Ep 1 Creativity: Lightbulbs are bullish*t

In this enlightening episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates challenges the common misconception that ideas are like lightbulbs—instant and bright. Instead, he dives into the reality of the creative process, revealing that great ideas are often the result of hard work, experimentation, and persistence. Discover practical insights and actionable tips that will enhance your creativity and help you navigate your unique creative journey. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting, this episode will empower you to harness your creativity more effectively.

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Stephen Gates : 0:00

Welcome to what we're gonna call it the first real episode of The Crazy One podcast. I know that you're sitting there looking at your screen, it's the second one that actually shows up. But okay, let's be honest, the first episode was just a welcome. It was a teaser trailer and a moose boosh for? What are the things that I really want to talk about? What are the things that I really want to care about and to try to give you a reason to keep listening? And so you made it to the second file, you're still here. And I'm going to take that to be a good sign. But where do we start? What do we want to talk about? And so I think that the thing for me was, whenever I sat down, I started to think about this, I started to think about what should the first real episode be about the thing that I kept coming back to was what I think is going to be the foundation for most everything we're going to talk about, and that's going to be creativity. And because I think I'm somebody who has spent my entire life. I mean, you heard in the intro, I'm somebody that was born into being designed. I've spent my entire life working on my creativity, my creative process, and it's led to a pretty fantastic career. But at the same time, I'm also somebody who grew and evolved into being a creative director, which meant that I was in charge of other people's creativity, I was in charge of the creative teams that I needed to lead, I needed to understand not only my process, but I needed to understand other people's process to be able to teach them. And then I evolved past that again, and went out into the world and started to speak at these big design events, about creativity and things like that. And so now people who don't even work for me, I'm going out and talking about it. So these are all the things that you know, I really felt like this is the place that we need to start, we need to start talking about creativity, because this is going to be the foundation, this is going to be the basis for a lot of the stuff that we do going forward. So it's going to be the perfect place to start. If we're going to start there, let's get something straight right from the top so that we're all coming at this from the same place. And what I want to talk about is the fact that if we're talking about being creative, I think a lot of people have this misperception that creativity is well you're just sitting around drawing, you're having fun, you're goofing off because it's one of those things where this isn't like I'm going out and building a house where you can see the progress happening. It's all happening in my head. And so there's a lie that that most people have been told that and unfortunately, people have been really kind of led to believe is true. And that's the fact that whenever you have an idea that there is a light bulb, there's this magic moments where the clouds part and the sun shines down, and it rains, champagne and puppies, and all of a sudden, you have the answer. And the reality is, is that that's not the way this is gonna work at all. And if you think that it is, then you definitely need to keep listening, because the reality is that those light bulb moments, those aha moments, at best, are a spark of inspiration. They're a starting point that we're going to need to learn to build on they are not the entire process. And because that's why so many people I think struggle with this is because they think, Oh, I had this one spark of inspiration I'm done. Well, the thing that I've found and the thing that I always try to teach people is the fact that well, that's not it and that what happens Is that creativity is actually, I always describe it as a blue collar profession. I mean, I grew up in a working class town. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I grew up around people who had worked in the mills and, and really kind of really owned and defined what that meant to really be able to go out and work hard. And so the problem is, like I said, before, people think that since we're sitting around, and we're just having ideas, that it's easy. It's not creativity is a blue collar profession, it is something that you really, really have to be able to work at. And the other reason why I think this becomes so critical is because over those 15 years, I've coached and tried to work on the career development of a lot of people. And what some people fail to see is that if you aren't investing in your creativity if you aren't making this a priority for you? Well, the problem is that you really just become reduced down to somebody who is good at doing something. You can deliver something you can hit a deadline. And the problem is that if that That's all that your career is going to be. Well, then what you become is a commodity you become somebody who can be replaced, you can be somebody that we can get somebody who can do it faster and cheaper. I mean, this is the been the legacy of so many industries all over the world as people would be able to come in and do this because they've commoditized themselves. But if you're somebody who can have ideas, if you're somebody who can, who can lead who can be creative, no matter what the industry is, well, then that makes you an essential asset that makes you somebody that they're going to want to have around all the time. And that little inflection point of knowing how to go from being a commodity to being an essential asset. So much of it hinges around creativity. So I think that not just for you to be a more creative person, but to really be able to get out and own your career. This is where we have to start. So with that out of the way with the upfront done, let's actually talk about what goes into a creative process. And so whenever I've done this, I've sat down and spent a lot of time thinking about this, I think it really breaks down into five parts. The first one is, whenever you actually sit down to be creative, to make sure that you have the right problem that you're trying to solve. Then we're going to talk about how do you get inspired? How do you actually have ideas? Once you have those ideas? How do you actually get them out into the world? And then last, and probably most importantly, actually talk about your creative process? And how is it that you can bring this to life? So let's start with the problem. And the reason why, like, I know this isn't the sexiest thing to most people, whenever they sit down to work, they just want to jump in and start creating, because that's the fun part of it. But the reality is, is that creativity starts honestly, with having the right problem to solve. And the one thing that I've always said, and one thing that I always believed is that if you have a problem that's really well stated, you have a problem that's half solved. And because I think that most of the time whenever I come in and I start working with a team that's struggling, the thing that