If you can make value out of nothing, you will always be valuable.
Just like a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day, everyone gets two brilliant ideas in their lifetime. They’ll hit you in the shower, or just before you go to bed. A connection is made that seems utterly original, you’ll feel literally lit up the adrenaline of this moment. It’s the lightbulb going off that you’ve seen in cartoons made real, and won’t be able to write this idea down fast enough. It’s a rush like no other, and I know it well because for the past 20 years, it’s been my day job to make myself feel like that.
It’s a career that’s dropped me amongst the world's best creative agencies and thinkers, let me collaborate with Academy Award winning filmmakers and Emmy Award winning comedians. Meet founders who have actually made the world a better place through their grit and ingenuity. Musicians, technologists, activists, authors, illustrators, and even doctors.
One of the common traits of the very talented creatives I’ve worked with is that they have absolutely no idea where their ideas or creative abilities come from. So from the earliest start of my career, as someone with more enthusiasm than talent, I watched, observed, and noted down anything that might help me think a little more broadly, or faster, or come at things in a fresh way. My motivation was probably that of any other creative person, I was merely battling my imposter syndrome and hoping I was contributing enough to be asked back the next day.
The note-taking never stopped. But what did stop after a while, was my anxiety around being in a situation where I was asked to find an answer to something without having any idea of what that answer might be until I start looking.
How I lost that anxiety wasn't a light bulb moment, it was a slow humbling process of trial and error, epic failures, and little by little, increments of success.
What I worked out was this:
Creativity is a totally internal process that draws on an individual's personal experiences, internal wiring and abilities to sit in ambiguity, making themselves vulnerable. It’s a messy and imperfect process that doesn’t really adhere to any rules that we can pin down. That’s why we love to celebrate the finished product, the glowing outcome, the punchline while ignoring the toil of what got us there.
I have learned that the magic is in the making. As Noah Yuval Harari so elegantly said in his book Sapiens. We are this remarkable species that can conjure up things that don’t exist, and then by collectively agreeing to them, make them real. Money, marriage, culture, language, and religion are all just concepts.
Creativity is what makes us human, and it’s the closest thing we have to real magic in this world.
That’s the emotional way of framing it.
Here’s another way of framing it. Creativity is the most valuable meta-skill and unfair advantage you have in a world where everything is being commoditised and automated.
That world is already here with ChatGPT and Midjourney being the first wave of AI tools that many will dismiss, and some will master.
Pre-pandemic I hosted the Australian and New Zealand meet-up at SXSW Interactive in Austin Texas, and have been a serial visitor to this epicentre focused on the future of creativity, work and everything that's coming over the horizon.
And although no one saw this pandemic coming, what's been keenly observed is that it’s jumped us 5 years into the digital future of remote work, decentralised collaboration, changes in how we connect, how we educate, how we everything. If it can be automated it will be, so if you are a lawyer, an accountant there's a very real chance that your job won’t be needed when all legislation and economic activity is captured on the blockchain. As lockdowns taught us, what we will need are the carers, the carriers, and particularly, those who can adapt and see the opportunity to make a better future in this massive change, the creatives.
Put simply If you can make value out of nothing, you will always be valuable.
You just need to know where to look.
I have a 45 minute keynote that previews how we might need to change how we solve business and communications problems.
Get in touch if you’d like to know more.
Ben Keenan. Jan 23.
