logic brain perceives the world according to known categories.”

In contrast, the right side of the brain processes information differently. In that hemisphere, we deal with images using our mind’s eye. It’s the area of the brain that uses metaphors and puts different things together. The right side of the brain is where we get our epiphanies and new ideas. Cameron calls the right hemisphere the Artist brain:

Artist brain is our inventor, our child, our very own personal absent-minded professor. Artist brain says ‘Hey! That is so neat!’ It puts odd things together (boat equals wave and walker).’… Artist brain is our creative, holistic brain. It thinks in patterns and shadings. It sees a fall forest and thinks: Wow! Leaf bouquet! Pretty! Gold-gilt-shimmery-earthskin-king’s-carpet! Artist brain is associative and freewheeling. It makes new connections, yoking together images to invoke meaning.

Unfortunately, through years of schooling, parents who try to tell us to do the right thing and become programmers/doctors/lawyers/scientists, and society as a whole, we have become left-brain focused. It’s an analytical world out there. In some cases, this is good. We need engineers who can think logically and build functional products. We need accountants who can compute our taxes. These functional tasks are necessary and it makes the world run. However, in order for the world to evolve, we need to innovate. This means engaging our right brain, our Artist brain, to become more creative, so we can create new connections and get our flashes of insight. Betty Edwards in “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” says

One definition of a creative person is someone who can process in new ways information directly at hand – the ordinary sensory data available to all of us. A writer uses words, a musician notes, an artist visual perceptions, and all need some knowledge of the techniques of their crafts. But a creative individual intuitively sees possibilities for transforming ordinary data into a new creation, transcendent over the mere raw materials.

My assertion is that the world needs more right-brain thinkers. For years, our schools have been telling us to fit in, think logically, be predictable, obey instructions. This has produced a world of employees who fit in, think logically, be predictable, and obey instructions. That isn’t what the innovative world needs. We need artists. Artists who use their right-brain to create something that changes others (hopefully for the better).

What is this blog?

I’ve created this to discuss my thoughts on art, creativity, innovation, design, and becoming great. It’s about how we as individuals can become more innovative. It’s about how we can build creative teams that can change the world. I want to explore why this is so challenging for most of us and how we can get past these challenges.

There are many resources out there about creativity and innovation. Many of these resources take a somewhat superficial view of how to become more creative (brainstorming techniques, diagramming, etc.). This blog looks deeper into changing the way we think and act to become more creative.

Please join me in this journey to tap into our creative selves. It’s going to be fun!