creative teams, surround yourself with progress

When you complete a list of action steps, your instinct might be to throw the list away. After all, the work is completed! However, some creative professional teams take a different approach; they relish their progress. Some go so far as surrounding themselves with it.The inspiration to brainstorm comes easy, but the inspiration to take action is rare. Especially for creative professionals, the constant flow of ideas is often the greatest inhibitor to making ideas happen.

Especially amidst heavy, burdensome projects with hundreds of action steps and milestones, it is emotionally invigorating to surround yourself with progress. Why throw away the relics of your achievements when you can create an inspiring monument to getting stuff done? A "Done! Wall" reminds you that you have moved forward in your journey.

Why not decorate your work space with completed action steps? While we tend to surround ourselves with art and imagery that serves to inspire us in our work, is it more inspiration that we need? Most creative professionals report that they are not short of ideas, but rather the discipline and organization to make them happen. For this reason, consider surrounding yourself with testaments to taking action.

There is no better push-towards-taking-action than action itself.

Share To Make Ideas Happen

The philosophy to "share ideas liberally" defies the age-old instinct to keep ideas secret. However, the creative person's tendency to jump from idea-to-idea-to-idea causes most ideas to die in isolation. Creative professionals should take every opportunity to communicate new ideas broadly, seek feedback, and develop a sense of accountability.Share your ideas liberally. The benefits from accountability and feedback outweigh the risk that someone steals your idea! Many productive creative professionals and entrepreneurs claim that they become more committed to their ideas after telling people about them! The fact is that great ideas are plentiful, and very few people have the discipline and resources to make them happen. When you feel accountable to others, you are more likely to stay focused.

Broadcast your idea to generate valuable feedback. Great ideas don't develop in isolation. You can become drunk on your own kool-aid without any candid feedback from others. A critical component of pushing ideas forward is gathering feedback to refine the idea.

Engage a few "partners" in every project. The more people you work with, the more pressure you will feel to provide further updates (and have some progress to report)! Why do publishers insist on offering advances to authors even when the author prefers to put off the advance in favor of a more lenient time schedule? The importance of deadlines has been a common theme across Behance's profiles of creative professionals. It is no surprise that novels are less likely to end up in a drawer, half-written, when there is an advance cashed and a deadline looming. Use other people and externally-generated deadlines as a way to boost your accountability!

Rely on Initiative, Not Experience

Companies are obsessed with resumes, constituents rely on credibility, and one’s past experiences are regarded as the best indication of future success. After all, what beats a great track record?However, the creative world and especially the history of breakthrough ideas suggest that initiative, not experience, is the best indicator of future achievement. Ideas require bold initiative to gain traction. We should think differently about the criteria we look for as we hire new employees and select new leaders.

What is initiative? Thomas Edison’s famous quote, 'success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration' delineates the central role of energy, leadership, and endurance in making ideas happen. Initiative is a bias-to-action. Those who take initiative possess tenacity and a healthy degree of impatience with idleness. Every team needs people that are able to jump in and get started, sometimes prematurely.

Hire based on initiative, not experience.
In the corporate world, it is all too easy to scan a resume and make assumptions based on past jobs and scholarly degrees. When our founder, Scott Belsky, worked at Goldman Sachs, he saw "more resumes with 4.0 GPA’s than there were job openings." Instead, when hiring people, his team looked for examples of candidates taking initiative in their interests. As he explains, "We would look for people who got involved and became leaders in things that they loved. It didn’t matter whether it was the sailing team or a campus newspaper, the fact that someone took extraordinary initiative was the best indicator that they would do the same in their future job."

People who dig deeply into their interests and naturally become leaders are likely to do so time and time again. Interestingly enough, the subject matter of past interests may be irrelevant.

The same argument could also be made when selecting (or electing) a leader. While the human tendency is to avoid risk and seek the most “experienced” candidate, perhaps one’s history of taking initiative should be the primary criteria?

Tips for Judging One’s Ability to Take Initiative:

• Look past the resume. Experience can certainly be the result of past initiative taken, but it can also be the result of mere circumstance.
• Initiative is the best indication of future initiative. Look for examples of leadership positions and “taking action” in a person’s history.
• Probe a candidate for their true interests, regardless of what they are, and then measure the extent to which the candidate pursued those interests.

When you stumble across a true "do-er," someone that has passion, generates ideas, and actually takes action, you must recognize your good fortune. Nothing will assist your ideas more than a team of people that are able to take initiative to make ideas happen.

Why Risk Is Worth It

Many of the strategies employed in competitive and recreational sports are applicable in business and our personal lives. One lesson I learned from alpine ski racing was the "40-30-30 Rule." During training, early on, I tried to go fast, and I also focused on not falling. On a ride up the ski lift, my coach told me I was missing the point. He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks.With ski racing, specifically, that meant taking the risk of leaning harder into turns, balancing at a steeper angle to the slope, and placing greater pressure on the outside ski edge – all of which increased the chance of falling. My coach explained, though, that if I wasn’t falling at least once a day in training, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Indeed, to improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Body builders call it the “pain period.” Only by trying something new, struggling, learning, and then trying again do we improve our performance. It’s a simple matter of acclimating to unchartered territory.

To improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone.

And when we come out the other side, we often can't help but wonder why we were so timid in the first place. Questioning this fear is not unfounded. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has shown that we deal with failure better than we'd expect. In studies, “when people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job… or fail a contest, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.” In other words, “we overestimate the intensity and duration of our distress in the face of future adversity.”

While we tend to focus solely on building our skill sets or expanding our knowledge, the greatest advancement and learning most often comes from action, experience, and taking risk. And our regrets in life reflect this. According to Gilbert, studies show that “in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.”

Although playing it safe makes sense in some professions such as financial services and healthcare, for our own creative development, we need to focus on the last 30%. Our inhibitions have evolved to protect us, but, in many cases, they limit us. The challenge is to rebalance our nature. Ultimately, it’s the ones who barrel through the discomfort, are resilient in the face of failure, and master the last 30% of taking risk who reach the highest levels of performance.

Be Solutionary, Not Revolutionary

When we sit down with a blank canvas or clean sheet of paper, we have the tendency to think big. We ask ourselves, “What can I think of that is new, surprising, transformational?”However, some of the greatest advancements across industries were not huge, singular achievements but rather incremental improvements. Even bold ideas such as online music stores, departures in architecture, and new genres of music were the result of new ideas refined over time. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. Google was not the first search engine. And the list goes on…

While logic should encourage us to improve what is around us, we still tend to think of innovation as creating something entirely new. Creative minds have the tendency to lose interest after the first implementation of a new idea. Marginal improvements are, frankly, less interesting for the cutting-edge creative. Nonetheless, incremental improvements often make up the difference between success and failure.

Creative minds have the tendency to lose interest after the first implementation of a new idea.

Especially productive creative teams are able to find excitement in solving problems both big and small, and in varying stages. It’s these accrued solutions that make up the distance between a new idea being created, and actually being adopted.

Leaders that focus on incremental progress – being “solutionary” rather than revolutionary – are the ones that truly push ideas to full fruition. Such behavior takes a tremendous amount of discipline. But with conviction and clearly defined goals, creative energy can be channeled to refine a good idea enough to make a great impact.

The next time you’re in “dreamer mode,” trying to conjure up something brilliant, challenge yourself to search for the little tweak that can make a big difference.