Ferran Adria has been named the world's greatest chef because of his restaurant ElBulli which was named the #1 restaurant in the world more than any other in history. In this episode, we will share the insights on his unique approach to creativity, inspiration, and more that I got as one of the few outsiders ever allowed to visit Ferran at his private workshop in Barcelona.
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http://thecrazy1.com/episode-15-creativity-my-conversation-with-ferran-adria-the-worlds-greatest-chef/
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Ferran Adria has been named the world's greatest chef because of his restaurant ElBulli which was named the #1 restaurant in the world more than any other in history. In this episode, we will share the insights on his unique approach to creativity, inspiration, and more that I got as one of the few outsiders ever allowed to visit Ferran at his private workshop in Barcelona.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-15-creativity-my-conversation-with-ferran-adria-the-worlds-greatest-chef/
FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
What's going on my crazy ones? Welcome into the 15th episode of The Crazy One podcast. I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, innovation, and a whole host of other things that matter to creative people. So in this episode, I want to go back and talk a little bit more about creativity. We focused on creativity in the second show and just starting to get you to understand how can you tap into your creativity and how can you do it a little bit more. But this time, I want to focus on something a little bit different. I want to focus on inspiration. I want to focus on motivation. And I want to understand the difference between those two things. Because one of the things that I've found as I've gone on in my career is that obviously inspiration is incredibly important. It's the fuel that drives your creative engine. It keeps your juices flowing, it keeps your work moving forward. And motivation is what drives you to do that work. But the challenge that I've found is that whenever I first started my career, both of those are easy to come by. Inspiration seem to be everywhere. Just as well. But a lot of that really came out of the fact that in my younger years and in the beginning of my career, it happened because so much of the way I learned so much of the way that you learn, artists see things that you like, and then go out and emulate them, you go out, you find what that is, you emulate it, you master that skill, you add it to your arsenal, and then you move on to the next one. Doing a time and time again, increasing your knowledge and increasing your skill set. Well, after a little while, a funny thing happens. All of a sudden, that inspiration is a little bit harder to come by, to the point where for me, whenever I look at other people, other designers, other creative directors, I find them motivating, I found they work motivating. They win awards that I want, they get recognitions that I want, they work with clients and brands that I want to work with all that's very motivating for me to work hard, but I find them decreasingly inspiring. Because I don't need to look at other people anymore. I don't need to copy Other people, I've started to find my own creative voice, I've started to find my own way of doing things. So that becomes a problem. Because now all of a sudden, I'm much more responsible for my own inspiration. I'm much more responsible for my own motivation to keep myself going. And I think that this is something that a lot of creatives struggle with, they struggle with this inflection point where all of a sudden, you aren't copying, you aren't emulating other people, but you have to find your own voice and find your own path. And the stronger your voice is, the harder this becomes. And so this is something where I've turned to and I've talked about this before. I've targeted to cooking, and in particular chefs, and I've actually been lucky enough to be able to travel all around the world and meet with a lot of the world's best chefs, because I find a insane amount of inspiration from that. And it's not just finding inspiration in the food that they cook because obviously good food is great good food can be inspiring. But the thing that I find so fast thing is that I want to talk to them about the way they handle their craft. Because I see a lot of similarities between design and cooking. Both are creative professions. So it's natural that there'd be this shared sort of symbiosis between our two processes. But if you talk to really good chefs, really high level chefs, I want to talk about what's their creative process? How do they take the exact same ingredients from the grocery store and do something with them? That's so completely unique. That's so totally different, that has such a strong and unique point of view to it. I want to find out about how do they run their team? How do they manage through that process of going from the wild, uninhibited creation of a dish of cooking and experimenting to then having to be part of an industry that demands that you execute that dish with exact precision? Exactly the same way, night in Night Out Day in, day out? And then for the chefs that have been more successful? I'm very curious to hear about how do they build their skills culture. If you look at somebody like