Lessons

Lesson Info

Creative Rhythm Pt 2

1/3 practice related to relationships on. And this is especially true in the context of free on demand. World is to have what I call the five conversations. So these conversations happen with clients they happen with within organizations that happened with your manager, especially if you're the leader of a team these air critical critical to eliminating dissonance, fear, expectation, escalation the three assassins of the creative process. A couple of disclaimers about these conversations Number one do not steamroll people with these conversations. Don't go up to someone and say you have something you want to say to me because I've got something I want to say to you, right? Not a good idea. Um, don't steamroll them. These have to happen just as part of your relationship with others. But these deal with some of the parts of our lives and our work that we don't often share with others, and so it creates this pressure beneath the surface. Also, they should be happening on the team level an...

d also on an individual level. So you should be doing this not just, you know, Hey everybody, let's all get in the room. Let's talk about these dynamics, but you should also be doing it one on one. So if you lead a team, you should be having these on individual level 1212 people also appeared appear. These could be really effective. So the five conversations are number one, the clarity conversation. And this is about eliminating dissidents. And we talked about distance earlier. The break between the wine. The what? But it also exists peer to peer it exists. Manager the pier. When there's a break in an understanding of what's really being expected of us, so do the what the Why add up If there's something in your world that you don't understand why you're being asked to do it, have that conversation. Don't wait for the dots to be connected. You know, vacuums love to be filled. So whenever there's a vacuum, that vacuum will be filled by whatever story most makes sense to you. Maybe not. What? What is the truth? The reality to your manager. You'll invent something to fill that vacuum just because you need an explanation for the why so don't allow that gap to exist. It creates a kind of dissonance in your life and in your work. If you're a manager, always be asking. Do you understand what? Why you're doing the work that you're doing right? You understand why that's important. Always be asking that question. Always be trying to bridge that gap between the wine. The what? Do you understand the objectives? You know, I can't tell you how often I experience that. We get very far into a project in an organization, and at a certain point it becomes unbearable, or or a little bit uncomfortable to say, I'm not sure what we're doing here. You kind of cross his threshold where you can no longer ask. What are we doing? It's better to be having that conversation as you go and ask people. Do you understand the edges? Do you understand? We're starting. Do you understand how will celebrate success in the end? What is it we're really trying to do again? It's about eliminating dissidents. We talked about that earlier about defining the edges and how important that is. The expectations conversation, and this is about making sure the expectation escalation isn't creeping in to the organization or into our client relationships as well. So do you know what's expected? of you, you know, as as a client. If I'm a photographer again, a designer writer, whatever it is I'm doing. If I'm having a conversation with client hate, I just make sure you understand what I expect of you so that I could be better positioned to do my job. Let's talk about that. What's expected? Or if you're on the other side of the coin, you have people who are reporting to you. Do you understand what's expected of you? It creates a baked in accountability, right, and it creates an parameters and points of traction for us in our work. What do you expect from me? You know, make sure that you understand what's expected of you, because sometimes we all know that those expectations can kind of go through the roof, and we don't even know it. We didn't hit some invisible expectations somebody had. Why would you expect out of me? Right, So having that conversation again eliminates a lot of that. It takes the teeth out of that assassin, and am I falling short? Is there an area of my life for my work or I'm falling short of your expectations? Let's talk about that now you don't want to be the person who is always going around saying, Am I doing everything? Okay, A my offending you in any way, right? Is there anything I'm falling? Sure you want to be that person. Nobody likes that person. But you do want to make sure that you're having these kinds of conversations with people consistently. Make sure that your meeting expectations just said that for your own good, so you can engage in your work with a full, free and clear mind. The fear conversation We talked about this before. That fear thrives in the unknown that thrives in the places we don't address we don't talk about. So what do you afraid might happen and why, when you come up with when you've done all of this work and then you come up with a strategy of creative strategy and it puts a pit in your gut and you think I don't it's a little risky. Oh, no, about that right. When you get to that point, stop and ask yourself whether we afraid might happen. If we do this, let's talk about let's talk about perceived consequences because it might be that we're free. We're all gonna get fired or whatever. And the manager might say no fire. You know, if you execute a bad idea, you're gonna be fired. Right? But were you that you will be fired for a bad idea? The more we talk about stuff, the easier it is to deal with. OK? And the more of the spells fear. So what do you afraid might happen? And why do you feel free to take risks? And what was the last risk that you took organizationally, how you define risk might be very different from the way your manager defines risk to make sure you having those conversations. The engagement conversation is in. Are you engaged? Not is in. Will