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Recipe for being a creative pro: think like a chef

By Patrick Gant

Your best work does not come from your ego: it survives in spite of it. To be serious about your craft and the outcomes of your efforts, focus instead on your work methods and allow the self to become small.

Just as master chefs treat their kitchen, their methods and their menu with respect, so too must you with your studio, your process and your product.

To illustrate how this works, consider how restauranteur Daniel Boulud concludes his book Ten Commandments of a Chef: each one resonates with anyone who is in the business of being creative.

1. Keep Your Knives Sharp

Your thinking must remain sharp, but that means far more than filling your head with facts. Sharpness of thought is much more about agility now. We underestimate how much our world is changing. We’re networked now like bees in honeycomb rather than tethered to the world by a single telephone line. Performance is rewarded best now for being adaptive rather than predictive. Empathy defeats self-centeredness. And yet we carry around this brain that’s still hardwired for hunting sabretooth tigers. Make regular exercise out of the notion that your assumptions about the world might not be correct.

2. Work with the Best People

Notice how this is framed. It’s not about surrounding yourself with people who are just as good or just as talented as you are. In fact, how good you are doesn’t even enter into this equation: look for excellence in others and they will seek it in you.

3. Keep Your Station Orderly

This is my least favourite item on the list. If I define my station as my work desk, then I have a lot of orderly work to do. But if I see my station as my MacBook Air and the flow I count on to generate clients, ideas and products I’m proud of, then I’m doing ok. Or maybe I’m engaged in a tiny bit of sophistry here just to get out of cleaning my desk.

4. Purchase Wisely

This has been a steadfast rule of mine for over 15 years. And I learned it from tradespeople: any tool directly linked to your ability to turn work into money is a tool you cannot afford to cheap-out on. A subset of this rule: own only what you need, not what you desire. I’m selective about what I keep: I sell or give away what I no longer use.

5. Season with Precision

Chefs know that seasoning doesn’t define but accentuates the dish. Writers know that adverbs and adjectives are like salt: there’s a fine line between enough and too much. Designers know that their best work happens when their product is made more understandable without explanation or ornamentation. Consultants know the hazards of over-explaining and that sometimes you have let an idea simmer with the client for a bit. It’s all seasoning. Know yours and use with care.

6. Master the Heat

Fear is fire. Learn to cook with it. And don’t let it burn you. You’re doing it wrong if owning a business doesn’t scare you from time to time.

7. Learn the World of Food

I would have put this one closer to the top. If you choose to make a career out of creativity, you have a responsibility to yourself and to everyone you serve to have well formed, thoughtful opinions on your tools, processes, influences and choices. Learning your world means you know exactly why you do what you do. That is the trademark of mastery.

8. Know the classics

If you’re anything like me, when you were young you assumed classics was just another world for old. Look around you: most things do not survive even 100 years on this planet. The rare things that do teach us two things: having a good sense of taste is a timeless trait, and any problem you struggle with today someone long before you also had…and had the good sense to write it down.

9. Accept Criticism

This gets easier as you get older and realize—paradoxically—that the more experience you gain, the less you are sure of. That’s not an excuse for being thin skinned when you’re younger. You only own the first draft of what you do: after that, it becomes something that’s beyond you.

There are two ways that ideas can be polished. First, through self-criticism and self-reflection. Second, by welcoming a process that allows your work to be challenged by having it bump up against the opinions, beliefs and biases of others.

10. Keep a Journal of Your Recipes

This is why my newsletter, CreativeBoost, exists. It is as much a travelogue as a record of what’s new to me. Keeping track of what you’ve learned is as much a gift to your readers as it is a letter from the past to your future self.

The indifference of content

By Patrick Gant

I want you to imagine for a moment that you and I are time travelling.

We arrive in the 2nd century BC at the Great Library of Alexandria. We’ve essentially stepped into the internet of the classical age: a place that houses vast amounts of human knowledge and serves as possibly the most important gathering spot for scholars of that time.

We notice something else right away: it’s not just noted thinkers visiting the library who talk among themselves about its great works. Many of the residents of this ancient city take great pride in being able to cite from its collections too.

Good ideas, as Alexandrians saw them, were worth protecting and sharing. They were choosy.

We move ahead in our time travel to about 50BC and find the Great Library is shattered. Jump ahead a few centuries and there is barely a trace that there ever was a library at all. Today, all we are left with are fragments of stories of its existence. We don’t even have a clear idea of what it looked like in its prime.

What is a greater tragedy than the loss of this library and the world of wisdom it contained is how we lost it.

Modern historians tell us it didn’t happen overnight, but slowly.

It was, as Matthew Battles suggests in his book Library “moldering slowly through the centuries as people grew indifferent and even hostile to their contents.”

Let’s think about that for a second.

Neither fires nor conquest nor enemies of free thought were needed to obliterate one of the pinnacles of classical civilization.

All that was needed was human indifference.

