Are Your Parents (or Another Emotional Barrier) Holding Back Your Creativity?

Stuckness—it’s every creatives nightmare. And when it comes, we tend to blame ourselves (mightily). Yet the real problem is often something surrounding the creative process—rather than the process itself.

In a piece describing the many species of creative block, Mark McGuinness writes about the emotional barriers that can hold us back:

Creativity can be intense. Faced with the unknown, you may be scared of what you’ll discover or reveal about yourself. Maybe your subject matter is painful, embarrassing, or downright weird. Whatever you’re trying to avoid, the only end product is procrastination.

When I was a student, the novelist John Fowles spoke at my college. When somebody asked if he had any advice for young writers, he talked about feeling embarrassed about the sexual content of some of his novels when he imagined his parents reading them. In the end he burst through the barrier by mentally shouting, “Fuck my parents!” as he sat down to write.

Give yourself permission to write, draw, or otherwise express whatever comes out—on the understanding that you will not make it public, at least for a while. Privacy will make it easier to get the draft version done. Then take a break before deciding whether you want to show it to an audience.

This is an excerpt from Manage Your Day-to-Day , the new book from 99U, with contributions from Mark McGuinness, Gretchen Rubin, Dan Ariely, Seth Godin, Steven Pressfield, and many more.

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The Creative Benefits of Split Personalities

In his wildly popular 2006 TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson defined creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Aside from being wonderfully succinct, this definition implies that any creative enterprise requires two key phases:

Phase 1: Coming up with an original idea

Phase 2: Taking a hard look at that original idea and assessing its value

So to be a successful creative, you need to not only be a good generator, but also a good evaluator. The problem is that in practice, it’s remarkably hard to be both. And the reason for that has everything to do with your motivational focus – how you think about the goal you are pursuing when working on a creative project. One kind of focus heightens your creativity, while a different focus gives you the analytical tools you need to assess your work. The good news is that you can actually shift yourself from one focus to the other in order to bring your best game during each phase of the creative process.

When you see your goal as an opportunity to advance – to gain something, or to end up better off – you have what psychologists call a promotion focus. This focus has been shown to be highly conducive to creative insight. For instance in one study, when asked, “How many uses can you think of for a brick?,” promotion-focused participants were more quickly able to go beyond the obvious (e.g., pave a sidewalk, use as a paperweight) to the clever and original (e.g., use it to commit burglary by breaking through windows, or to turn off your TV – assuming you don’t ever want to turn it on again.) This is the focus you want when you heading into a job interview, or brainstorming options for a new ad campaign.

Promotion focus causes you to have a more exploratory information-processing style, and greater comfort with risk, which facilitate creativity. The promotion-focused worry less about every idea being perfect or even feasible, so they are open to more possibilities. Unfortunately, the downside of promotion focus is that while it may be great for creative idea generation, research suggests that it’s not well-suited to creative idea evaluation. So there is another kind of focus you should adopt to get that particular job done.

When you see your goals as opportunities not to gain, but to avoid danger and keep things running smoothly, you have what’s called a prevention focus. This focus makes you more analytical, more cautious, and more sensitive to potential flaws or weaknesses in an idea. Prevention focus is unlikely to lead you to creative insight – in fact, it is likely to block creative insight from happening in the first place. You definitely don’t want to be prevention-focused when you are trying to generate ideas. But switching to a prevention focus after you’ve come up with some options will help you to more easily tell a workable idea from one that will never get off the ground.

In my new book Focus, I describe many techniques for shifting from one focus to the other – but here’s one that works brilliantly:

Phase 1: Creative idea generation

Get your Promotion Hat on by taking a few moments to think about what you will gain from successfully completing your project. What good things will happen? What are the rewards? How will you be better off? It can help to actually write a short paragraph to really get into focus and, as Charlie Sheen might say, access the right set of mind tools. The next thing you know, you’ll be feverishly scribbling all your awesome new ideas onto cocktail napkins.

Phase 2: Creative idea evaluation

Now it’s time to take a breath and put your Prevention Hat on. To do this, think about what you will lose if you don’t successfully complete your project – what will the negative consequences be? How will you be worse off if you fail? (I know – this doesn’t sound fun. I never said prevention focus was fun. But it is really effective.)