Thomas Keller, who is arguably America's greatest chef, to three Michelin star restaurants, widely, widely recognized and has created a culture that has gone on to foster and spawn some of the other great culinary talent that we've seen in the world, how does he build that culture? How does he build it so that it can work across top flight restaurants that are on either end of the country? One in Napa Valley and one in New York? How do you do that? How do you keep that going? So that's why I seek these chefs out not only just because I think I'm a big fan of food, but because I generally want to understand what is it that they do? How do they see the world? How is their process working? So and is there something that I can glean from that something that I can learn? One of the stories that everybody always loves, and it's something I've told on this podcast before was there was a chef named Heston Blumenthal. Hasson is probably Britain's greatest chef. His most notable restaurant is called the fattest Which is located in Bray, which is about 30 minutes outside of London. easily the most fun I've ever had at a meal. It was literally like sitting down and Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I've never smiled and laughed so much through an entire meal. Well, someone's later, he was doing an event here in New York. He was doing a book signing for the fat cookbook. And he did it at a store in New York. And my wife and I were invited and we went, and we showed up at the event, finding Heston standing by himself in the back of the space. No one talking to him. Everyone huddled around nervously sipping on their drink. Everyone's seemingly too intimidated to go up and talk to him. Well, that's something that I've never been encumbered by. I'm not any sort of a wallflower. So I walked up to Heston, and started talking, and I started to ask him about his creative process about how did he see the world? And one of the more interesting and insightful questions I asked him was whenever he sits down at a restaurant, what are the things that he looks at? What are the things that he thinks will be an indicator of if this meal will be good or not? His answer was Simple and it was one word in fact, and his answer was simply butter. I stood there for a few seconds in silence puzzling over how butter could be an indicator of whether a meal was going to be good or not. A few seconds, I gathered my thoughts and asked him what he meant by that. Well, he went on to explain that for him. Butter is an indicator of if the chef has ever eaten in his own restaurant, is he thinking about his guests, and for his creativity is he creating for his guests or is he creating for himself? Again, very insightful, but I still wasn't seeing the connection with how you could glean all of this out of a piece of butter whenever it comes to the table. And he explained that the reason why he said butter was because whenever you think about it, if you sit down to a meal, and the butter arrives at the table with the bread or whatever the the starter would be, if the butter is rock hard, it can't be spread on the bread. You try to spread it and it tears the bread. It's that frustrating moment. That what that tells him is that the chef isn't thinking about his guests this the chef hasn't taken the time to eat in his own restaurant, because that little detail of something that is part of the introduction, the start of the meal, a very important first sentence in the story that they want to try to tell has been overlooked. That if that is the detail if that's the way that it is because it's hard, it's cold, and it isn't something that you're going to be able to enjoy that that's a sign that the rest of the meal probably isn't gonna be that good. But if the butter shows up, it's room temperature soft, it's easy to spread, then that's an indication to him, that the person who's creating the meal has thought about the guest and they're creating for them, that what it is they're doing is important that they enjoy it. It was really a interesting, fascinating, insightful thing I could take back into my work, and also had the very interesting side effect of for the past. I don't know what it's been 10 plus years since we have that conversation with Heston. There has not been a meal that has gone by where my wife has not patiently waited for that butter to arrive at the table taking her knife and probing into it. And if it was cold and hard And uncredible, she would declare that Heston would not be happy with the meal that was about to ensue. But then on the other hand, if it was done the right way, she would smile quietly. And kind of you knew what she was thinking that what the indication of what the meal was to come. And we've done this time and time again, as we travel all over the world. And it's something I would encourage you to try because it is an interesting trend, that you will see that if you get that rock hard butter, so often the rest of the meal will match that quality. But today, we're going to talk about a different chef. And I've talked with many of them. But there was one experience in particular, and especially as we talk about inspiration, that the chef is probably my biggest inspiration and as somebody that I turn to right now on a yearly basis to continue to get more inspiration from and it's the chef who is widely recognized as the world's greatest living chef. It's a