Working in the Creative Age

Dan Coughlin, guest columnist for our sister publication, Snow Magazine, offers how to turn creativity into business opportunity.

When I was a kid, there was a very popular song on the radio called, The Age of Aquarius. It was written in 1969. Some of the lyrics included:

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions

That age never quite happened, but right now we are living in an age that really is happening. It’s called the Creativity Age. The world has evolved from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age to the Creativity Age. This era is relatively new. It began with the proliferation of the Internet and email and has gained speed ever since with technologies that have connected people all over the world and given people the opportunities to do things they could never have done before.

The Creativity Age caused massive upheaval for many organizations and individuals and shut down many businesses. It certainly upended many people’s otherwise wonderful careers. It cut across national borders, shrunk the planet, and changed how organizations and individuals interact with each other. It also created enormous opportunities for people all over the world

…and the crazy thing is its impact is only going to get bigger and bigger. The Creativity Age is here to stay.

Where paid-work happens
If you’re going to earn a paycheck, it’s going to happen in one of a few ways. You will either work for a for-profit or a not-for-profit organization. You will either own a business or work for someone else. You will either manage the efforts of other people or you will not. You will either work with other people in an organization or you will work completely by yourself. Your work today and in the future is going to fall into one or more of those categories. We can break it down even further. Toss out your title and your industry and the size of your organization and your bonus and where you went to school. None of that stuff really matters. Regardless of the way in which you work, there are certain key elements that absolutely matter in the Creativity Age. Here are five of the most important.

Add value
Value is anything that increases the chances that the other person will achieve what he or she wants to achieve. Regardless of your title or your income or the size of your organization or your industry, you have one critically important job to do today. That job is to add value. Every day you have to ask yourself, “Today how am I going to create value for other people and deliver it as well as I can?” This is not a fun little saying to post on your wall and smile about. You have to have a ferocious and committed drive to creating and delivering value every day!!! This is the one and only way to survive and thrive in the Creativity Age.

Observe, listen, read, and combine
The old saying, “There is nothing new under the sun” is true, but only tells part of the story. The creative person looks to create new value by observing other people in action, listening to their thoughts, reading their stories, and combining the ideas into new products and services. The great advantage of today is you can “observe” what is happening anywhere in the world via the internet, you can listen to what people have to say from anywhere in the world via Google.com and Bing.com, you can read any book or magazine in an instant on an iPad or Kindle or Nook, and you can combine an incredible array of products and services and ideas that already exist into something that is new and is of great value for other people. These four skills (observing, listening, reading, and combining) make up the generator of creativity. And they’re free! Use them every day.

Care immensely about what you do
I had lunch with my mom yesterday. When I drove her back to her condominium, we paused in the parking lot. She pointed to a group of men who had raked and swept a giant pile of leaves together. They were putting the leaves into a giant mulching machine. She said, “Those men care about their work. Look how clean the parking lots are. I’m going to go tell them what a great job they are doing.”

In the Creativity Age every detail matters a lot. Regardless of where you live you are competing with other talented people all over the world. No country has an insurmountable advantage over another. It’s an open game of competition. Consequently, the key is to create and deliver as much value as you can every day. Ultimately, it comes down to caring enormously about what you do.

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