So we talked about how the creative process isn't just one insight, and then it ends there, right? If only. Archimedes can jump out of a bathtub, but then he has to actually do the work involved in collecting those insights and pursuing them to the point of reaching an invention or an enlightenment. So here we really want to talk about all of the adversity that can occur in this creative process. There are bumps in the road. You have to persist. You can't give up at the first bump. You've got to keep going. Right, and maybe we can even learn from those bumps in the road and profit from adversity and view it as an opportunity. So one question that arises is, why do people persist? Yeah, and then how, right? Yeah. So why do we put up with all that trouble? Then what can we do to make it easier and maybe less adverse so that we accomplish creative pursuits rather than fail along the way? Right, so that's the creative journey. So creativity doesn't just happen in easy flashes of insight. In fact, it feels a lot more like a grind than people appreciate. Part of that is because the ideas get rejected, right? Yeah. So it's not as if I generate a great idea and the world, just goes, "Oh, amazing. We'll take it." So there are so many great examples of this. I think it really helps to think about very creative ideas that we know now to be really important that were often rejected. So one example would be Stephen King's first novel, Carrie. People probably don't know that it was rejected 30 times. In fact, Stephen King gave up on it. He threw it away, right? Yeah, he threw it out. His wife actually fished it out of the trash. So thanks to her, we have it. Yeah, and his career, right? Right. Yeah. All that follows from that first success. He could have given up on that first book. So persistence is key. We get that from everyone. Harry Potter is the more contemporary example that people talk about, right? Yeah. That was, I think at least 20 publishers rejected that. So rejection is part of it. Part of the problem is that creative ideas are initially untested and unproven, and so you're dealing in the realm of uncertainty, and so there are a lot of examples of [inaudible]. No one knows, right? Right. No one knows if it's a good idea or not. Every major invention has this, right? Yeah. So you hear about the telephone, right? Yeah. The initial rejection was they just don't see any use for the telephone. It has too many problems to ever be useful to Western Union. This was from their internal communication. Other examples like, for example, when people heard the idea of introducing sound into movies. The initial response was, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" That's another very famous one. Spoken like a director. Another one of my favorites, and we just ran through these all, David. I think they're funny and worth thinking about. Remember, the head of Microsoft basically said the iPhone is going to be worthless and a flop, right? Right. So every major invention that we see, somebody is saying, "This will never work. Why would we ever want one of those?" Right, and so we initially have to persist through that period of uncertainty to get our ideas heard. Yeah. They're going to be rejected because we don't know about them yet. You have to keep going. Creativity is also a journey, maybe even a grind because creativity doesn't involve just one idea. It involves potentially multiple ideas that are generated and integrated over time. A great story that illustrates this is from Gordon Gould who explained how he invented the laser. By his account, it just flashed into his head as a moment of insight one Saturday night, and he just saw the whole picture of how to build a laser all at once. But he was quick to point out though, that that one moment of insight, even though it was quick, came about after 20 years of hard work in two very different fields, physics and optics. Only by working through the problems in each of those fields and then combining them, did he really reach that one moment of insight that seemingly occurred out of nowhere. I think it's also telling that he talked about all of those ideas like separate bricks that had to be arranged in just the right way. So sometimes there's a temptation to focus on the end results of that insight that occurs easily and out of nowhere. But in reality, it's the combination of many different ideas and changes in perspectives that have to be combined. So again, creativity is not just one idea, it's many ideas. So creativity evolves over time and takes us in directions we couldn't even have imagined from the starting point. So that could be in the course of one particular product or invention. It can also be over the long haul of multiple inventions, multiple products, multiple stories joining together into a larger story. So for example, 3M, so the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company, that's where it got its name, 3Ms. It started out in 1902, I think, as a mining company that sold a popular mineral to grinding wheel manufacturers. From that mineral, then they began selling sand paper, and then tape, and then more kinds of tape, first masking tape and then clear tape, and now they sell 55,000 different products including everything from car care products to touch screens. The point is that where you start may be pretty far away from where you end up as one idea leads to another idea, leads to another idea, and there you have it. Take a different example. David McConnell started Avon in 1886. He was a door-to-door book salesmen, a job that had already been around, but he had trouble selling books. Then he realized he could get attention of the people he was visiting at their homes by offering them perfume samples. But soon, it was the perfume sample and not the book that sold, and as a result, he founded the California Perfume Company in New York, and eventually turned into Avon. So the point is you don't really know where you're going to end up based on where you're starting. Honda, for example, came into the American market with motorcycles, and they tried to build a giant, big, heavy, powerful motorcycle, and it turns out no one was particularly interested in those. But everybody loved the tiny scooters they brought and wanted to buy those from Honda that they weren't planning to only use for their own employees. Again, you don't know where it's going to take you, you have to be open and flexible to where the journey goes. Even within a single story, even within a single project, creativity can be a journey. It may take more than one insight, it may take more than one invention even to continue with a single story. So I'll give you just one example. This is a story from Linda Putnam, who's a wonderful researcher of conflict resolution and negotiation. She tells the story about a school board that was working with a teachers union to try and figure out a new way forward. You can think about this as any negotiation context. But they were trying to figure out how to manage pay differences across teachers. So the teachers union was asking for a pay raise and the school board was trying to unsurprisingly limit the amount of additional funding that they needed to provide to teachers. They had a fairly stiff argument about that. Then what they did is they had an insight, they realized this wasn't just teachers asking for more money, what was really happening was that it was a collection of teachers who served as coaches for teams or otherwise were coaching clubs or activities around the school. What they had noticed was that some of those teachers were underpaid relative than others. That really shifted the school board's perspective because they realized it wasn't changing base salaries for teachers, it was changing compensation for after-school activities or club leadership. So that was the first shift. Further conversation evolved after that, and they then realized that the real issue was that the difference in pay for teachers who were coaching a team or leading a club was that the men seem to be getting paid more than the women. As a result, it was really a matter of defining what are the kinds of investments that you might make when you're leading a team or coaching a club that require a more pay versus less pay? It may take a lot of work to be, I don't know, a football coach or a volleyball coach, and it may take less work to be, say, the person in charge of the chess team. But the logic here is that they started off with more pay and then they got to gender disparities and payments, and then finally, they resulted in a new guideline and policy around what time commitments and what activities were worthy of more pay and which ones required maybe less pay. So even within a single negotiation, even just talking about a single issue, there were multiple insights along the way leading ultimately to the agreement that resulted from the end of this teacher union and school board negotiation. You can imagine that that could happen in any context, whether you're developing a new product, whether you're designing a new service, whether you're negotiating a contract, or whatever else. The first insight might get you a little way, the second one may help you get even farther, a third one may be off course, and the fourth one might get you across the line. There's a journey, there's a story even within a given project. It doesn't have to be one insight and done. We've seen that creativity doesn't really have a beginning and an ending, it's really a moving target in a lot of ways. That even if we settle on a creative idea, the world changes, our perspectives have to change, and so the process just continues to unfold over time. If we can change our perspective, and in so doing, change our goal, change what we think we're doing, change who we think we are, then this could morph into something very different. That to me implies that we have to get used to being in the middle of the process rather than thinking it's going to start and end and then we'll be done. The bad news is though, as we'll see, the process isn't always fun, there are bumps in the road, so we'll turn now to what those bumps are and how do we deal with them. Right, and persisting.