Looking again at your cocktail napkins with your prevention focus, you’ll be able to see much more clearly which ideas probably won’t work, which ones can’t possibly work, and which ones appear to be mustard stains. The ones that still seem promising, even while wearing a Prevention Hat, are probably gold.

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Bring Sanity to Your To-Do List With the 1-3-5 Rule

“Here’s the gist: On any given day, assume that you can only accomplish one big thing, three medium things, and five small things, and narrow down your to-do list to those nine items.” – The 1-3-5 Rule

Prioritizing work is like making a sandwich; everyone does it slightly differently and everyone thinks they know best. If your go-to strategy hasn’t been working recently or you’ve never settled on a way to prioritize the multitude of things you have to do in a day, you should try the 1-3-5 rule.

The basic idea is that you pick 1 “big” task, 3 “medium” tasks, and 5 “little” tasks to accomplish in a day. One of the biggest causes of work stress is dealing with long-term projects that suddenly end up behind schedule because they were never urgent enough to get on your radar. By prioritizing ahead of time and making sure some of those long-term projects that just love to go forgotten get on the list you can make major strides in reducing your stress at work.

At the very least, you’ll know what to work on each day and 9 tasks a day, every day, is a whole lotta forward progress.

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Be Accountable: How to Deliver an Authentic Apology to Your Clients

When. Not if. There will come a time (probably several times) in your career when you make a huge mistake. You’ll drop the ball on a client project, blank on something important, or hand in work missing essential parts. A project will be screwed irreparably. You’ll feel the weight of your boss’s scepter. You will let someone down.

Sarah Bray knows the feeling. She runs A Small Nation, a company that helps other businesses attract an engaged audience and build their own small nations. I asked her about a time when she had to apologize to a client.

During coding on one of her projects, Sarah’s client was “really frustrated with the experience they had had with one of my employees…the client was actually holding back on communicating what they really wanted because they felt like a nuisance.” In the end, the client felt they were treated poorly and didn’t end up getting the work they expected.

“So I got a really long, fiery email that had obviously been simmering under the surface for a long time,” Sarah continued. “They didn’t want a resolution. They wanted to be heard, and maybe a little bit of revenge.”

Client communication can be tricky. There’s no method to completely eradicate miscommunication or mistakes. We strive for excellent creative work. We seek productivity and close relationships with our clients, but problems will always arise. It’s wise to learn this skill early: how to say, “I’m sorry.”

The good news is that we see public examples of apologies every day. Pop stars and athletes and CEOs are constantly apologizing for their transgressions.

The bad news is so few public apologies feel genuine, but rather carefully weighted PR moves to brush aside negative attention. An apology doesn’t work unless there’s a dose of humility attached to it.

So what’s the best way to approach a blunder and apologize for it?

First remember, your mistake probably feels bigger than it actually is. Any tough conversation comes with a fear of the unknown. Mulling over your mistake has probably magnified its importance. Relax.

Apologize personally, with humility, respect, and honesty. Don’t bullshit. Speak as a humble person, preferably face-to-face and using personal language. It’s important to actually say the words “sorry” or “apologize” and provide a clear, succinct indication of exactly what you’re apologizing for.

In the case with Sarah’s client, she says she apologized right away: “My immediate response was to email back and say that I was so sorry, and then I scheduled a phone call. Once we got on the phone, they were actually really nice about the whole thing — they felt bad about sending that email.”

Wording your apology plainly helps. Here’s an example: “I know I really screwed up here, and I know I made you and your team look bad in the process. I want to apologize personally and figure out a way to turn it around. Are you open to talking about that?”

An apology doesn’t work unless there’s a dose of humility attached to it.

Don’t make excuses. There’s probably an excellent and valid reason for your mistake. Now’s not the time to explain it. Take full responsibility without caveats. It’s the only way to begin to build back trust.

Try not to pay the blame forward. Speaking of responsibility, how many apologies have you heard in your life that start, “I’m sorry that you feel…”? Blaming your client, or anyone else, for an emotion they’re having just puts the onus of the problem on them. Start to repair the situation by shouldering the full blame for your part in making the other person feel a certain way.

Be explicit about a solution. Sarah offered her client “ten hours of billable time for free, and to personally take care of any of the changes they needed.” Once you’ve admitted culpability and taken responsibility, it’s time to do what you can to fix it. Come up with a swift and actionable solution that you can undertake now.