I can usually trace it back to Is that the problem they're trying to solve? isn't what they really need to be working on that it's something very different. And so what we need to know, is a couple things. The first is that creativity in the creative process should be about solving problems. What I also see in a lot of teams is what they're actually doing is that somebody came to them, where they already had the idea where they already know what it is that they want to do. And they're just simply asking somebody to vet and validate that that's not creativity. So we're not going to talk about that. But what we are going to talk about is making sure that you have the right problem to solve. So let's look at an example. And this was a study that was done where the researchers went out. And they had two different creative teams, they put them in two different rooms. And what they did was they went to the one team, and they said, Okay, what we want you guys to do, is we want you to design a better toothbrush, and they set them off to work. And then when they went into the other team and they said well, we want you to do is we want you to come up with a better way to clean teeth. And so at the end of the day, they got the two teams together and the one who'd been acid who had been asked to create a better toothbrush. Well, what they did was they had what you would expect a toothbrush that was a little bit more complicated, it looked a little bit better, it had some new technology, but it was essentially the same thing. Whereas the team who'd been asked for a better way to clean teeth had gone wildly different that it was a system where you'd be able to vacuum your teeth and be able to do all these kind of like really interesting and very different things. And the only difference with that the reason why the one with the team that was asked to to build a better toothbrush only had a small amount of innovation versus the other one that had a legitimate kind of breakthrough around that was only due to the question that they were asked. And so I think that that's the thing to start to understand is to get very good, very focused about making sure that whenever you are posed a problem, that it's the right problem that it's asking To solve the right thing, and that it's not being too prescriptive, that it is something that gives you the room to be able to actually really go and think about things. So I think that would be the first thing that I would tell you is just whenever that comes in, to take a moment to pause on that, and to focus on the problem. And but the one thing that I will say, even in the toothbrush example is the fact that you do also want to make sure that that the problem that you're being asked to solve has some constraints, because the best creativity does come from those constraints. And sometimes the tighter constraints, the better because one of the things that I've discovered is the worst thing that you can tell anybody that wants to have an idea is go do whatever you want. Because you simply become paralyzed by the options, you become paralyzed by all the different possibilities that you could go explore. So you suddenly have to try to narrow down on a few different directions you have to be able to try to focus in and so I think that you know, there is this yin and a yang and I know that it can sound a little bit contradictory, but on the one hand to make sure that you are really going out to solve problem not getting a solution. And that whenever that problem comes in, that it is small enough and tight enough that it lets you really be able to work and really be able to do something innovative about that. And so that's just the problem. And so if we move out of that problem, you have the problem that's come in, there's the thing that you want to solve, you feel like it's in a good place for you to be able to be successful, then what most people will set off about doing is trying to get inspired. And I think inspiration can be a very funny thing. I think there are some people who seem to have made a career out of just traveling the world and getting inspired. But the one thing that I see is a lot of people will do this kind of like traditional inspiration model. And the first thing that they do is they look to see, okay, well this is the problem that I have to solve, how have other people solve it, what are the what's the competition doing? It is a natural starting point to do something like that. But the thing that I always will try to tell people is that at the end of the day, and I think Todd Henry had coined this term, or at least that was the first place that I saw it was that at the end of the A cover band will never change the world, if all that you're going to do is to take what somebody else already did repackage it and put it back out there. That's not really going to be the breakthrough creativity that you want. And look, I know we can have a whole philosophical argument about all creativity is just building on ideas that people have had before. But the reality is that creativity honestly is how do you take these inspirations and combine them into a unique way that will let your ideas stand out. And so if all you're going to do is to be a creativity, Xerox machine, well, then your work isn't really going to get noticed. And so what you have to do is to find unique insights, unique inspirations to try to be able to take that as a starting point, take what other people have done, recognize it and not acknowledge that, but then really look at Okay, how can I make this different? How can I make this better? And one of the places that I've always looked for that is the audience I'm going to be designing for. I've always been a huge practitioner, and believer in design thinking this was a methodology. A company called IDEO came up with and really kind of made famous in the 1960s 1970s. And one of the core tenants of design thinking is empathy is to really understand and to walk a mile in the shoes of the person that you're designing for. And I think that this can become an incredibly key thing in terms of getting a different perspective to actually go out an experience not to have it be theoretical, like one of the crazy things that I had done was whenever I had started working for Starwood Hotels, the first year, 364 days that I worked for the company, I lived in a Western in New Jersey. Now, part of the reason why I did that was because while I was moving from Dallas, and I needed a place to stay, but the other reason why I wanted to do that was because I really wanted to understand, on a very deep level, how do consumers who stay in a hotel feel what do they experience? What are the things that are good, what are the things that are bad? And you know, I really took that experience as the foundation for all the innovative work that I went on and did there and I think This empathy around getting inspiration can be incredibly critical. I think one of the things that I've always done whenever I looked in try to get inspiration is I actually look to other industries. Because for me, I find that I get very well maybe very motivated by other designers. But in a lot of cases, I don't tend to find them inspiring. Because what they've done, well done as a past tense word, they've already done it. So what I can do is just simply copy it. So what I do is I look to other industries, and one of the things that I look to most is food, because I think that there's a really fascinating parallel between the way that a really high end chef can take the exact same ingredients that everybody else gets, but