you marry me? Um, what's your energy level and enthusiasm right now for your work on this important right? Because, um, we don't talk about the way we're doing the work. We just talk about the work. Are you Are you engaged? Are you energized by the work right now is you know, you feel enthusiasm for it or you just kind of going through the motions. What's inspiring you right now again? We talked about that earlier is an important question. And how do you feel about the work we're doing? Okay, It's different from what do you think about the work like we talked about earlier? How does it work? Creativity make you feel that's a different answer than what do you think about creativity, Right? When you talk about how it makes you feel, it's totally different. What's the best thing we're doing? And why, again, a great conversation starter inside the organization again, This is about talking about the work about the process, not just about the end product, which is where we tend to gravitate when we're in a create on demand environment. And then there's what it is called the final 10% conversation. We all leave a meeting. We leave environments having said about 90% of what it is we want to say. Okay, so we always leave that little bit inside of us that we don't really talk about because it's uncomfortable. It's unbearable. We don't want to embarrass someone, really embarrass ourselves, and we walk out of the meeting. The problem is that those conversations happen anyway. They happen again. My friend Ben calls them whispers in the hallway. So they happen at Starbucks. They happen, you know, in the hallway on the way out in the evening ago, did you hear about global, blah, blah, blah? We don't talk about it, and it builds pressure beneath the surface in our lives and our client interactions. So what's the dumbest thing that I or we're doing right now? Let's talk about that. What do we think is the dumbest thing that we're doing right now? I would rather have that out in the open than have people mumbling about it beneath the surface. Maybe there's information people don't have Right, So let's talk about that. What's the smartest thing that we're doing right now? Let's talk about what we think of the great work that we're doing and what's something obvious I don't see by the way, relation Aly. It is a powerful question to ask in the context of someone else that you know if you if you're connected with what's something that I don't see about my life, about my work, about the value I'm adding that you think I don't see. But it's obvious to everybody else if you are committed to a course of growth. You want the answer to that? Okay, so focus relationships. Energy is the third element, were brilliant and managing our time were terrible, abysmal at managing our energy. So we stack meeting after meeting after meeting after obligation after obligation, we get to the end of the day. We need a brilliant idea. We've got nothing left. Nothing were fried because we haven't been managing our energy effectively along the way. We have to be good at managing our energy as well as our time. And by the way, Tony Schwartz wrote a brilliant couple of brilliant books. He co authored the 1st 1 The powerful engagement. 2nd 1 was Be excellent. Did anything. He goes very tactically into how the manage energy, absolutely brilliant books. I recommend picking that up. Its new pickup Die empty, but absolutely brilliant book, but not to sell a book. Okay, but we have to be good at managing our energy as well. Right? Couple of strategies for doing that. The first is to practice what I call pruning vineyard. One of the primary rules of the Vine Keeper is to regularly prune areas of new growth off the vine. Perfectly good fruit By the way, why would you prove perfectly good? Threw off of a vine? That's the goal of I. Would you prune fruit off the mind? Well, because the Vine keeper knows that if that fruit isn't regularly pruned, the new fruit it will eventually steal. Resource is from the older, more mature, fruit bearing parts of the vine. And over time the entire vine will succumb to systemic mediocrity because it's not wired to bear that much fruit and to bear that much good fruit, right, I would submit to you that many of us in our lives we will struggle with new fruit on our vine, its new ideas, new projects and we do this thing. We talked about the Project Plateau thing that Scott Belski talks about. We jump from thing to thing to thing because we're always trying to bear new fruit, trying to come up new ideas, new things, new projects, new commitments that we make in our lives. What we're terrible at is saying no to really good opportunities because there's something more important than more urgent that we need to focus on that needs our energy needs. Our effort were terrible, that pruning so we have to on a regular basis. Make it a practice to go through all of the commitments in our life. The creative projects were tasked with all this stuff and say, Where do I need to create white space by pruning so that I can focus more deeply on the work that I'm being tasked with? That's that's really important to me. The stuff I have to knock out of the park. How do I prove in all this other stuff out so that I have this space to focus on that? You know, it's sort of a little bit in vogue. Teoh do Steve jobs stories and quote Steve Jobs right now. Right? But when he came first came back to Apple after his, um, long absence from Apple. When he came back, Apple had grown all of these divisions and had tons of products and how many skews they had, how many different projects they were working on. And he came back and he drew a chart on the white board pro consumer desktop laptop, four things we're gonna we're gonna drill these things, and when we get them right when we absolutely nail these things then we're gonna focus on other stuff. And until we get these right, we're not gonna do anything else. That's a form of pruning. It was saying it's most important that we get this right. And once we get this right, we'll work on others. So that's what we have to be good at saying, no, the things But we're terrible again. Fear of