Being a responsible person means taking accountability when you screw up, even if it tarnishes your reputation in the short term. The bright side is that everyone’s fallible; you might even come out of your mistake with a closer and more meaningful relationship.

-

Over to you:

What mistakes have you made, and how did you apologize?

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9 Questions To Ask About Your Social Media Addiction

Social media teaches us to take a reactive stance. Just log onto Twitter or Facebook and the information streams in incessantly. You could spend your entire lifetime (and then some) just replying to other peoples’ updates. But if we want social media to truly serve us, we need to start taking a more mindful approach to how we use it.

In our new 99U book, Tiny Buddha’s Lori Deschene offers up a handful of hard-hitting questions we should all be asking ourselves:

• Is it necessary to share this? Will it add value to my life and for other people?


• Can I share this experience later so I can focus on living it now?


• Am I looking for validation? Is there something I could do to validate myself?


• Am I avoiding something I need to do instead of addressing why I don’t want to do it?


• Am I feeling bored? Is there something else I could do to feel more purposeful and engaged in my day?


• Am I feeling lonely? Have I created opportunities for meaningful connection in my day?


• Am I afraid of missing out? Is the gratification of giving in to that fear worth missing out on what’s in front of me?


• Am I overwhelming myself, trying to catchup? Can I let go of yesterday’s conversation and join today’s instead?


• Can I use this time to simply be instead of looking for something to do to fill it?

This is an excerpt from Manage Your Day-to-Day , the new book from 99U, with contributions from Lori Deschene, Gretchen Rubin, Scott Belsky, Seth Godin, and many more.

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Introducing the New Book from 99U: “Manage Your Day-to-Day”

Are you putting off your most important creative work day after day, as you fend off a constant stream of emails, interruptions, and urgent requests? Is your adrenaline and anxiety regularly running high, while your sense of meaningful accomplishment is running low?

It’s time for a reality check about the way we’re working. Our current model is frantic, stressful, and just plain unproductive when it comes to the things that matter most. Beyond that, it just doesn’t serve our creativity.

To help us all recalibrate our workflow for sanity, sustainability, and meaningful productivity, we at 99U decided to create a smart, succinct book about how to manage your daily workflow that’s specifically tailored to creative minds.

Essential best practices for producing great work in a mixed-up, crazy-busy, information-addled world.

I’m incredibly excited to introduce Manage Your Day-to-Day, the first book in a new 99U series which assembles insights around four key skill sets that we believe are essential to success: building a rock-solid daily routine, taming your tools (before they tame you), finding focus in a distracted world, and sharpening your creative mind.

Dedicating a chapter to each of these focus areas, we invited 20 incredible creative minds to share their expertise, including:

• Seth Godin


• Stefan Sagmeister


• Tony Schwartz


• Gretchen Rubin


• Dan Ariely


• Steven Pressfield


• Scott Belsky


• James Victore


• & many more

The result is a tightly-edited collection of best practices that will help you shift your mindset, recalibrate your workflow, and push more incredible ideas to completion.

It’s not just a book, it’s a wake-up call for your creativity.

—

–> Pre-order “Manage Your Day-to-Day”

–> Learn more about the book

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Why Working Everyday Is A Good Idea

Why wait for the muse when you could be churning out product? It’s not a very romantic notion, but many of the most effective writers/painters/inventors work every single day—even if it’s only for a few minutes.

Here’s what bestselling author Gretchen Rubin has to say about the power of frequency in our new 99U book:

Frequency keeps ideas fresh. You’re much more likely to spot surprising relationships and to see fresh connections among ideas if your mind is constantly humming with issues related to your work. when I’m deep in a project, everything I experience seems to relate to it in a way that’s absolutely exhilarating. The entire world becomes more interesting. That’s critical, because I have a voracious need for material, and as I become hyperaware of potential fodder, ideas pour in. By contrast, working sporadically makes it hard to keep your focus. It’s easy to become blocked, confused, or distracted, or to forget what you were aiming to accomplish.