the way that they then use their creativity in the way that they then use their craft turns it into something really, really unique and really different. So I've set off traveling the world talking to different chefs about what is their creative process, how do they find inspiration, one of the most interesting conversations that I had was with it's one of the top chefs In the world, he has a restaurant just outside of London called the Fat Duck and the chef's name is Heston Blumenthal and Heston was in New York for an event. And it was funny because everybody seemed to be really kind of scared to talk to him. So I'm not burdened with that problem. And so I walked right up to him, and we start having a conversation. And one of the things that I wanted to talk about what's his inspiration? Or like, what are the things that he looks for? Whenever he gets inspired? If he goes and eats at another restaurant, what's the thing that he looks for? To see if the chef is really being creative or not? And I'll never forget his answer, because what he said was the butter. And it took me a second. And I kind of am sure that I had some weird look on my face. And I said, Well, what do you mean, I don't understand what do you mean the butter? And he said, Well, whenever I sit down at the table, I can tell if the meal is going to be good or not by the butter because the bread comes in, they bring that little pad of butter and he said the reality is that if it's rock hard, I know that the chef has never eaten in his own restaurant. I know that he's not really thinking about his guests. He's not being empathetic. He's not really understanding and thinking about How to inspire the guest. He's just simply thinking about how to inspire himself. And so the fascinating thing was that so for the last, I don't know what decade probably every time my wife and I go to dinner, we sit there and wait. And the bread hits the table and the butter shortly after, and my wife will always take a knife and go over and kind of slowly probe into the butter to see if it's rock hard from being too cold, or if it's actually soft. And we'll then declare after seeing if it's good or not, if Heston would have been happy or not, but I think that it really does hold true, right? Because I think if, in that case, if the chef isn't thinking about how to inspire the diner if the chef is just simply cooking for themselves. While it may be interesting, it's not ultimately serving the audience. It's serving himself. And so I think that you know, it's just it's always been a story that I try to be reminded of about, whenever I'm trying to get that inspiration that it isn't really just about me that I'm creating something because I'm not a fine artist. I am somebody that is creating commercial work for Someone else. And that since that is the case, I have to take my audience into account. But we'll we'll stay with the theme of food here for a second because I think that the other thing around inspiration that becomes really important and just your creativity, your creative process in general, came from a conversation I had with a different chef and this one actually came from a little bit further east and it was a master sushi chef named Jiro Ono. And if you've ever seen the movie Jiro dreams of sushi, this would be the same guy. And so here again, whenever we got to sit down and talk with Jarrod, one of the things that I was asking him was, you know, because it was very noticeable in his kitchen that while his son had worked with him, there were a lot of also very young chefs who were there. And I always find this really interesting about how do you take these young kids who are 18 2021 just coming out of culinary school if they've even done that and bring them into a world class kitchen. And what Jiro said was, whenever he gets these kids, what he does is he tells them that if you ever want to cook great food, you need to actually have eaten great food because What you need to do is you need to have a pallet, you need to have a measuring stick that is going to let you know if your work is great or not. So what he will actually do is send them out to eat at some of the best restaurants so that whenever he goes back to his restaurant, he knows that they've actually had great food so that there is a mental measuring stick that they have in their head, to be able to look at their own work and judge. And I think this is a big part of inspiration, right? Because then a lot of times your creativity, and your inspiration is only going to be as good and as strong as your taste. And if you have a very narrow perspective, if you aren't getting out there, if you have an underdeveloped palette, your work is going to be weak, your work isn't going to be as strong as it needs to be. And so I think that this is one of those things of inspiration shouldn't just be for a particular project. But I think you constantly need to be working for whatever your given profession is to go out and consume the best of it. For me, it's going out and consuming. The best design the best writing the best movies, the best video the best, because whenever I build brands, it's about building culture. About that mix of rational and irrational, it's understanding, you know, where are the aesthetics of culture right now, not only in North America, but the will for the world. So there's a ton of work that I'm doing behind the scenes to make sure that my palate and my taste is as good as it needs to be. Because if that ever starts to fall within the measuring stick, that I'm going to hold my work to the measuring stick that I'm going to hold my team to, is going to fall, and then that's going to be a big problem. And so I think that, you know, this is one of those things about whenever you do that, figure out how to develop your palette, what are the things that you need to go do to make sure that you understand the best of whatever is out there and be able to consume that on a regular basis and to be able to try to ritualize that this is why for me, I will freely admit that I am probably the only man in america who will openly admit that he uses Pinterest, because to me Pinterest is a fantastic place for me to just keep in touch with what's going on that I've had to spend the time to go out and follow the right people. I've had to spend the time to structure the boards that I have in a very particular way, so it focuses around the things that I want to keep my palette sharp for. But it's just it's a very simple thing where every day I go, and I just spend a few minutes I see whatever has been posted, I see whatever is out there. And I keep it on these boards. And then whenever I go back, and it's time for me to work on a project, two things happen. One is that my palate has stayed sharp, it stayed to a place where I feel like I'm still in touch with what's going on in that particular space. But then it also provides me a canvas, a mood board, for me to be able to use that for inspiration so that it's something that I can go out and start to refer to, to be able to see, you know, where are the things that I want to start? What are the inspirations that I want to draw on and again, use it as a starting point I want to build on it is not the means to the end, but that I can build on it. And so I think those are the two main things that you really have to think about about where do you draw your inspiration from and how do you develop your palette, whenever you really want to go in and you want to think about inspiration. So we're going to move on from inspiration, and we're going to go to ideation and