Success is never guaranteed. There are so many factors at play for our efforts to start to gain traction and birth momentum. Success, especially in creative matters, is not given, it is earned There is however an equation that can help position us for our best chance to succeed:

Vision + Ideation + Vulnerability +  Hustle + Perseverance = the launching pad.

• Vision – We have to have it. It may not always be ours, but we have to have vision. Without a clear vision of the why and the inspiration that vision brings there is no reason to get out of bed and try to make anything happen. Vision also breeds excitement and passion, two necessary ingredients for creating owners not renters of our initiative.
• Ideation – Develop the ideas that will propel the vision. Ideas are vehicles that make vision move.
• Vulnerability – It takes a healthy dose of vulnerability to share our ideas. Further, when we have vulnerability as part of our equation it creates space for authenticity to exist. Authenticity develops trust and in order to do anything of substance we have to trust the tools, people, and vision around us.
• Hustle – It takes a lot of work to be successful. Don’t buy the lie that overnight successes are just that…overnight. There is a lot of blood, sweat, tears, sacrifice, pain, joy, and emotion in every successful entity. Work, and creative work at that, is not sexy, rarely admired, and often detested. But, if you want success you have to be willing to do the things no one else will do. You have to care more about your project than anyone else. The minute someone else cares more than you do…you are sunk.
• Perseverance – Some days are great don’t get too high. Some days are awful don’t dip to low. Persevere. Stay on task. Don’t get distracted. Follow the plan, work the plan, stay on vision…the methodic march is more effective than sprinting for a day and being forced to rest for two. When we understand that we are running a marathon not a sprint we understand pacing and the need to respond to issues rather than reacting to them.

Then there is luck. Some people believe in it and some don’t but anything successful has to have the right environment around it. Time, market, team, audience, and a host of other “stars” have to align. Hopefully when they do, and they will for your entity, you have worked your equation and are ready to chase the momentum that they can create…the sail towards success.

At the end of the day, we need you to be successful. Its not a want…it’s a need. Are you ready?

I think we often confuse creativity and art.

Art is the expression of creativity. Its birthed from creativity and lives because of creativity. Likewise, artists are conduits for creativity. Still, art is not creativity.

Then, what is? I think creativity is_____:

• Simple
• How we solve problems
• How imagination comes to life
• A peak into the future
• Everywhere
• Never entitled
• A gift that’s respected
• Inspiring
• The ability to inspire
• The chance to bring clarity
• Beautiful, yet sometimes ugly
• Amazingly humbling
• Desperate for attention
• Desiring to be stretched
• Found in our intuition
• Teachable
• Confusing
• Abstract
• Comforting

Now it is your turn, what do you think creativity is? ___________

It is not easy to stay creative. We get busy. We have responsibilities. Life gets fast and intense. We want to create our best stuff, all the time, but it is not easy. Sometimes we need a little jump-start. Other times, we need to intentionally create just to stay fresh. Here are a few FREE ways to keep you creative:

• Stay alert – Look for creative inspiration. Look for things that spark an idea or your imagination. They may be anywhere. When we stay alert we identify the hidden nuggets of creative inspiration in the world around us.
• Write something down – Daily. Write down an idea or a thought, maybe a picture. Write it down and save it. If we don’t write ideas down we risk losing them. Are you willing to lose a unicorn if you could capture one?
• Take a picture – Every day. Take a picture of something. Taking pictures forces us to frame our world. It forces us to look at one area not the entire panoramic. Taking pictures gives us a lesson in composition of the world around us.
• Have a conversation – Talk to someone who agrees with you, someone who will disagree. Someone who challenges you and someone you can encourage. Conversations build community and community builds great art.
• Change positions – Find a different place or angle to work. New canvases create new opportunities for ideas.
• Get alone – Sometimes we have to get alone. Block out the noise and the distractions. Turn off email and twitter. Avoid Instagram. Find the screaming ideas that are hiding in the silence.
• Listen to something new/ different – Music we love can inspire us but so can music we don’t know. Change the soundtrack and adapt it to the mood you are in or the mood you need to get into.
• Don’t settle – Look at art you have created and find adjustments. What can you make better?
• Don’t quit – Ever. It is the only thing that will keep you from being your creative best. Quitting is the end goal of the resistance…don’t fall victim. Failure and setbacks can make you better. Tomorrow is only a day away…unless you quit.

What are some things you do to stay creative?

Art is not as easy as data.

Data is cold, lifeless, and not emotional. 
When criticism is aimed at data very quickly the truth is identified, evaluated, and then we move forward.

But art is connected to its creator…the artist. 
When we create art a small little piece of ourselves is connected to our art. When art is criticized it is easy to take it personally. When our art is questioned often we feel like our very worth is being called to task. It happens to the best of us. We all have moments when our emotions blur reality and we find ourselves so connected to what we make we can’t find the necessary separation for us to move forward. Criticism often cripples artists.

