I just finished reading Creative Confidence. As always, I made plenty of notes. I recommend taking the time to read this book, but if you do not want to, here they are my notes and excerpts:
- The best way to gain confidence in our creative ability is through action - taken one step at a time through experiencing a series of small successes.
- Creative confidence is not achieved by reading, thinking, or talking about it alone. An actual action is necessary.
- We have to accept uncertainty of the path ahead, and just try it and see.
- Every person is different, and we need to figure out what holds us back from being creative and courageous.
- Whatever creative goal we choose, it is important to build our own experience.
- If you have an idea or an active project, start experiencing with the materials on your desk right now to make it more tangible.
- if there is a big challenge/project in front of us, it is a good idea to break it down into more manageable chunks, and try to focus our creative energy on a task where progress can take place quickly and you have a good chance of success.
- Let's approach the world with a sense of childlike wonder, and see what new ideas we can identify and explore.
- If we can build a few skills and learn a few techniques for applying creativity ... If we can find the courage to speak up and experiment, to risk failure and act on our creative impulse ... we might discover, that work can be more fun than fun.
1. ‘Creative energy is one of our most precious resources' and 'Creative confidence depends on an absence of fear of failure and judgement.’
Isn't it an awesome feeling when you feel creative? It feels like you are at your best. Our reservoirs of creative energy are not bottomless and need to be nurtured and replenished. When our creative tanks are empty, we feel .. well, kind of like when we have a bad hair day :)
So how do we fill up our creative tanks? Everybody is different, but a couple of things that most likely could apply to anybody are new experiences, doing more of what we love and makes us feel good and inspired. Inspiration is all around us. We just need to keep our eyes open. And by keeping our creative tanks in a great shape, and being empowered by knowing that we are creatively (and otherwise in a great shape 웃), we take confident, powerful actions. We build creative confidence.
2. ‘People with creative confidence have a greater impact on the world around them. Our belief systems affect our actions, goals, and perception.’
When we believe in our creative abilities and that we can have influence on a change, it feels natural to us to take the leap of faith and we are comfortable with uncertainty. We cope better with failures, and we persevere and try hard for a long time. We also challenge the way things are being done now, and we feel confident to speak up and suggest new ideas. We know what courage and persistence are because we have plenty of them. When we have creative confidence, we see our potential and our place in the world more clearly than when we do not have creative confidence.
3. ‘Creative confidence is a way of seeing our potential and our place in the world more clearly, unclouded by anxiety and doubt, and seeing every experience as an opportunity to learn from.’
We all should seek experiences that will spark creative thinking - interaction with experts, being in unfamiliar environments, etc.
Have you heard the term design thinking? Maybe you were wondering what kind of thinking it is? Design thinking is a methodology. It is based on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to come up with ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional. Design thinking suggests that to solely rely on rational and analytical thinking can be risky. Design thinking is based on the belief that a combination of feeling, intuition, inspiration, rational, and analytical is beneficial. Relying not only on our rational and analytical thinking, but also adding listening to our gut can unlock our creativity. Which ultimately leads to a new mental outlook, a new self-image, and a new sense of empowerment. The book uses a term "flipping", which is described as changing from one state of mind to another.
- Once you start creating things, you realize that everything has intention behind it.
- We can achieve audacious goals if we have the courage and perseverance to pursue them.
- The surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.
Another good point that the book talks about is the importance of paying attention and gaining strength from small successes along the way. We start a new venture. We start doing and learning and .. failing. However, ‘’building confidence through experience encourages more creative action in the future. And the inescapable link between failure and innovation is a lesson you can learn only through doing.’
4. ‘The personal resilience, courage, and humility born of a healthy failure form a priceless piece of education and growth.'
Not only salespeople struggle with the fear of failure. We all do at some point in our lives. What fear does it that it holds us back. It prevents us from trying new things, from trying to pursue our passions. We do not try new skills we just learned, because we fear that the result will not be good enough. Perfect maybe. We don't take on new challenges and risks. BUT, we all can overcome our fears. HOPE. Hope is the magical thing. We have to believe and be confident to try and know we will improve only by doing. ‘We just need to hold out a reasonable hope for success, as well as the possibility of a truly epic win.’ We need to make creative leaps, based on experience and intuition.
5. ‘Diego Rodriguez in his blog Metacool says that innovation thinkers often use "informed intuition" to identify a great insight, a key need, or a core feature .. Relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices.’
... because there is something called "constructive failure" ... so, our next project can be freely labeled as an experiment. We can cut ourselves some slack and experiment, right? In order for us to learn from any failure we experience, we have to OWN it. It's ours. Let's get selfish and make it only ours. Because that's how we will learn and grow the most - by figuring out what went wrong and what to do better next time. Yes, of course, sometimes things are out of our control and we fail because not of what we did wrong.
6. ‘It takes courage to leave the land of certain outcomes and the comfort of what we know to try a new approach or share a wild-sounding idea.’
The book mentions vulnerability as an important element in being creative. We need to let go of comparison and embrace our skills, our work, and what we produce. If we do that, there is no need for self-promotion. As we become more confident about our work and what we produce, we also start feeling more comfortable about being vulnerable and trust people around us, which leads to overcoming barriers to creative thinking and constructive behavior. ‘Reaching out to others is usually a strategy for success.’
7. ‘The first step toward a great answer is to reframe the question.’
... one of reframing techniques that the book mentions is "altering our focus or point of view" (for example, shifting focus from a child to a parent ..). It's also important to cultivate seeds of creative energy, because as Louis Pasteur said, "chance favors the trained mind ... Chance favors people who do lots of experiments and then pay very close attention when something unexpected happens."
8. ‘Knowing-doing gap ... In order to reach a creative breakthrough, you just need to start, regardless of small failures that may occur along the way ... Commit to rapid and continuous improvements, because action allows most of us to learn at a faster rate. Otherwise, the desire to be best can get in the way of getting better.’
In the midst of learning, we need to turn insight into effective action. To achieve our goals, we have to be focused on getting it done now ... No matter how large the chasm, we can narrow the knowing-doing gap one step at a time. If we want to make something great, we need to start making. Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process ... Besides speeding up the process of experimentation, prototypes are easy to throw away when they fail. Creativity requires cycling a lot of ideas ... Once we embrace the idea of leaping into action, small experiments become a key source of new knowledge and insight ... By releasing our idea into the world before it's ready, we receive a real-market testing, which is an invaluable source of insight (even if we still have more development to do).
9. ‘The Courage to Leap and start, and the Persistence to follow through ... The value lies not in the idea, but in the action.’
... If we are stuck in a "looks good, feels bad" position or job, we should think about the overlap between our personal passions and the workplace options that might be available to us. We should learn new skills. Start writing the new story of our working life :)
When we start taking an action and moving, we start collecting various stories that are important insights.