so with ideation We're gonna get into a little bit more of of the craft of how do you have an idea. And the part of that craft is understanding that the best way to have ideas is honestly to have a lot of them start by having a lot of them. And the way that this will get broken down whenever you talk about design thinking or something like that is we'll talk about divergent and convergent thinking, which can sound very complicated, but trust me, it's not. What it means is whenever you diverged, you go out and you just simply try to have as many different ideas as you can. Don't limit yourself go out there and just put down anything, no matter how insane about how ridiculous it is. Go out and put all those ideas down. Well, then what you do is you converge, you come back together, you take those ideas, and you say, Okay, what are the ones that are good? What are the ones that are bad, keep the good throw out the bad and then you can start to group them. And then you can see, oh, maybe I have a couple different groups that i like that i think i'm really working and then you do the cycle again, take those topics, do a whole bunch of ideas at it. Come down and do it again. And again, you know, there was with some of my teams I used to describe it as riffing this would be like the the concept that you would have around music about, we would then be able to take the theme and we would be able to kind of play with it, we would be able to go out and improvise around it and see what it was that we thought was working or not. But, but that's really what you want to do whenever you start having ideas is to just go out and try to have as many of them as you can. And so whenever you do that, there are probably seven rules that I'll try to really use. Or these are like the seven guidelines that I'll keep in my head whenever I'm doing any sort of ideation or any sort of brainstorming. And so they're pretty simple, but I think they can become really, really critical. The first one is whenever you're you're going out and you're having all these ideas, save judging them for later. Just write it down, and then decide once you're done when you get to the converse part if they're good or not. So just defer the judgment, put it off and just write out write down all those ideas, no matter How, you know crazy they might be. And that honestly feeds right into the next thing, which is for me, I really try to like encourage myself to have wild and crazy ideas to really be able to take advantage of the fact that if this is my chance to really do something great if this is the time, whenever it's free of constraints, free of clients, free of all that stuff, where it's just me sitting down and having an idea, why not swing for the fence, why not try to do something really big? Why not try to have a big crazy idea? Because it's gonna get refined, it's going to get drawn down, it's gonna get changed, but the thing that I've discovered is, okay, so if that change is gonna happen, and that drawback is gonna happen, why wouldn't you try to throw the idea out there further, so whenever he gets drawn back, it's still gonna be miles ahead of where it was if you were just playing it safe. So this really is something about going out and trying to have like a really big crazy idea. The other thing that I do for me and this may not work for you, but I found it to work for a lot of people. Whenever you do sit down to have all these ideas to try to be visual, like some people like to take post it notes in the write down ideas. Some people like to sketch but but I think no matter what you do try to be visual with it, type it into Evernote, like do something with it. So you can see all the ideas because I think it's really good for you to be able to kind of have that idea and be able to see what's going on with all of it. So you can kind of understand what's working what's not. The other thing and this can be a bit of a challenge is, but whenever you define the problem, if you put some constraints around it, try to stay true to those constraints, try to basically just stay on topic and focus on the problem that you're trying to solve. Because sometimes you'll find yourself to start to drift towards solving a different problem that you'll you know, the ideas that you're having will start to want to change what it is that you've been set out and assigned to do. And so I think that part of it is just whenever you're doing that, to just stay on topic and to focus On that stuff. But what I said before still holds true focus on quantity. Really even as weird as this may sound, in this one case over quality. So just try to let your brain run free as much as it can and connect those dots any way that it wants. And so the last two are really much more focused around if you're doing a brainstorming with a team, there are some times where I'm going to just sit there and I'm going to think of ideas by myself. But there are other times that I'm going to sit down, I'm going to do it with a group. So if I'm going to do it with a group, there are two things that I try to do with that. One is whenever I have an idea, I try to build on ideas that other people have had. So it basically lets you just kind of snowball where you can pick up the ball and run where one person had a really interesting insight or really interesting idea, how can I take that and make it better to improve it to take it even further, because it's that interplay between these different perspectives, the interplay between these different opinions that sometimes can really lead to like the best, the most interesting stuff. But the other thing you can do and this takes a little bit of discipline in occasionally It takes you being a little bit of unfortunately a jerk is that whenever you're doing these brainstorms one conversation at a time, that's the critical thing you have to focus on is if there are three different conversations that are happening with three different groups talking about ideas, well, the problem is, I can't build on an idea I can't hear. And so all of a sudden, whenever that's happening, it's just it's not letting you be able to kind of do those things. So whenever you have that group of people, everybody has to talk one at a time, if not break up into separate groups that will go separately work. So then those separate conversations can happen, but if everybody's going to work together, one conversation at a time. And so with those are kind of like the basic guidelines, the rules that whatever you want to call them. But the other thing that I think you need to kind of make sure that you do is after you converge and you come back together, to not fall in the trap of I always just call it like pushing ideas around. We're all that we're doing is we're not really trying to think of anything new. We're not really kind of trying to put First of all forward, we're just trying to come up with slight variations of the idea we already had. This is a trap and design that I, whenever I work with designers, they spend a lot of time getting to the first look of something the way that it's gonna, you know, really work for them. And then whenever you go back and give them the feedback, instead of coming back and embracing the fact that this is a new opportunity to really do something new, but what they do is they just go back and they kind of push the pieces around, because they feel like well, it's all here, I just have to find a different combination. Okay, well, sometimes maybe that's true most of the time it's not and so what you need to do is to not just simply push your ideas around, and