HOW TO CREATE OPPORTUNITIES
Remember yourself as a kid? Think about the role-playing you did, think about all the things you created. Get those drawings and models out! If you have serious problems recalling these experiences and you do have not children yet, then go to the nearest nursery school and just watch kids at play. As you watch them remember the old adage: ‘If children gave up the first time they fell, they would never learn to walk.’ What you will see are little human beings playing, laughing, enjoying different roles, imagining different professions.
But those children will steadily decrease their play and fun.
As they get older, they will be told that this kind of behaviour is not logical and therefore not correct.
One of the leading authorities in the field of creative thinking, Edward de Bono, defines three ages of life.
The age 0–5 is the age of ‘why’, 6–11 of ‘why not’, and 11–75+ of ‘because’.
Our business culture is biased towards logic and rational thinking.
Our educational system is often reduced to a ‘one right-answer’ system.
De Bono claims that ‘since Aristotle, Socrates and Plato 2,500 years ago we believe in logic and argument to prove theories either right or wrong, trying to find the ultimate truth and putting things in boxes.’
This seems to be true as we have myriad left-brainers who believe in pure analytical faith: people, especially politicians and managers, who are pushed to use the numerical, rational and logical part in the left hemisphere of the brain. And look where we have ended up. Sameness wherever you go.
When I asked Ferran Adrià, the groundbreaking Catalan chef at the El Bulli restaurant in Roses, Spain, how he would define creativity, his answer was simple but clear. ‘Creativity is not copying,’ a maxim he learned from French chef Jacques Maximin. Yet copycat seems to be a strategy nowadays. It is like playing rock-paper-scissors with beginners. They usually choose rock and also tend to copy the winner. It is predictable. And it is about exploiting, not creating. Ruthless exploitation, remember, is the opposite of sustainability. In the creative economy sustainability means the care and sustainable renewal — that is, environmentally, socially and financially sustainable — for our resources.
Jürgen Salenbacher — Author of “Creative Personal Branding”, a professional resource that makes rewarding reading for anyone in the creative economy and is a key practical tool for those who are interested in positioning themselves in it.