missing out were terrible doing that because we don't wanna miss Allen something David Allen who were getting things done. He has prod up this practice. He calls the someday maybe list, which I think is brilliant, This idea that keep a list of things that you're saying no to now that you might want to do in the future. So you're not saying no forever. You're just saying I'm not gonna do this now because I don't have the energy or the focus of the time to do it. I'm gonna put on the something, maybe list. I'll get around to it at some point. Okay. Think whole life. What this means is we tend to think of our lives is a Siris for hermetically sealed volts. So I make commitments in my personal life commitments in my family, life commitments in my work life and because there's around different calendars, I tend to dismiss the fact that I said right, sit right at the center of all of those things And so, you know, I've got a big work project that's going till May 30th and then June 1st I'm going to start. You know, I'm going to leave on vacation, and that's going to be fine, because, you know, work always ends on time, right? So that's gonna and dry on May 30 of them believing vacation and it won't be on my mind at all. I'm gone and I'm gonna come back. And when I get back, I'm gonna plan a friend's wedding on the coats, my kid's Little league team or whatever you've got all these things that are going on at the same time. What were terrible about doing is thinking about how all those commitments connect, and we said at the center of them, all of them require energy from us. We have to be good at looking at the rhythms of our life and saying, Hey, I've got a big work project going toe May 30th maybe not the best time in the world for me to be planning a vacation on June 1st. Maybe not the best thing. So instead, I'm gonna push that back a month because I don't want to end up on vacation thinking about this project. We didn't get done on time. And now I'm halfway distracted when I'm supposed to be with my family vacation, right? We're not good at thinking whole life, but this is My family just came out of this last week and it was, unfortunately, circumstance. It was less planning. That was circumstance. So last week my new book came out on Thursday, but old by the way, we were building a house, and it just so happened because of everything that happened along the way. We were moving into the house Wednesday through Saturday, and the book came out on Thursday and, oh, I'm leaving for San Francisco to go do creative live on Sunday morning and then have, like, a 17 city, you know, speaking engagement tour. It just so happens sometimes we can't control that, But if I didn't have rhythms and practices in my life leading up to that, I would be completely fried right now, I would be a walking zombie right now broadcasting too. You know everybody here because because, you know, we're not sustained, capable of sustaining all of that simultaneous were not. But there have been rhythms and practices that prepared me for that for that moment. Right? We have to be good at pruning. Will be good thinking whole life if we want to manage our energy effectively. So the fourth element is stimuli. We talked about this earlier. All these things that live out in our world. The things we see, we know this. We experience the things that maybe other projects we've done in the past the things that, uh, that live out there in the ethos that we can pull together and we can combine and try to come up with new ideas. But we have to be purposeful about the kinds of stuff that goes into our head would be purposeful about the kinds of stimuli that were informing ourself with. But unfortunately, you know, it's like the old saying you are what you eat. Your body mass becomes what you consume. You create what you take in. But some of us are less than purposeful about the kinds of stimuli that we allow into our head, right? And so we you know, and most of our days you're browsing YouTube or you surf in the comments section on the Web or watching Netflix this fine. There's nothing wrong with any of that in moderation. But we have to be purposeful about also having things in our world that inspire us and inform us that challenges to think in new ways. So one strategy for doing that dump dump dome Have a study plan right now, before you get out of the local college by a trigonometry textbook, it's something I'm talking about. What I mean is, Do you have time in your life set aside to absorb thoughts to a Steven sample from USC calls it to commune with great minds. The fill your head with inspiring and challenging ideas and thoughts into combined those and think about them and process them and think about how they apply to your work. That's where brilliant creative thought comes from. The next great idea for your industry is probably not going to come from inside your industry. It's probably gonna come from somewhere outside going to come from somebody looking in the place nobody else is looking and in applying that to the work that they're doing. But that doesn't happen by accident. Its structure and serendipity. It's purposeful exploration. So what does this study plan look like? I always recommend to folks that their study plants could be comprised of about 50%. Is just pursuing your curiosity. What do your deeper questions? What are the things that you want to do in your life for the problems you would like to solve the kinds of questions that were obsessing, um plaguing you. Funnel that into a study time where you perceive those curiosities, find what what Joseph Campbell called his Bliss station? Find that time in that place where you can just go and pursue your curiosity without the judgmental eyes of others gazing upon you. 25% should be relevant to all the projects that are coming up. So as you look at what's coming up six months from now, ask yourself, What do I need to be putting in my world now or feeding to my team or whatever, so that we're prepared for what's coming up six months from now? get ahead of it. Don't wait until the projects here and they think, Oh, no, I have to go do research and study and