Spanish chef named Ferran Adria. And Ferran really is somebody that I stumbled across. I don't know what maybe 15 years ago, whenever he had I'd open a restaurant on the Costa Brava which is in the northeast part of Spain on the coast called El Bulli. And El Bulli was, for a long time the world's greatest restaurant. And because of that, I became obsessed with what Fran was doing that it was so different. And it was so creative, and it was so unlike anything the world had ever seen. Then I really just became fascinated with his process. And so in the winter of 2012, I actually was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime, whenever I was working at Starwood Hotels we had partner with for on on a project that he was doing. And so I was given the opportunity to travel to Barcelona and spend the day talking with him. That alone would have been mind blowing enough because for me, so you can understand the magnitude of this. This was very much something that I viewed along the lines of if I had the day to be able to sit down and talk with Michelangelo or Picasso or just any of the great creative minds who have ever lived. What would you say and what would you ask but beyond getting To have that conversation, I had the incredibly rare opportunity of getting to go to what really was his secret workshop in Barcelona. Out of this really was a transformative experience. And I think that's what I want to talk about today. And it's continued to draw me back to Barcelona every single year. My wife and I would go back for a week for Thanksgiving. And every year we curate a different group of friends to go with us. One year it was one of my friends was a tattoo artist. And other year it was a chef and other year it was a designer who worked for me and we mix and match these different people that we bring with us from the States. And we pair them with some other incredibly creative people that we have in Barcelona, and we just see what happens. Sometimes we teach sometimes we cook, sometimes we take photographs, but it's always just this way to get inspired and sort of refill the tanks. At the end of that trip every year. We turn to and always will go back to a restaurant called tickets and tickets is run by what is rightfully the other part of this incredible culinary dynasty which is for Ron's brother albear albear was the creative director at El Bulli. And the two of them really reshaped the entire face of cooking. But tickets is our bears restaurant, and it's a simple topless restaurants. And it was started very simply and very humbly and it has really grown into and for has been for a long time. One of the top 50 restaurants in the world, the toughest reservation in Barcelona, but we're incredibly lucky. And that every year since we do this trip every year, we get to spend Thanksgiving at tickets. albear does a custom menu for us. And it is a meal that every single person that I've ever taken there will tell you change their life. It changed the way they looked at food. It changed the way they looked at creativity. They never walk away from that meal the same as whenever they went into it. And that is an incredible thing to watch. It's an incredible thing to be a part of. It's something that I feel as well every year I go to see what has albear done. Today I just really want to focus on foreign and to focus on the conversation. I had that day with him in 2012 and the ability to go to his workshop and to really kind of get an understanding of the way he ran the restaurant, his creative style, and really, how did he become somebody who was just such a visionary in this medium. And so a little bit about fraud just a little bit of a background if you have never heard his name before, the most interesting quote I ever heard was at gourmet magazine had once referred to him as the Salvador Dali of the kitchen. A lot of people really made fun of him for a while because he was the man who made foams on food, kind of an interesting thing and it became a bit of a trend. And El Bulli is often and really by anybody you talk to refer to as the single most influential restaurant in history. It will be started really in the late 1980s where fron really started to do these cooking experiments. It was really starting to look at how could you bring science into the kitchen, but do it in a much more Intellectual way, a much more deliberate way, a much more creative way. This trend will often be referred to as molecular gastronomy or modernist cuisine. There's a bunch of different titles that come to it. And I think that it's a trend that was widely maligned. Because in so often I think people would really say that it was more technique then taste. And I think just like any part of creativity, there are people who are more technique than taste, there were plenty of people that I can think of the thing that Photoshop is just simply trying to apply as many filters as they can to whatever it is they're working on. That's not creativity, and it's not good taste. But what foreign did was just basically say, look, cooking is nothing but science. And whenever I mix up a loaf of bread, and I put it in the oven, the way that the East interacts with the sugar is to make the bread rise. What happens to those air bubbles, whenever it cooks, that's all science. We just don't think of it that way. We just think of it as cooking. Well, this was taking a much bigger, much more kind of