I think it's also okay whenever you do this, to start with the obvious ideas, we talked about this in the in the inspiration piece of it like coming out of inspiration, you can have your competitive analysis, you can have your inspiration that you have from Pinterest or wherever it is. And I think that's a very, very natural starting place. Whenever you you do a process like this. The trick is and the key is going to be to not settle for that starting place. To feel like, oh, okay, well, you know, I have something, but to go on to push forward to try to just understand that that's a starting point. But what I need to do is I need to move past this. And I need to move into really finding something new and different. That's really ideation. And I know that right about now you may be thinking, Okay, well, like this is all great, you're giving me some rules, you give me some of these other things. But you're not kind of really going into how specifically should I have an idea. And so I'm just going to say that we're going to do one quick talk about implementation. And then I'm going to go ahead and talk about that, because I think that probably is gonna be the biggest and most important thing out of this whole thing is to talk about your process. And so we're gonna quickly talk about implementation. And so this is you have some ideas, you think that this is what it is you want to do. And so, there are two ways that all often handle this part of the process. Sometimes you can have a really good idea. It's Something that you feel like will really be successful. But because of budget or politics or you know, just the way consumers are right now, it's not going to be the time to be able to kind of roll out that idea that this isn't going to be the place for it. So what do you do with it. And so there's a friend of mine taught me a trick around this. And it's something that I do and have done for years that I find to be really, really helpful. And what it is, is almost in, I guess, I'll call it like a back burner. So it's a Word file that sits on the desktop of my computer. And it houses all the good ideas that I've ever had that haven't been implemented. And I have one for me, personally, I have one for work. And that what I do is once a month, I sit down and I open this file up, and the files got three parts. And the first part is what should I be working on right now? What are the things that I feel like are really going to be the best ideas for me to be able to have like these are these are things that I need to be focusing on, these are the things that I need to be doing. And then there's another one and it's kind of like near term, these are the things that you know what maybe I've just got too much on my plate, maybe I have too much going on. And this isn't the time for me to be able to work on it. But it's going to be soon, for a long time This podcast was on that list or something that you know what I wanted to evolve past writing, I wanted to be able to get to a place where I could talk because I just felt like I could produce more I could communicate more. And also because most of the time, whenever I was writing, I tend to write like I speak. So let's just short cut this out and get it into this medium. So like that that had been sitting in my near term file for a while. And then there's also long term stuff. I think these are things that are they're really good idea. But here again, I don't have the budget. I don't have the time, but it's not something that I want to forget about. And so I think that this sort of a back burner can be really important for whenever you have your creative process just because you don't want to lose good ideas, right? You put in all that effort you put in all that time you came up with something that you felt like was really good, don't let it slip away. One of the other things that I found around a creative process visit if you ask somebody to have an idea, and they go out there and they invest that time. They invest that energy in it, the thing that's gonna happen is if that idea doesn't come to life, and if that happens regularly enough, that inspiration, that energy that they had very quickly is going to turn into frustration. And so this is my way of being able to try to kind of help fight that to be able to look at this and say, Okay, well, these are really good ideas. And these are things that I need to go through and to be able to figure out, and this is my way where I can go through and I can be able to hold on to that so that I can figure out what is going to be the right time for me to be able to work on that. The other thing that I'm a huge believer in is to actually go out and to prototype your ideas to actually go out and to figure out okay, how can I quickly easily simply test this on the people that I'm supposed to be empathizing with? Because I think one of the things that you have to do is you have to try to break your idea. You have to say, Where are the weak spots? Where are the areas where this really isn't going to work the way that I wish that it would, and I think that you can't be precious about that process because if you are the problem is Your ideas are going to be very pretty, they'll be very nice, they're not going to be terribly well thought out, they're going to get broken, they're going to get picked apart too easily. So you have to make sure that when you send that idea out into the world, that it doesn't have you presenting it, it doesn't have a shiny deck that the work is literally just the work that whatever people see is what they experience. They don't understand the conference calls the work the compromises what's coming in to Dotto, they don't understand any of that stuff. All they understand is what's in front of them. So my thing is, let's take that truth, that glaring light of day and try to do it as often as we can. And so I think that's my only thing for the implementation part that I want to talk about is prototyping. And so I think whatever you prototype your idea, there's a lot of different ways you can do it. I think most people, whenever they hear prototyping, they think of like, you know, if you're building a car, it's the clay model, if you're gonna do something like that, where it's making it tangible and physical, kind of like before you launch it, and that's not really the case. And so for me, there are actually four different ways that I'll prototype something. The first one I'll prototype just to do research. And this is the kind of prototyping that honestly really should probably have belonged up in the inspiration phase. Because this is me trying to build something, honestly, just to think about it. And it's because what I want to do is I want to understand the boundaries, the patterns, the pain points, the things that somebody who's going to try to use this idea would experience but just do it from a research perspective. Because maybe I think that this great insight that I have is really fantastic. But whenever I show it to people, they don't understand it, they're not ready for it. They don't have the technology for like, there's some barrier there that's going to keep them away from really having it come to life. And I think that's a really big problem. So I think the first thing is to be able to do that research just simply to kind of think about it and to prototype to think the next one is something where it is that rapid prototyping. And I think you know, this is a phrase that gets thrown around a ton. But for me, this is really just the build to learn that what I'm going to do is to take it in probably