whatever. Start doing that now so that your mind could start marinating on that information and then 25% is stretch, and this is basically eating your mental vegetables. Hey, this is this is reading stuff that is that you may not find necessarily appealing, but it's stuff that you need to do to stretch your mind, to start thinking in new ways about your work. Write stuff that's maybe challenging to you that they made this. Confirm things that you believe you're out there looking for dis confirming information to cause you to have to think more systemically about what you're doing. So that's a study plan. The second strategy is to take better notes, and what this means is most of our notes, air facts and figures. And Bob said this and Julie said that. And you know, it's it's all this very specific and regimented stuff, but we're not paying attention to the voice inside their head. Some of us need to ignore the voice inside her head. I get that right But we're not paying attention to little hunches, intuitions, these little ideas that crop up because they don't seem relevant at the time. But sometimes that's our mind, sending us a problem saying, Hey, something important here. You need to pay attention, right? So we need to be good at taking better notes, paying attention to those hunches. Those ideas. I was recommend that people take a notebook. They number the pages in whatever notebook they're using in the front that keep two pages blank and they created index there. And whenever they have a hunch or an idea or whatever about something, write it down and then go back to the index and write down the page number that that little hunter, that little intuition was on an idea. Whatever. If it's not relevant right now, right down the page number and then whenever you're looking for an idea, open up your notebook and look at that index and see. Hey, is there anything I've already thought of at some point the past that might relate to the problem? I'm now trying to solve a brilliant way to make sure that Steph doesn't go into the creative landfill on becoming relevant. Third strategy. Really, the stimulus is to do what I call a stimulus dive. But what this means is putting yourself in positions where you're experiencing the world in new ways. So if you're an introvert, go to a dance club. If you're an extrovert, go to a museum and don't talk to anyone all day long. It's incredibly painful, but you're forcing. You were forcing yourself to interact with the world in new ways to try and you think new means of expression, new means of interacting with stimuli and your environment and your forging new neural pathways. You're forging new ways of seeing the world. You're getting yourself outside of the road that you're now. Most of us have heard this before. Drive a different way. The work take a different means of transportation or read a new book. We've heard these things before, but it's not what you know. It's what you do that matters. Action is how you discover reality, not thought, not contemplation, thinking about self all day. You can know a lot of stuff. That is what you do that's gonna make a difference. So even if you've heard this stuff, a bunch of times doesn't matter. Doesn't matter at all. What matters is what you do. Growth comes from action. Okay, So what are you doing in your life? To prepare you for those moments? You have to be brilliant, right? The final element of rhythm is ours. Ours is about where we put our time, obviously times the currency of productivity. So at the end of the day, where we put our time determines success or failure. But a lot of us think efficiency with our time rather than effective this so again. We'd rather stack meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting, obligation after obligation. And we get to the end of the day and we think one of their time go. We didn't do this stuff that was really important to us of the stuff that was really effective. Instead, we spend our day trying to make ourselves feel as efficient as possible. We have to build into our life effectiveness building practices, capacity building practices If we want to increase our ability to face tomorrow's obstacles, problem finding is as important as problem solving. And the way we do that is by building these practices that allow us to identify problems and opportunities and take advantage of them. So one practice that I was recommended, something I call unnecessary creating. I come in a lot of times to create services firms. And I'll ask, You know, I mean, creative directors are directors, designers, your writers. When was the last time that you made something? You created something that somebody wasn't looking over your shoulder and paying you for right? And it's shattering to me. How often the answer is. I don't know. I don't know. I can't remember the last time I made something just because I wanted to make it, not because somebody was paying me for it. We get into doing something because we love it and the pretty thing that becomes more about making a living. That is about our first love, the thing that drew us to it to begin with. And when that happens, unfortunately, it zaps energy that could be going into creating better work. So build a practice in your life of unnecessary creating of skill development places you could take risk. You can learn new things. You can try things in a decidedly off the clock kind of way. It's unnecessary. Nobody's watching you. Nobody cares what the results are. But it's for you. It's the failure. Well, the driver yesterday who brought me from from here from our production meeting to the to the the hotel, was telling. He goes out at night. Sometimes I go out with a lantern on his head, he'll stack rocks because it's a way for him to get away from the pressures of the world and get away from expectations and just be in the moment and be focusing and stacking those rocks making at work. It's lost in that it's an unnecessary, active creativity for him. So what is that in your world? And by the way, a lot of times you'll find that the ideas that come out of that this skills committed that apply to your on demand work. That's the amazing