interesting look at how do you take on this A science of culinary practices and this sort of cooking phenomenon, because what he really wanted to do was to create these things that would just surprise and they would enchant the guests. But that taste had to be there. And so what fron did was in his approach to creativity was very, very interesting. El Bulli was only open six months a year. And that from usually around kind of January to June would be the time whenever it would be open. And then from June to December, he would close it and then he would then travel to go to Barcelona and work in his workshop. And he would try to figure out how could he go back and for the next season, to create something even better, even more unique, even more interesting. So this six months on six months off, started to lead to this fascinating frenzy, where what would happen would be every January the reservations would open. And so every New Year's Eve, I would kiss my wife, saying Happy New Year and then flip up on my laptop and go in to register for the lottery for El Bulli. Because it was a lottery there would be millions and millions of requests for only a few thousand seats every year. So it became this culinary mark of distinction if you had gone to eat in there, it became number the number one restaurant in the world first in 2002. Then he did it in 2006 2007 2008 2009. It's the only restaurant in history that ever for four straight years got the number one spot and five times overall it's a feat that's still never been repeated. But the problem was that this Nirvana this Camelot couldn't last for a few different reasons. And the biggest one was because fron had told me once that he and his partner in this each would have to invest about 300,000 euros every year to keep the restaurant open because it just simply wasn't profitable. The amount of time that went into it. It just wasn't working. But the right restaurant was a proof of concept and let him speak and write books and really kind of furthered his name, but just financially, it wasn't working the way that it needed to. And so in 2010, I think this preponderance finally just caught up with him, I think, and talking without bear, I think it also just became being number one is hard, especially being number one time after time after time is hard, because everybody wants to shoot for you. Everybody wants to come after you. And the burden of that expectation is not insignificant. So in 2010, they announced that they were going to close the next season, they had dubbed it The Last Waltz. And with that, fron went through and close the restaurant, really much to the shock of the world because it was still so so popular. The thing that I wanted to focus on was really not the six months that he spent cooking, but the six months that he would spend in it was really his workshop. In Spanish. It was called a buoy. Tire tire meaning workshop or laboratory, and the tire is located in Barcelona. And in Barcelona, there's probably probably not just in Barcelona or in Europe, but it probably is the best food market that I've been to anywhere in the world. It's called the Boca Yeah, it's one of the oldest food markets in Europe. And if you walk into the book on a on you go across the street over into the old Gothic Quarter of the city, you walk a few blocks down around around a street that's actually named for foreign. You come up to a very nondescript door with a huge oversized, wooden entrance. And you go in there and you walk up to the second floor and there again, a large wooden door awaits you with a simple small sign on it with El Bulli logo, which is a French Bulldog, since they'll be obviously means the bowl. And this was the space where they created lbe. This is the part where Ferghana Now bear and Arielle Castro and a bunch of these kind of collaborators would come together and it was a space that they had created to experiment to develop theory to plan menus. This was an incredibly sacred space for them. It was something that I actually got kind of emotional be able to visit, because I started to realize as I got to the door that 86 out of the last 100 culinary innovations had taken place in this room, that for something that had been so significant, this was the Michelangelo's workshop of food. And you went through the large door in front medis there. And the short entryway was lined with honestly every award and honor you can think of. And that as you walked through, there was a kitchen, living room and sort of study seating space, dining room, and then there was an upstairs sort of loft space where they had storage for old menus, cookbooks, they could reference piles of experimentations and service where and all kinds of other things. And so if you want to see what this space is like and if you want to find out more about front and Oh boy, because I don't want this to be just the retrospective on this restaurant. There are two things Different things that I would encourage you to watch. The one is and the last time I checked, you can still get it for free on YouTube. If not, I'm sure it's on iTunes. There was a show that Anthony Bourdain did for his series and it was called decoding Farren Adria. And this really was more Danes trip to go meet frog for the first time thinking he was just the foam dude and be incredibly skeptical about what his brand of creativity was. It's a fascinating look at the Thai air at