Frequency keeps the pressure off. If you’re producing just one page, one blog post, or one sketch a week, you expect it to be pretty darned good, and you start to fret about quality. I knew a writer who could hardly bring herself to write. When she did manage to keep herself in front of her laptop for a spate of work, she felt enormous pressure to be brilliant; she evaluated the product of each work session with an uneasy and highly critical eye. She hadn’t done much work, so what she did accomplish had to be extraordinarily good. Because I write every day, no one day’s work seems particularly important. I have good days and I have bad days. Some days, I don’t get much done at all. But that’s okay, because I know I’m working steadily. My consequent lack of anxiety puts me in a more playful frame of mind and allows me to experiment and take risks. If something doesn’t work out, I have plenty of time to try a different approach.

This is an excerpt from Manage Your Day-to-Day , the new book from 99U, with contributions from Gretchen Rubin, Dan Ariely, Seth Godin, Stefan Sagmeister, and many more.

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The Abstraction Method of Problem Solving

Everyone has heard the phrase, “losing sight of the forest for the trees.” The idea behind this metaphor is that when you are too close to something, you can get mired in the details and have difficulty focusing on the way those details fit together into a big picture.

During the past 10 years, psychologists Yaacov Trope, Nira Liberman, and their colleagues have provided a lot of evidence for what they call “construal level theory:” The closer you are to an object or event, the more specifically you think about it. While the more distant you are to that object or event, the more abstractly you think about it. This idea has important implications for your creativity.

Every object or event in the world can be thought of in many ways. Take the four-legged beast you see walking down the street on a leash, it could be thought of as:

• Fluffy the poodle who lives next door (very specific)


• a French poodle (slightly less specific)


• a dog (a bit more abstract)


• an animal (more abstract)


• a thing (very abstract)

This ability to think of things at different levels of specificity applies to events and goals as well. If you pick up the phone to call a client to try to make a sale, you could think of this very abstractly (engaging in a relationship), less abstractly (working on a sales call) or even quite specifically (holding the phone to your ear and talking).

The second half of construal level theory is that your tendency to think of something either abstractly or specifically depends on your distance from it. Distance can refer to physical distance, social distance, or even distance in time. For example, the classic New Yorker magazine cover of the New Yorker’s view of the world reflects this concept. In this cover, the island of Manhattan is shown in great detail, then there is a strip labeled New Jersey, and the rest of the country occupies about as much space as New Jersey does. That is, the more physically distance there is to an item, the fewer details you use to think about it.

Getting Distance

A similar thing happens with other kinds of distance. When you think about an event happening to yourself, you tend to focus on all of the details. The actions you have to take, the interactions you have with other people, the time it takes to make something happen. When you think about the same event happening to someone else, you focus more broadly on the outcomes without thinking about how it happened.

That is one reason why we believe so strongly that people’s abilities are the results of their talent. A great musician puts on a wonderful performance on stage. You focus on their clear ability to play their instrument, but you do not think about all of the years of practice that musician has put in to develop the skill displayed on stage. You ignore all of this work, because of the social distance between you and the musician on stage.

Distance in time works the same way. When an event is far away in time, you focus on general characteristics like how much fun the event will be, or the reasons why you want to attend that event. As the event gets closer, though, you begin to think about all of the ways that event will interfere with your daily life. That is why you often agree to do things far in advance, and then regret agreeing to them in the moment.

You focus on their clear ability to play their instrument, but you do not think about all of the years of practice that musician has put in to develop the skill displayed on stage.

If you are in a situation in which you need to display some creativity, you can use this relationship between distance and abstractness to your advantage:

CD Players, iPods, & Abstraction

Often, it is hard to come up with creative solutions to problems, because you get mired in the details of the problem you are solving. Those details will often lead you to think about solutions to the specific problems that arise, rather than rethinking the problem altogether. In the 1990s, for example, many companies created portable CD players people could carry with them as an evolution of the portable cassette tape players that preceded them. The difficulty with CD-players is that they would skip whenever the player got jostled.

Early on, people treated CD players as if they were like cassette players or record players, because those were the specific precursors to the portable CD player. Consequently, most of the early solutions to the problem of skipping CDs involved adding more shock absorption into the portable player. That would prevent the laser from losing its place on the disc. By thinking more abstractly about CD-players, though, people began to treat them as computer media rather than like cassettes or records. That shifted the solution to the problem of skipping from creating shock absorbers to reading ahead in the computer file and buffering the music. That is, thinking about the problem more abstractly changed the nature of the solutions to that problem.