So how can we maximize criticism and keep it from destroying our passion? Here are 5 steps to help us handle when our art is criticized:

• Evaluate – Step back. Take a breath. What is being said? Could there be truth to the criticism? What if what is being said can actually make our art better? Finding the clarity to push back for a moment helps us filter what is being said and measure its validity.
• Adjust – Once we have evaluated the criticism we have to decide how we will adjust. Will we make adjustments, make a case for why we should not adjust, or improve to make things better.
• Transfer – Criticism can be some of the greatest fuel for better art. When we transfer criticism to motivation the challenge to better ourselves, our art, and these projects can propel us. When we avoid allowing criticism to bring us down, but rather use it to make us better, we can accomplish things that may never have happened had we not encountered the criticism in the first place.
• Remember – Even though it is hard to believe this, we have to remember that rarely is criticism personal. Most of the time criticism is passed in order to avoid mistakes not destroy the artist. Obviously this is not always true, but in most of our environments the truth that we find hard to believe is that criticism has little to do with us personally and more to do with getting things right.
• Learn – Take advantage of every piece of criticism. Learn from what is constructive and adapt to the alternative perspectives. When we learn from criticism we make ourselves better and avoid the chances of encountering the same criticism in the future.

As artists we create our best stuff when we are most emotionally connected. Criticism is never fun. It often hurts and rarely is fun but it is part of reality and it is going to happen from time to time. When it does, what are we going to do with it?

How do you best deal with criticism?

Photo Props:

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” - Anais Nin

We all have excess of something in our lives. Be it stress or peace, work or time, joy or misery, frustration or momentum…we all live in some type of excess.

Are we leveraging it to create art or allowing it to zap us from being our creative best?

Contrary to popular opinion we have the choice…choose wisely.

Leading our teams can be difficult.

As creative teams develop, especially when our teams include volunteers, there are a few things that we have to remember. It is as important for us to LEAD as it is to CREATE. The funny thing is, we are artists to and we still have to find ways to connect with our art.

Honestly, at times, life gets so busy that I go days without creating or touching anything really creative and I slip into management mode rather than creative leadership mode. Here are a few things I try to remember in these times:

• Seek Wisdom & Insight- Pray for it, ask questions, quiz people, study…while we feel we may not have the time to do this, if we don’t we wont be able to create.
• Intentionally create pockets to be creative and not to be a manager. Without these we will be more focused on decisions and meetings than we will be with art and moving our organizations forward.
• Don’t make promises for someone else – Only make promises based on what you can control. One of the most powerful ways to thin our attention is to have to cover promises we made for others. Managing expectations is vital because it forces honest conversations.
• Lead with vision – Lead with a vision to where we are going, not just where we are today.
• Explain the how and the why. How we will do this and why we need to do this.
• Delegate – Bottlenecks thin attention quickly. Diversity enhances creativity.
• Pick The Team – Surround yourself with high capacity people who carry the vision. When we see vision link address it immediately.
• Remain Skeptical Put Positive – Being skeptical, without being negative, is a trait that forces us into reality while living in a creative world.
• Encourage others. Encouraging forces us to refocus on positives and find things that are working.
• Remember we set the pace & the tone – Our teams watch us. We are setting the pace and we are also setting the tone. How we manage our emotions matters.
• Fight for what matters. – And let the stuff that does not matter go. It’s not worth it.
• Control What You Can Control – When we worry about stuff that is outside of our control it only breeds frustration.
• Find solutions not just problems.
• Find a system that works then use it – Systems can help us carry the heavy lifting.
• Embrace failure. The feeling of failure sucks, but if we fail by being audacious it is worth failing to get things right.
• Always be looking for a new or better way. Fall in love with the message not the method.
• Protect your team but be honest with them even if it hurts.

I am tired of not creating our best art because of pace and system. We can do better. Personally, I am committing to it…how about you?

There are so many more important aspects of leading creative people, but these are a few we are working on right now…what are some of yours?

Photo Props

We all desire to work in a perfect world. Unfortunately, we live in a NOT PERFECT WORLD.

So what can we do? We can:

• Get upset
• Make excuses
• Quit
• Complain
• Not deliver our best work
• Sulk
• _________ (fill in the blank)

OR, we can:

• Use the imperfections as a challenge
• Find solutions
• Make the best of our situation
• Control what we can control
• Keep pushing and striving for “better” stuff
• Accept the reality in front of us
• Do our best
• Fight for excellence
• Figure it out

A Perfect World does not exist. It never will. If we’re waiting on perfect world to arrive, we are going to be sadly disappointed.