a buoy and at the meal that ensues and the friendship that grew between the two of them. The other one, which is a bit more of an unadulterated look at it is a documentary called El Bulli cooking in progress. And this really follows from an entire season from the closing of El Bulli from the season before moving to Barcelona, spending six months developing the menu and then debuting that menu the next season for La Jolla. And so both of these are just fascinating looks inside of this. And so whenever I'd been to the workshop, I'd actually met Ferghana a few times before, but like I said, this time was different. The other times were book signings or I'd seen him speak or different things like that. And as We walked through the Thai air for on really kind of took us through all the different spaces explained what everything was. And over the course of that conversation and my quite honestly endless questions that I seem to have, I found that some really interesting insights emerged. And I think it speaks a lot to creativity. I think it speaks to a lot of the things that we all can learn from what he had done and apply to that. So that's what I really want to walk through in this show, is that while the setup may have been longer than most, I think the insights are worth it. And I just think whenever you have the access to a creative mind like that, it's definitely worth taking note of what he has to say. So the first thing that Fran would talk about, was it really with this six months on six months off model, that one of the things that they were really big on was that they could only move forward by looking back by going through and cooking for that season. Whenever that season ended. They would take the time before they started creating anything new to do a retrospective to look back over the past six months. would have been a success when it failed. What did they need to work on? And that this was something that he pointed out, and that we talked about is that he felt like most creative people don't take the time to look back. They just want to be fascinated and focused on the new, because they want to move on to the next big idea. But there's so many insights and so much of what allowed them to do what they did, came out of them taking the time to do that retrospective to go back and look at what was working really well. And what were the other things that really didn't and to spend a little bit of time to figure out why was it part of their process? Was it part of just a flaw in the dish or in them or their teamwork or something like that. And this sort of retrospective, ideally, should be part of an agile methodology. If you use agile to develop anything, this should be part of it. But just from a pure creative standpoint, it is something that we tend to be allergic to. Because I think that it's one of those things where you have to be able to stop. You have to be able to grow and think about what are the things That I could do better. And to have that honest conversation with yourself and not to simply gloss over it moving on to the next thing, because looking at where those mistakes are looking at where the things are that you could do better makes you better. It makes your creativity better. We talked in that very first episode about the need for self awareness about how that's such a critical part of doing anything creative. And I think that ties back here as well. Because I think that to understand what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses are part of developing that self awareness. And because the reality is also whenever I sat and thought about it at that point, I'd never been part of a creative team or a studio, where that was done with any regularity. We would do the work pitch it to the client, they loved it, they hated it, we moved on, we would do the work, we'd pitch it to the client, we would win the business or we wouldn't on and on and this sort of cycle. And that you know, it was really only something that whenever something had gone really badly that it happened because then we were in crisis mode. Only then did we need to figure it out? Whenever it was just normal or whenever it was good, we never did this. And I'm just as guilty of it. Because so often what I do, whenever I look back at my work is I just look back at it critically, I see the shortcomings and the mistakes and all the things that I could have or would have done differently, as opposed to stepping back and taking a bit more holistic view of it, of saying, what were the things that I did, right? Why did I do that? What were the things that I did wrong? Why did I do that, but just taking the time and the moment of just self reflection to think about what happened. And so I think that was an incredibly important thing that I try to do more of, is to make sure that I take the time to stop in my own work, to step away from it, to see it with fresh eyes to pretend that I'm seeing it for the first time to do this with my process and everything else so that it really helps me understand what it is that I'm really doing. So from there, we also started to talk more about just pure creativity. So after they did the retrospective what was that It that they were doing, how could they come up with things that were so different. And one of the things that Fran would talk about is that for him, creativity wasn't copying what somebody else did. And I think that