the crudest and roughest way that I can, and to put something together to test my initial hype. So that whenever I have something in that ideation phase, and I'm going through and doing that, then I'm sure that it's really something that's going to kind of resonate with people. And I think you've seen whenever I do do prototyping, they can build, I mean, I saw one where they built entire pharmacy out of foam core. But the whole point of it was that they just wanted to test the initial hypothesis of the way people were going to interact or the services that they were going to have. And that was all that it was meant to do. I think the third part of it then, is live prototyping. And I think this is kind of like how do we build to communicate that we want to examine the product and how it fits in the market. And so this would be going from, you know, those rough really crude foam core models into something that starts to feel a bit more real, that it's something that we can start to kind of really kind of communicate and hone in on the fidelity of the idea a bit more. And I think this is often the place where most people will come into prototyping is whenever they do this sort of live prototyping, but I think that for me, this should not be the only entry point. And the last one to do is really that Okay, I'm going to build something because I actually want to launch this and this is that live This is the the concept car that you see it an auto show, this is where I want to take this and validate that this idea is going to be able to come out and it's going to get accepted at scale, because this is going to be very, very close to what the final product would be like as whenever you get into an idea. You can validate the idea, the concept of it and see do people like the idea versus Do they like the execution? And I think again, some people get these very confused because you can have a concept, an idea that is absolutely right on. But what screws it up is the execution. And I think like you saw this if you were you saw music players that were out there for a really long time you saw phones that were out there for a really long time. Well, it wasn't until the iPod came along. The people said wow, your mp3 suddenly makes sense. This seems like this is a really good way of doing it or Gee, you know, I never thought about doing a phone like an iPhone that has applications and things on that. So this is the heart of Apple's mentalities. They may not be first to market but they are best to market and so this is for them where they will go through and make sure that the insight the concept really holds through an execution. And so those are going to be the the couple things around implementation. Now we're really honestly going to come down to the heart of it. And that's going to be about your process, and how do you create it? And honestly, like, why, why haven't I gotten into more specifics about any of this? And the reality is, is that the creative process is different. For every single person, there aren't going to be any magic bullets. Sorry, that's just going to be the case. But the reason why that is, is because every single person connects the dots differently. They get inspired differently. It's based on what are the things that they've done really well over their life? What are the things that they've struggled with? What are their confidences, what are their weaknesses, but it all comes down to the fact that everybody does this differently. And I think this is one of the biggest parts where, like from a leadership perspective, most companies will really fall down because they want to be able to institutionalize the process to be able to say, okay, when you're going to be creative, You have to be creative through these particular steps. This is why I embrace something like design thinking because design thinking will expose the methodology around this. So everybody can understand the steps. But it's freedom in a framework, it lets you be able to come into it and say, Okay, I understand the steps and what we need to accomplish, but how I'm going to accomplish it? Well, that's up to me. And that's something that I can really take on. And so I think whenever I talk about my process and how I do stuff, the challenge is going to be it works for me, it by no means means that it's going to work for you. So the challenge here becomes, how do you start to get in touch with your process? How do you start to understand how you connect the dots and part of this starts to come out of self awareness of paying attention to Okay, what did I do when I had a good idea? What did I do when I had a bad idea? And so for me, like this has honestly been a 20 plus year quest, once I started to figure out that this was gonna be an issue of how to figure this out. Like I can tell you very specific Things like if I'm going to sit down and try to concept against that idea, I can listen to music. But it has to be music that either I know extremely well. Or if I don't, it can't have words, because what I will find is that my mind starts to become too distracted with the words, and that I'm not necessarily thinking about what I want. But at the same point, I like to be able to have that kind of noise in the background. Again, like television doesn't work for me, because there's too much content, I can get distracted too easily. So I know how to kind of set the stage for creativity. I know some of these things, because like, you know, I've spent a lot of time taking notice. And like one of the things that I've noticed is that I am extremely left brain, right brain and so like, historically left brain is your very creative. It's a typical way you describe that right brain is very, very analytical. My thing has always been I'm kind of both and I think that the best creatives are probably kind of both, because what I'll do is I'll do a lot of preparation, like I said about developing my palette of going into Pinterest of, of doing those sort of things to kind of set the stage that even whenever I get the problem, I have to make sure that the problem is right, I have to make sure that the way I'm going to solve it conceptually may be right that as a designer, I have to separate out the concept from the execution. So that there's a very sort of right brain way that I approach all this. And here again, I'm going to turn back to food. And so one of the things that you'll notice if you ever go into like a high end, kitchen, or even just any chef, once he knows what he's doing, you'll often see all the ingredients kind of like pre cut and laid out. And what that is, it comes from a French practice in a French term called meson plus, which sounds very fancy, but all it just really means is kind of like everything has a place. And what it is, is that cooks recognize the fact that they needed a methodical preparation to the messy process of creativity, that we need to prepare all the pieces we need to prepare what it is that we're going to need so that in the moment whenever the problem comes in whenever the order comes in, and it's time for them to be able to create that they have what they need right at their fingertips so that they aren't in cumbered by the process and can just really let the creativity flow. This is why whenever a lot of people ask me about like, what new program, what new application should they learn? The advice that I always give them is that an application isn't a career path. Like all the great technology we have, at the end of the day, honestly, is no better than a pencil. It is no better than a pencil. Because Photoshop is