Today, use your challenges to motivate yourself and your time. Find a way to make the most of what you have in front of you and create your best art – or the best art possible. How you approach these issues will dictate the culture and the mood around our teams, our art, and our opportunities.

What kind of world are you looking waiting for?

Photo Props:

John Wooden, the hall of fame basketball coach, once said: “If I am through learning, I am through.” Some of our most important creative lessons live right in front of us but we’re often too busy to pay attention. These lessons help us continue to grow. If we’re not growing, we’re shrinking – there’s no neutral. So what does this look like?

• 1. Stay in a posture of learning. If we’re not adding information, data, and “new” to our toolboxes, we’ll get stale and our creative energy will evaporate. Without new lessons, exposure, and experiences, we will only be able to stretch to the level at which we’ve already learned and experienced. We will become recyclers, not creators. We have a chance to change the world, but the world can only be changed by the amount of knowledge we mix with our creative muscle. Innovation lives in that tension. When we stop learning, we stunt our creative growth.
• 2. Work for greatness. Greatness and perfection are different. Strive, sacrifice, and battle for the greatest art that can be created. Understand that we don’t live in a perfect world and that excuses get in our way. Greatness – our best – is not only attainable, it’s necessary. Sometimes the factors around our art, the forces at play, and the imperfections impact the ways we create and actually make our art better and more human. We are all broken people full of imperfections. Why would we expect our art to be any less beautiful than our broken best?
• 3. Find community. It is important to be in relationships with people who you are developing and with people who are developing you. Without community, we never will have a chance to collaborate and create outside of ourselves. Community makes creativity better and confronts the insecurities that surround our art and ideas. Creativity in community makes us better artists and positions our art to have more reach, influence, and completion.
• 4. Be humble. Be bold. We should always be humble and teachable. Our best art tends to be bigger than who we are. We should be confident in the gifts we have and the creative muscle we have developed. When presenting and sharing ideas, we should be bold – but only mixed with equal part humility. There is an equation about talent that goes like this: people will put up with a jerk who has talent only as long as their talent is greater than the amount of trouble they cause. Without humility, the scales will tilt and our talent isn’t enough to carry us. People like to work with people who are confident, but more so with people who they like. Be bold in what you can do and humble enough to realize there is always someone better.
• 5. Date Your Artist. Get time alone. Do things that refuel you creatively. Make sure you are managing yourself creatively as much as possible. Creativity is a muscle, not magic. There are times to exercise and times to rest. Do the things necessary to be your creative best. If you don’t take care of your inner artist, who will?
• 6. Pick Your Spots. Pay attention. Know when to take risks and when you shouldn’t leverage equity. Experimentation is a good idea some times, but there are other moments when those same experiments can destroy the greater good you’re working for. When we pick our spots, we take into account all the necessary data to create momentum and energy around our ideas. Take risks…just learn to take them at the right times.
• 7. Stay flexible. Change is our only constant. Being flexible allows us to adapt to changing ideas, climates, markets, and organizations. Flexibility can be hard for us because we fall in love with our ideas. We must remember that our message is always more important than our method. Flexibility helps us deliver our best based on the latest information.
• 8. Don’t settle. We know what good looks like and what great feels like. Work for the great. Don’t be satisfied. Learning to get better with each project makes us better artists. Without challenges, we won’t continue to grow. Seek challenges. Look for them everywhere. Fabricate them, if necessary. Challenges keep us from settling.

Are you growing or shrinking creatively?

Excuses are expensive. They keep us from doing our best work. They cost us time, resources, and opportunities. Benjamin Franklin once said: “He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” Creativity can sometimes be daunting and there are times we all look for reasons NOT to be our creative best. Here are 25 lies we believe and present as excuses:

• 1. We do the things we do because it’s what we have always done.
• 2. “That’s not how we do things.”
• 3. We believe vision is not clear.
• 4. We have no urgency.
• 5. We allow our attention to detail to drift.
• 6. We have “too much to do.”
• 7. We believe the lie that “My boss won’t let me,” even if we haven’t asked.
• 8. “They” wont like it.
• 9. We’re not empowered to do “it.”
• 10. There’s no trust.
• 11. We lack the desire to take a risk.
• 12. There’s not enough money, time, or people.
• 13. Assumptions instead of innovation.
• 14. Fear.
• 15. No one has done this before.
• 16. Everyone’s doing this.
• 17. Insecurity.
• 18. “Not my job.”
• 19. I don’t have the authority.
• 20. Rules & procedures.
• 21. Lack of encouragement.
• 22. No teamwork.
• 23. Too many meetings, emails, or tweets.
• 24. Fear of trends.
• 25. Low morale.

Excuses cost us too much. Change starts with us. We can stop the excuses and work to change the culture around us.

What are some of the excuses that you fight?