this is a simple thing to say. But I think that with him, you could really see that he passionately believed, and this was something he really enforced, that what they needed to do needed to be original, because I think that he recognized it. And I have seen it a lot as well, that we all have this tendency, we want to fall back into past achievements. We want to fall back into what's comfortable, and easy and safe because we understand what it is. And that whenever you do that, you don't really have to risk anything you don't grow. And this is where and I've said this before, and I'll say it again, comfort is the enemy of greatness. Because you become comfortable, you become aware of what it is you've done in the past. So just simply regurgitating it time and time again is a much simpler, safer, more comfortable way, then doing something new, because that way is much scarier, you risk a lot more. It's something that could fail and who wants to fail. But I think that what he would really talk about and something that I've really tried to embrace was that for him, it was building a workshop that really was a culture of failure. It was this thing where if you weren't falling down, if you weren't failing, you weren't trying hard enough. You had to risk you had to fail. And that sometimes even letting people fight was often encouraged because you could see the passion of their conviction, you can see who really believed more in the idea and what it was that they were doing. Because what happens is that if everybody is taking risks, it makes it easier for each individual person to put themselves out there because everybody else is doing it as well. And you can find breakthroughs. You can find things that are going well you can find things that are going badly, but in either case, what you see are people who are genuinely trying to risk something that whenever you encourage it, and not only encourage it, but you actually expect it. And that that is the thing that you want people to do. That's a totally different paradigm. That's a totally different way of handling things. Because so many other studios, what they expect is that everybody's going to prepare for something to go wrong. So they all can scurry away and cover their own ass and blame somebody else, as opposed to going into it. And understanding that creativity is messy. Creativity is about getting things wrong. If you aren't getting things wrong, you aren't doing it, right. That's a very different way of approaching things. That's a very different mentality. If my expectation is that you're going to be pushing so hard that you are gonna fall down, you are going to do something wrong. And if you aren't, I'm going to ask you, why aren't you? That's very, very different. It's very strange to a lot of people, but it went him in that team. That culture of failure became incredibly important. The next thing out of front that you could also see as he walked around talking about the things they had done the achievements they had made the way that his team Had interacted and if you ever watched any of the documentaries, you can see it. And that this is the thing that I think defines so many great creatives is that there is an absolute obsession over every detail. There is no detail that is too small and they train it into themselves. They train it into their culture. Because here again, we'll go back to Heston Blumenthal who I talked about the beginning with the butter. After the meal, the Fat Duck, we went back to the kitchen, very, very small kitchen. It's a restaurant that is, is is almost like eating in someone's living room. Very, very small kitchen equally small galley style, small window you can peek through, and a long line. And one of the interesting things that I saw was that at that point, we had been there long enough that the staff was breaking down the kitchen, they were taking everything apart and cleaning it for the night, and I watched one of the chef's open one of the drawers below one of the stoves and he took out a Q tip. And not only have they scrubbed down the entire surface, but he was taking the Q tip too Clean the individual grooves that were in the screws on the side of the drawer. And I think to most people, you would say that's completely insane. Why on earth would you do that? But I think that when you look at it, and I've seen this in the kitchens with Ferran and Thomas Keller and Heston, and a whole host of other big name chefs, that there is no detail that's unimportant, that they teach everybody that they hold that up as the standard, they want to keep for themselves, that there is no sort of unimportant detail. And this was became really evident whenever front took us upstairs to the loft space and the Thai air above this sort of living room seating space, where the space was filled with the plates and tongs and all these little service were items that they had tried or that they had tried and failed, and there'd be generations and generations, some probably with 20 or 30 different variations on even just a plate, but it was trying to get it right. It was trying to get it so that every little detail of that entire experience really delivered and I think That that really came through. And I think that that just relentless attention to detail is so incredibly important. But I think as a leader and even as a standard to hold yourself up to, it's incredibly hard, you know, good is