We’re all creative

If you’re like me, you love to come up with crazy ideas, tinker with things and apart to see how they work. As a kid, I would gleefully take apart my remote-controlled cars, inspecting all the electronics, pulling out some bits here and there. I was pretty good at dismantling things (still am). One thing I’m not good at is putting it back together. I would toss all those electronic parts into a small box. It became a mini-graveyard of electronic devices, I simply didn’t know what else to do with it.

You might not know this: creativity is a skill and can be learned.

There’s a common belief that most people have a combination and preference for how they are creative. Here’s a quick breakdown.

We all have a preference for our creative strengths, it’s not a matter of good or bad. I’ve always been a strong ideator and implementer. In other words, I’ll come with an idea and jump on it. But the idea probably didn’t solve a problem, and I probably wouldn’t bother putting it through rigorous testing and refinement. If you have a low preference for all of these skills, you are said to be an “integrator” (think, facilitator or manager).

Back to the story…

Fast forward 10 years to 2010. In college I studied electrical and computer engineering at WPI. I went through great lengths to built fascinating things. My favorite creation was a CNC-machine. It was massive, taking up a 5 ft x 7 ft x 3 ft space in a bedroom of my apartment.

The actual machine was much smaller, but since it was part of a family house I had to make it as quiet as possible. It was a LOUD beast. I went to Home Depot to collect supplies so I could build a sound-dampening chamber (think particle board and spray-foam insulation). Also, because of all the dust it produced, I had to build and attach a vacuum hose and filtration system. The entire machine cost around $1,500 and over 3 months to build, but was totally worth it.

Success without purpose is short-lived

During an engineering competition at WPI, my team used it to create a printed circuit board (PCB) for a prototype product that won us 1st place. I was stoked! My plan was to create PCB’s and try to make some money to offset the cost of building the machine.

OK, fast forward a few months after I built the machine.

I hadn’t used the CNC machine in weeks after the engineering competition. The PCB’s I created all had small defects, and they definitely weren’t high enough quality to sell. In fact, I couldn’t make a working PCB — it was a miracle the prototype used at school even worked at all! Fixing the machine wouldn’t be worth the effort. It’s just taking up a huge part of the bedroom, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

It sat there until I eventually had to move, so I dismantled it and sold off its most expensive parts, throwing the rest in the dumpster. What a drag to see your creation and hard work go to waste like that!

This was an important lesson for me, and totally changed the direction of my life. I loved jumping in head first, bringing my idea to life in the shortest amount of time possible. But, I didn’t think it through. My idea came to life sparkling and shining, impressing my friends and family. People would “Oooh” and “Ahhhh” when they came over to visit. “What the hell is that thing!?” they would ask me. Explaining it was fun, but using the machine was a pain. It was imprecise. Setup and alignment would itself take a half hour. And it wasn’t a guarantee it would stay aligned. It led to imperfections in the boards which rendered them useless.

So then my idea quickly died, laying lifeless in the middle of my bedroom. It was motionless, sprawled out across my desk. It wasn’t long before it became an eye-sore, just something that got in the way.

Learning Lesson

Fast forward to today. I’m much less impulsive and rarely go full-throttle anymore. I’ve become very skeptical of my own ideas and now ask myself clarifying questions like these:

What problem is this solving?

What’s the end-game?

What do I get out of this?

How much effort would be involved?

Do I realistically have enough time to devote to this idea or project?

Thinking like this has its pros and cons. Obviously there are less ideas I’ll pursue so I actually end up producing less into the world, and that’s by design. I save a fair amount of time that might have otherwise been wasted on poorly thought-out ideas.

The downside is that I haven’t really jumped into any of my ideas — it’s as if I’m too afraid they’ll fail. Anyone who is interested in startups knows that failure should be embraced. It’s only recently that I’ve found a solution, a balance, to this problem.

The moral of this story is this:

Find a balance between being productive and being useful.

As with most things in life, moderation is key. Use the creative thinking diagram to find the skills you need to develop. Better yet, find smarter people to fill those gaps, and bring them on your team.

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

― Oscar Wilde

If you’re too impulsive, you’ll burn out quickly and risk having anything left of value. Focus too much on only being useful, and you’ll lose touch with the creative path that can lead to break-through ideas.

We’ve already discussed how the TodoTemplates idea was born, and how it was implemented. Now let’s chat about validation — the clarify step of the creative thinking process. I knew the problem existed, but I needed more proof to be certain that TodoTemplates could solve it.