just a very expensive pencil. If I have no idea to communicate, yes, I can make it look very pretty. But if it doesn't resonate with people, if it's not based on human truth, nobody's gonna care. It's gonna look very pretty, but it's not going to go anywhere. So I think that this is my thing, right of like this methodical preparation to be really messy. And I think that so for me, it is utilizing Pinterest a lot. It's using Evernote a ton. Because I think that for me, I like that it's on my phone, it's on my iPad, it's on my computer and that so that any time whenever that inspiration strikes, whenever I've gone in and set up what's the problem that I want to solve that as I work through that concept, I can go in and keep adding to that to refine it to to riff and I For me, it's really come down to the fact of, I recognize the fact that sometime I'm very good at doing creativity and bursts of really focusing and knocking out as many ideas as I can. But also for the fact that as a designer, there is not an off switch. There's not a time whenever I can just sit back and turn it off and just coast and think, Okay, well, I'm not going to be creative anymore. These things are still rattling around in my head. And oftentimes, some of the best insights can happen in those moments. So what I want is I want the easy ability and the access to get back in to be able to work with that. I do a ton of sketching. I always preach that like you don't find concepts in Photoshop, I constantly to the point of where somebody will joke that I have a speech impediment where I cannot talk about an idea without drawing some part of it. I'm sketching, this is where like the iPad Pro has been a revolution for me because I finally been able to digitize my process. For so many years. I always would trail around with a sharpie in my hand and a vellum pad and the other I would constantly be sketching things, but this allows me to be able to do it but to be able to kind of start to put it down and make it Real but to not get overly hung up on the fidelity of it, because here again, like if it's the idea that counts don't overly focus on the fidelity, I do this thing with my team, where what I'll do is I give them a very large marker like a sharpie, like the biggest fattest chisel tipped marker that you can get away with, without them probably wanting to think you're buying it to do graffiti. And I give them a really small piece of paper, like a three by five card. Because what it does is if I have a really big marker and a really small card, what that does is it forces me that I can't focus on the details, all I can really do is to focus on the idea that I can sketch something but it's going to have to be rough. If I'm doing a design for like a website, I physically cannot write what is going to go into the button or what a piece of copy says or sketch out a photo because I have this big marker small paper. And so I think that there are those sort of things where it also comes down to again, having the self awareness to recognize that you know what, too often I'm running to the to the fidelity of the execution too often. I'm not focusing on that. idea, well, then if you do that, in those moments, you need to start to recognize that to, to make that a part of your process so that whenever you're doing this stuff, you can sit there and say, Okay, look, you know, I know that this is gonna be a problem, and I need to be able to work on this. And that that's the real challenge here, to start to become self aware. That's the key to all this. And that's what simultaneously is going to be the magic and not the magic and all this because it is up to you. It's up to you to be the one to start to pay attention to this stuff. And I think you can have people who help you can have people who mentor I think you need to try to seek those people out. But at the end of the day, how you connect those dots is completely personal. And this is why they will write books about creativity until the world ends, no matter what the technology does, no matter what it is, since cavemen painted on walls, I'm sure there's been some guy who's been starting to give advice about creativity, but that's the reason why is because of the fact that everybody's going to do it differently, and they always will. And so it really is that process that starts to make a difference and that you really have to start to focus on, so I'm going to end with an exercise. And this is quite honestly, probably the most stolen idea I've ever come up with. And I've had tons of people who steal it all the time I give it away. And so it probably shouldn't even be stealing anymore. But what it is, is it's an exercise that I do and I had developed to help get better at my creativity to start to so I could quickly start to notice, what am I doing when I have good ideas? What am I doing when I have bad ideas and to be able to try to make this an exercise, it's something that's grown. And it's something that I now do with all of my teams. It's something that I'll even do for people whenever they come in for an interview. Because for me, I need people who can think the world is full of people who can make pretty pictures, I need people who can think and so that's my thing is to use this exercise to try to get to that. And so it's very, very simple. And it's something that I've always called Think fast. And what it is is just answering a very simple statement and the statement is why would a particular brand Build a particular product. And it's just that simple. It's just those two fill in the blanks. And what you do is you'll have, I usually do it as two stacks of cards. There's some times when I've done it with like two lines of numbers, and you pick a number from each line. But usually two stacks of cards is the easiest way that I found to do it. And so one stack of the cards is going to be all about brands. And these are going to be big global brands that everybody's going to know these are going to be the apples, the Nikes, the Tesla's the big ones, that everybody is going to understand what they do. The products then are going to purposely be, well, they're probably gonna be a little strange, you're gonna be a little funny, they're gonna be a little off the wall. Because what you want to do is you want to get a very interesting juxtaposition between a brand and a brand value that everybody understands and a product that makes no sense to go with it. And so what I do with this exercise is I give the people after they draw one brand card, and they've draw one product card. I give them one minute to think about, why would the brand that they just picked make the other product that they just picked So one minute to think about that, and then two minutes to pitch me on it to just really literally off the top of your head. Think about why is that something that somebody would want to do? I'll give you a few examples of it. One of them would be, why would a brand like Nike that everybody knows to just do it brand? Why would Nike make a gas can? So here again, the juxtaposition is purposely meant to be ridiculous. Why would Twitter will say make a lipstick and I'm actually sitting here drawing these cards as I'm doing this right now to try to work through this. Why would Audi make a swimming pool? Or it was funny, I actually interviewed somebody the other day, and they thought it'd be cute to turn it around and put it back on me to see if I could do it. They asked me why would Starbucks make tennis shoes? My answer to that was, okay. Well, you know, one of the big things that people are obviously focused