the enemy of great because good will just be good enough. But this is where you have to hold yourself to that higher standard, you have to get in and clean the grooves in that little screw up for whatever your creative concept is. But this is where I think it really is up to you to have the discipline to be able to drive against that standard because it is so important and it does make such a difference. Because at the end of the day for whoever is going to consume whatever your form of creativity game recognizes game, if you're really paying attention to the details, if you're really instilling that in people in in your own work. People may not consciously know it, but they understand it and they know that it's there, and they can respond and recognize it and it is something that is really important to them. The next thing that I noticed in my conversations with foreign was something that I very, very Much believe in, but is very, very hard to achieve. Because one of the things that Fran would do is whenever you would ask whatever he did, whatever his contribution was, he would always correct you and stop and say there was no individual that it was the team. The team mattered above everything the team was what accomplished everything. It was not him. He was simply a part of the team. And I think that this is something that's incredibly telling. And it's something that since that day, as I've traveled around, and even whenever I've interviewed at companies, whenever I've talked to different places, one of the things that I listened for was a distinction that Ron had pointed out that what he said was, whenever he talked about the team, or whenever the team talks about themselves, they always use the word we, there's never the word AI. And I think it's an interesting thing to look at and to watch for. So whenever I will go and talk to teams, I listen. Well, they say, this is what we did, or this is what I did. Because I think that it's a very interesting sort of thing because the reality is, is that creativity is a team sport. There is no i There's nothing that I have ever done in my entire career, nothing that appears in my portfolio that I did alone. At the very least there was a client there, there was somebody else that was involved in it, there was never just purely an eye, that it was the UI. And frons just repeated dedication to this, that every single thing really was the work of more than one person really became something that was incredibly humbling. It was incredibly it was just it almost drew you to him because it was something where it really wasn't just about him it was that the work they all had done and how important that was. And this is something that's really important for you and the people that you work with is to think about, are we an AI group, or are we a weed group? And if it is an AI Why is that? And if it is a we how do we keep doing that? And how do we know how to be able to keep making everybody come together? How do we keep getting people to come together and to work as a team to understand that it is a concept that Everybody is investing in what's going on. But I think that, like I said before, it is such an incredibly important part of this, that everybody comes together, that they are selfless, that there is that culture of failure, you can start to see all these things tie together, that if there is a culture of failure, where you're encouraged to fail, that, you know, whenever you do fail, other people will be there to support you, that there are these sort of things that all start to feed together that whenever we're doing it, you know, that the rest of the team is going to show up with that attention to detail with that real understanding that there is no unimportant detail. And what they're going to do is they're going to pressure test your ideas, because I think that's really what's so important. And so many people if you've ever read or seen Steve Jobs, talk about teams, he would refer to it as a player's that a player's ever only wanted to work with other a players. And this really is the exact same concept, because he would say that what would happen would be that the A players would only want to work with other a players And then if anything else came in the culture of the system that we would reject something that wasn't to their standards, somebody that wouldn't work with the group. And I think that you see the same sort of thing over and over again. And I think that, that in the end was probably the biggest takeaway for me was that the tie air was this space, to fail, to fail fast to fail repeatedly and gloriously to celebrate the things that went wrong because you knew that it was putting you on the path to something that was genuinely new. Because with innovation, you can't find innovation by knowing where you're going to end up when you start the journey. You have to leave room for this failure. And I think this is one of the biggest places where I see companies and brands fall down. They talk about how they want to be innovative, they talk about how they want to be different. And they all talk about that right up until the moment where it means they have to do something differently. They have no option. Type for failure, they have no appetite for experimentation. They just want the home run every time every single time. And that's not the way this works. And that that's the real problem here is that everybody