thing about this. And the more you build the capacity, the more it will apply to your work. OK, so the second is idea time, and what that means is incredibly obvious. But setting aside time in your life to generate ideas of your most important work. But instead we expect ideas to happen in the cracks and crevices the ideas of the last thing we do. Instead, we get moving. We start making me start doing stuff, and we just expect the ideas toe happen. We need to set aside time for what's important. You set aside time to generate ideas for most important work. We talked earlier about defining our work by establishing challenges to define your work for your idea time and then explore the edges, explore the periphery, generate ideas. Um, uh, focus on venturing into those uncomfortable places and experiment and risk. Nobody's watching you. Nobody cares, Right? Take risks when you're on your own. Dime on your own time when nobody no eyeballs are upon you. And then you can apply the things that you find, too your on demand work instead of expecting it to happen. The cracks and crevices. So those are the five elements of rhythm where we need to be building practices, focus, relationships, energy, stimuli, hours. They awkwardly spell the acronym fresh, which was thoroughly not my idea. By the way, my editor, my editor for the for the For the Accidental, created for the first book. Originally ours was time, he said. Right now you have Freston breast is not very good. Don't go with 1st 3 change time. Two hours. But it's an easy way to remember that. So you can ask yourself, Hey, focus. Do I need to build some practices in the area? Focus. How am I doing? I'm focused relationships. How are my relationships right now we're going talking a bit about checkpoints in the importance of having ways of checking in on these things on a regular basis. Energy wise and wise after right now are my pruning right and my thinking whole life, giving myself the energy in the white space to do my best work stimuli? Am I filling my head with valuable stimuli? The things I'm going to need to do my best work and then hours Am I using my time for effectiveness, not just efficient. And if you do that, if you build an infrastructure in these five areas, you will find over time a trend line for being prolific. A lot of work brilliant, doing good work, or at least trending toward doing better work and healthy meaning. You'll do it sustainably because you're building infrastructure to support your create on demand roll. Okay, Yeah, fantastic. And we got some great questions coming in. Thank you, everybody who's joining us online? Actually, here's a question from someone from your hometown. I don't know. You know Jeff Project sectors asking He's loving the conversation around focus and determining the important urgent scale. And he's wondering, With you launching a book, I imagine you have a huge possible task list. What system do you use to track your daily efforts to stay focused? Yeah, so I'm having a really granular about this. I have been using David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology for about 12 years now, and David and I actually had a conversation about this. I did an interview for his community about the new book Die Empty, and it was fun because I kept the whole time I kept going back and saying, Yeah, but getting things done is completely changed my life in my world, he's getting things done. Is that the way of determine my cast lists, keeping my priority straight, And then I use a tool called Omni Focus, which is the technology tool that I use for keeping those lists. It's on my IPhone, my IPad and on my Mac and I use it to keep those lists straight. And then every day I have a list of things that crank through those things. And that's how I and I look at my list of projects on a weekly basis, and I ask myself, What needs to be pruned out? What am I just doing? Because of sheer momentum in my life? What is Where is inertia taking over in my life, where I need to prove some of that so I can focus on the work that I really need to be doing. Publishing a book during a book tour Boo Book launch. It's all a lot of work, and this is the book. It's called Diane Di Empty Unleash your best work every day. I think it's fantastic title, and this is literally just off the press. It was released last week, and we really appreciate top being here today, as he's right to say in the middle of a book launch. It's still warm. I know you talked a little bit about what we're going to get two when we get back. Is there anything else you want to add? Yeah, so I think it's important in some ways to talk about. Not on Lee. It's nice to know these elements of rhythm, but but how do we stay aligned? How do we make sure that we're not veering too far off course Because that's the thing, like a and creative work there. Constant distractions. It's easy to get off course, and I haven't realized until later, while I'm pretty far from where I want to be, So we're gonna come back after lunch. We talk about how to establish checkpoints to keep us aligned around what's most important and keep our activity relevant to the work in front of and then in the final thing that they were gonna talk about. Okay, that's great. How do you bend your life around work that is meaningful to you? How do you prevent media So Chris getting stuck and making compromises along the way? And what are some places people creatives especially get stuck? And how do we move beyond that? To continue doing work that's meaningful, tow us and valuable to others? That's very relevant, really excited. Just want to share some comments from the Internet, Claudia A. TL says, Oh, this is gold so important to have people like you that are inspiring and challenge DJing at us at our work. 3 18 media This product strategy creative strategy thing is really awesome, especially as a designer that deals with clients. The product strategy is setting those project expectations, and then you deliver the creative strategy in the proposal. Mark, 1963 also says, You're answering a lot of questions of why I had rolling around in my head, but it was just too afraid to ask.