on is health. Starbucks is liquid calories. And so if we're talking about liquid calories, and we're talking about health, tennis shoes would be a natural extension of that, that it would be something that they could pair with their app. So it's a wearable so that you'd be sure whenever you burned off the coffee that you drank that morning, maybe It would be something that it could also pair with that wearable so that it would know what your favorite coffee was, it could see where you were. And if I'm in New York City and I'm walking up to a Starbucks, it would know that the drink that I want takes five minutes to make. And I'm five minutes away so that whenever I show up, the coffee is going to be there, and it's going to be ready. I think you can keep going with this. But the thing is, it's not about a right answer. It purposely is absurd. It purposely is not meant to be something that there's going to be a right answer to, but the idea is for you to be able to kind of say, Okay, that was actually a pretty good solution that I had, like, I kind of like the Starbucks thing. What was I thinking about with that? And so for me, it was like it was thing about the brand and the product, and then, you know, what are the problems that that product probably has? And then how do I pair those problems with this potential solution of the sneakers to be able to do that? And then whenever I start to solve for that, okay, how can I build on that initial idea of being able to do it for exercise because that's the obvious health benefit. That's where I would start. Well, maybe the wearable in the ordering thing isn't such the obvious part of it. So for me, that's why I said is literally I can stop right after I do. I can deconstruct my process, I can say, okay, does this make sense? Is this something that was a good idea? In that case, the Starbucks one felt like, you know what, That one wasn't too bad. But how did I do it? It's this ability to just kind of quickly run through this, that will help you start to summon that creativity on demand. Because I think that's the other byproduct of this is the ability to be creative, on demand to be able to get much faster doing this. So you don't have to go through the process of figuring it out as much You don't have to take as long because that's the other part of it that comes with this is that if you start to become more creative, and you start to become that part of that essential asset, well, then all of a sudden, people start to want to put you in more meetings, all of a sudden, you're viewed as more of a leader. But with that comes the expectation that you can also create faster. And so with that, I think that this will be a good bridge and so that the next two episodes that we're going to talk about are actually going to be about that is that very thing, that idea of leadership, because I think with creativity is the foundation, leadership around this This is gonna be the other part of it. And we're gonna break this up into two parts. The first part is going to talk about you as a person, you as an individual, what do you need to do to become a better leader? And then after that we're going to talk about Okay, now that you've got yourself squared away, and that you understand what do you need to do to be a really good leader? And I'll give you a preview, there's gonna be no magic bullets there. Because the problem is that leadership and creativity both share the same problem. Is that okay, now that you have yourself together, how can you then start to lead other people, and because both of these things are very, very distinct challenges. So those would be the next two episodes that you're gonna see coming up in the queue on this. And before I go, I want to leave you with kind of just some recommended reading. One of the things that I really like to do is I love getting other opinions, I constantly study I constantly work this is why I work on my creative process for as long as I have. And so there are three books that I would actually recommend. I know that there are tons and tons on creativity, but I found that these are the three that are the best. I have them as required reading for most of my teams because I think that they really have value. And so the three of them will be the first one is Making ideas happen and it's called How to overcome the obstacles between vision and reality. This was written by somebody who I'm, I've always been very, very thankful to have. One of my friends is a guy named Scott Belsky. Scott founded the behance creative network went on to work at Adobe, recently went left there to go into the financial world as well. But Scott, honestly is probably the single smartest person that I know when it comes to understanding creativity. He has spent a lot of time working with and talking with the best creative teams in the world and really will back up that thought that creativity is really 99% perspiration 1% inspiration. And so this book really focuses on how to give you the structures around how to make all these ideas actually happen. And then it's a go to book for me it is one that I go out and read at least once a year just to be able to kind of get a refresher and keep myself grounded. The other two come from one of my other favorite authors and somebody who I also really, really love to see speak is the author Todd Henry. And so Todd's written two books that I think are really really relevant here. The first one is The book that he first had done which was the accidental creative, how to be brilliant at a moment's notice and I think this really ties into the theme that we talked about before about summoning your creativity on demand it is a fantastic book to again give you some of the the structures and some of the things around there that honestly I've just scratched the surface on here. The other book of his is die empty unleash your best work every day. And I think this really is about how do you get this work out. So now that you kind of like summoned and can understand how to tap into your process, how do you really get to kind of unleashing that and doing it every day. That'd be my recommended reading all I'll be happy to throw links to that and you can go buy them on Amazon in the show notes. So feel free to head over to my website to be able to check that out. Also just head over there if you want to see anything so I think if you want to look at old episodes if you want to look at other articles that I've written head on over to it Stephen Gates comm s t e p h e n gates like Bill Gates, and look if there's anything that you want to talk about, this is me standing in my studio talking to a microphone. I would like to try to make This dialog to try to make this a discussion. So if there's anything here that really resonated if there's anything that you think doesn't actually work, if there's something that you want me to go into in more detail, shoot me an email and send it to ask at Stephen Gates gates COMM And I'll cover it in a future show, I'd like to get to the place where we can do question shows, and I can talk back and be able to answer some of these things. So this really can be a discussion. I know, this tends to be a one way medium. But I'm the crazy person that wants to try to figure out how to make it into a conversation. And so with the usual legal disclaimer that all the views that I talked about here are my own, they don't represent any of my current or former employees. And so with that's it, I think that was most of my thoughts on creativity. As usual. Thanks for listening, and until next time, be sure to stay crazy