who wants to glorify the apples of the world, the Steve Jobs is the fronds, the people of that sort of nature. That's the thing they don't understand is that you have to leave room for failure and experimentation, you have to let creativity blossom, you have to understand that trust is so incredibly important that that's what forms that we. And so I think that for me was probably the biggest takeaway out of this is that you have to create the time and create the space for thinking and for innovation. Because whenever you're just producing, you're just going through and you're working towards a deadline that isn't necessarily creativity, because so often that's just production that's trying to get something out the door. That you have to To leave space and time for this to happen. This is something where for me as increasingly we work in an agile methodology where you run in these sprints to try to get work done. Well, what I always have introduced is this concept of what I call a sprint zero. Sprint zero is really taking the time to let creativity happen, to give the people who are creative time to think about what is it that they need to do, to think about these concepts to create the blueprint for the house, the concept that we're going to drive towards. So then when we're in the Sprint's and producing, well, it's no different than a blueprint for a house, so that I'm sure why one group is building a wall and another one's building a floor and another one's building part of the roof. At the end of the day, they're all going to line up because they're all in service of a shared vision. With that, take the time go out and take a look at one of those two documentaries. The the decoding front Adria is about 45 minutes or an hour. It's a quick watch. But it's a much deeper look into this and you can get a better sense of who foreign is but I think that the other thing I would say is figure out, what's your version of this? For me? It's chefs. And for me, it's cooking to drive that inspiration to keep the fire lit to keep new ideas coming in. But what's your version of that? And have you spent enough time thinking about that? What are the things that not just motivate you? Because anything can motivate you, money can motivate you time can motivate you, but what inspires you, because inspiration is really something much more substantial. And I think that's the thing. You have to make sure that you're attending for with you, that you're attending for your process you're attending for your creativity, you're tending to take care of your instrument to be able to keep yourself moving forward, because that's the real challenge at the end of this because even the best team, the best work, well, even if you're a part of that, you have to figure out how do you contribute to it? How do you stay happy inside of it? How is the place where you can figure out how you fit in that? And so that this is the thing, don't become codependent to just do what everybody else does. Take the time, take the do what I do every once in a while, take a mental health day, go to some galleries, go have some great food, go talk to a friend of yours in a different industry who's doing something you really find inspiring. But figure out how do you inspire yourself? How do you keep that fire lit, and keep yourself driving forward. Because as we talk about being creative over long spans of time, 20 4060 years, that's a really hard thing to do. And because the other challenge that you're up against, is that you're going to change who you are today. And what inspires you today will not be the same next year, five years, 10 years from now, the process of creativity never stops, the evolution will never stop. And so this is where you need to take the time to think about you and to think about how can you keep that fire lit. And so with that, we'll put a bow on this show. And so as always, if you enjoy anything that I talked about here, I'll always ask that. Just take a few minutes, even just a few seconds. If you want, head over to iTunes and leave a review makes a huge difference helps with the popularity of the show. It's the only currency I'll ever ask for. If you're feeling like you just want to spend a couple seconds just go click on the stars. If you feel a little bit more industrious, a little more inspired, go and write a few words and leave a review. As always, you can find out more about this podcast listen other episodes and get the show notes from this show. I'll have links to both of those documentaries and a few articles on fraud and his brother albear as well. Head over to podcast dot Stephen Gates calm Steven is s t e e p h n. And you can go in there and be able to get everything you need all in one place. If you have any questions something you want to find out more about something you liked something you hated something you want to hear me talk about more in the future. Let me know shoot me an email at ask at Stephen Gates calm and I'll get back to you just as soon as we can. As always the boys down illegal want me to remind you that all my views here are my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. And finally I say it every time because I mean Every time but thank you for your time. I know that time is the only true luxury we have. And I'm always incredibly humbled that you want to spend any of it with me. So until next time and until we talk again, stay crazy.