I once (in the autumn of 2001, at VIP) heard Șerban Alexandrescu (Headvertising) speak about leisure time within an advertising agency.
His affirmation (large approximation, here) was something in line with: if you run an advertising agency, you need to give your employees some spare time. If they work long hours, they don’t have the time for leisure, like watching plays, movies, going out, which will limit their ability for creativity.
This is so true. A lot of time, people focus on the working parts – “Oh, I’ll work so-and-so hours, I don’t need to read the news, watch some movies, listen to podcasts, listen to music, in other words – educate myself. No! All I need to do is work-work-work”.
There are two problems with that:
- First, unless you do really repetitive work, and you’re highly motivated, it’s very hard to work long hours in a day.
- Two, you won’t get inspiration. There are some really technical jobs right now (working with repetitive tasks, just doing the same things over and over again), but, generally, it should help if you can have some creativity in your job. And, in the future, I expect more and more of the repetitive jobs will be put aside, replaced by machines (digital or physical). So, I think it would be nice to know what happens around you.
How to get more creative? I think there are two solutions:
- Get more dots. Get more things to connect with. Expose yourself to various situations – see movies, read books, listen to things. Find out where information lurks, and get into the abyss.
- Connect the dots. Write some blog posts connecting ideas. Keep a journal, but don’t just mention “Today I did so-and-so”, but more into “Today I did this, which reminds me of, which also reminds me of, which I can relate to another situation”. This is rather hard – connecting the dots. It’s not hard to watch a movie, it’s hard to write an essay about ideas you got in the movies, and how does the movie fit the bigger picture (pun intended). It’s not that hard to read a book, but it’s rather hard to connect the ideas within it. Make it a habit, and it should become easier as time passes by.