Solving Problems

To help yourself think about a problem you are solving more abstractly, it is useful to give yourself some distance from that problem. There are several ways to create that distance. Imagine that you are solving the problem for someone else rather than for yourself. Think about what the solution to the problem will look like 5 years in the future rather than right now. Think about how people 1000 miles away might be conceptualizing the problem. Each of these methods helps to create some distance, and that can help you focus on the more abstract parts of the situation.

After you re-think the problem, though, it is important to focus on the details again. So, once you have an insight that changes the way you think about the problem, focus on it close up again. In that way, you can ensure that the solution you develop will also address the little things that can make the difference between success and failure.

-

How about you?

Have you ever solved a tough problem by getting some distance? What happened?

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Long-Term Focus Can Boost Productivity

“One strategy that caught my attention: he confines his deep work to long, uninterrupted bursts.” — Cal Newport

Cal Newport interviews a professor who separates his year of work into separate themes. In the fall and winter he generates and discusses ideas with his classes and then uses the rest of the year to write papers based on those ideas. By splitting his two work modes, generating ideas and writing, he can focus completely on the task at hand. Eliminating distractions and truly focusing on your work is typical productivity advice. However, he expands this idea to cover a longer time span, focusing on one mode of work for months at a time.

You may not have that kind of control over your work, but what if you adopted this idea on a more limited basis? Early in the week you focus on idea generation and later in the week you execute those ideas. Or, maybe you spend the first week every other month solely committed to generating and developing new projects and the rest of the time actually getting them done? Distractions on a minute-to-minute basis are a productivity killer but is it possible to use that philosophy on a longer time scale, too?

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Creative Tip: Don’t Worry About Things You Can’t Control

“I can’t control if a publisher will want my work… If I rail against the world for things that are out of my control, I’m unnecessarily giving away power (and expending a great deal of energy). It’s a waste.”

— Jeff Goins

All of your work, from the simplest email reply to the most epic creative work you do, starts from the most basic of resources: your energy. As Goins clearly articulates, worrying about the things outside your control accomplishes nothing except expending a lot of energy that could be better spent elsewhere.

Try taking stock of what you actually have control over in a typical day. You’ll likely be surprised by how little you can really influence. Instead of letting that be a source of stress, try embracing it and narrowing your focus to where you can have the greatest impact.

Luckily, how you approach your work and conduct yourself on a minute-to-minute basis are completely under your control and are the building blocks for a successful career and life.

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Video: Jerry Seinfeld on Not Critiquing Process

“I don’t accept the judging of process… We’re all trying to get to the same island. It doesn’t matter if you swim, fly, surf, or skydive in — it doesn’t matter. What matters is when the red light comes on.” — Jerry Seinfeld in “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”

Everybody seems to have a blog and will happily tell you the best way to work it can be easy to lose sight of what matters. Like Jerry says, we all have a different process. Some people work on Apple computers and some work on PCs. Some use paper planners and others are fully digital. Some people rise with the sun and some are denizens of the night. How you work is really up to you as long as you’ve found what works best for you. What matters most is the final product.

Thinking about and tweaking process can be a lot of fun. But if you look around and notice everyone is doing something different from you, don’t fret. You might just be skydiving into the island while they’re taking the boat. You’ll end up in the same place and you might be having more fun along the way.

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Apple, Target, JC Penney and the “Fundamental Attribution Error”

After he masterminded the launch of Apple’s wildly successful retail stores and Target’s hip reinvention, Ron Johnson was snapped up by JC Penney with the hope that he could reinvigorate the struggling retail outlet. But thus far, Johnson’s golden touch doesn’t seem to be working at Penney. Which begs a question about the cult of personality: Can any company’s success be attributed to just one person, or should it be considered in a broader context?

As the always astute James Surowiecki writes in a recent New Yorker piece on Johnson:

At Target and at Apple, Johnson was running with the wind, not against it. At Penney, he’s trying to do something very different: remake a company’s DNA. Penney’s board no doubt believed that Johnson’s record guaranteed that he’d succeed. But this perception probably reflects what psychologists call “the fundamental attribution error”—our tendency to ignore context and attribute an individual’s success or failure solely to inherent qualities. (People who watch one basketball player shoot free throws in a poorly lighted gym and another shoot in a well-lighted gym attribute the latter’s greater success to ability rather than to conditions.) Skill is important, but so is context: being great at selling cheap fashion or cool technology products doesn’t mean you’ll be great at turning around a middle-market retailer.

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