I consider that lesson often when I look at our modern-day Great Library on the web.

It doesn’t have walls and doors but there are plenty of similarities in terms of its purpose and ambition.

We fill it with stories and ideas, commentary and diatribes. And the occasional cat video. Much of this serves as a fine way to capture the zeitgeist of the times.

And yet I’ve grown weary of the word that gets used to label all of this: content.

I used to think that there was purpose behind that word choice–that maybe content was an economical way to describe text, audio and image based ideas.

I’m not so sure anymore.

Let’s be honest. Most of what passes as content online today just isn’t all that good.

Too often, it’s just thinking out loud. And there’s plenty of it: I count 598 million Google hits for the word.

Just as troubling, far too much of it is self referential. In other words: it’s content about the marketing of content for content providers to reach content consumers.

Do you really want to be part of that gig? I sure don’t. I’m pretty sure that’s why you remain a loyal subscriber to CreativeBoost: you’re picky with what you spend your time reading.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some moralizer who seeks to purge words I don’t like from our lexicon. I’m quite sure content still has its place somewhere.

I’m more troubled by what motivates its everyday use: that old foe, indifference.

Most online content is to ideas as fast food is to nutrition. It’s cheap and plentiful. But it’s not good for you. In the long run, there is a price to be paid for it.

Beyond just settling for flabby thinking, a diet of content–whether you’re a consumer or creator–leads to something even worse: unrealized potential.

You and I only have a finite amount of time to make our respective dent in the universe.

And what we have in this tick of time is a chance to share with the future what we’ve learned. It’s the idea tree that we plant for others to later enjoy its shade.

That’s the true power and wisdom of writing (and yes, other media might qualify too but those are not in my area of expertise).

Writing is thinking made organized against its will. And it is our job to put everything we’ve got into ensuring that our efforts are a reflection of our very best selves.

There’s a better way to look at the ideas you create and share. Think of it as your material.

Just as if you were building a house, you want something that won’t fall down when greeted by the first gust of wind.

You don’t want something that chases trends or quickly falls out of fashion.

Solid material–assembled with care, shared with love–has a timelessness to it.

That is how we can learn well from the Alexandrians, if we choose to.

It is our best defence against the corrosive effect of indifference.

Heck yes, you need to write better headlines: here’s how and why

By Patrick Gant

Pay more attention to headlines in what you do.

Sure, you might be tempted to say “but I don’t write headlines in my work.”

Oh yes you do.

Ever find yourself needing to send an email but struggle to get readers to respond or to take some kind of action? Do you do analytical work that involves creating in-depth reports? Maybe you’re trying to find a stronger hook for your fundraising letter. Or maybe you’re looking at ways to get better at giving presentations that connect with people.

These are just a few examples where headlines can be valuable. We just don’t often think of them that way.

With email, we call it “coming up with a good subject line.” With reports and presentations, we ask ourselves “how can I cover all these complicated ideas in a way that doesn’t lose the reader?” See my point? Part of a headline’s power is its ability to compress an idea.

Sure, a great headline can attract attention (a practice that was alive and well 2,000 years ago in Rome when the first gazette, Acta Diurna, couched hard news with salacious stories).

But what they really do is give your reader a good reason to keep reading.

David Ogilvy—the true original MadMan of advertising—once said that “on the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

He wasn’t kidding about that last part. Even in my own work, I spend an inordinate amount of time crafting and refining headlines and subheadings, because it’s “the ticket on the meat” (another Ogilvyism).

Why does it matter so much? Because as I like to regularly remind: people are busy.

We live in a world now where the thing that is most scarce is audience attention.

You have to earn it and keep earning it. With that in mind, here’s what I know about how you can write better headlines that will help you keep earning those readers and find more homes for those ideas you want to share.

Make friends with action verbs
Cut out the fluffy features behind your idea until you’re left with a raw verb that describes what it can do for the reader (e.g., “Do…Grow…Make…Get…Take…Expand…”). It might not seem stylish to use them, but action verbs never get dull and they deliver the goods on answering that one question every reader has: “what’s in it for me to keep reading?”

Be more specific
Boring writing happens when you don’t know where you want the reader to look. As fiction writer Nancy Hale tells us: “The more specific you are, the more universal you are.” That applies to more than just fiction. Headline writing is compressed storytelling. And that’s something you can apply to any business. Find the glowing core in your story.

“How to” is your BFF
Veterans of advertising copy will tell you that you can’t write a bad headline that starts with “how to” (see what I did in the subject line of this email?) Granted, this is more relevant to email subject lines and presentation copy, but never say never when it comes to creating a surprising header even in dense analytical reports. I’ve seen it done.

But say no to link bait
You might think it’s tempting to mimic the linkbait strategies of Buzzfeed and others who peddle McContent (e.g., “You’ll never believe what happened next…” or “Seven ways to do X”). But don’t do it. That’s a race to the bottom and one that’s become so common now that readers are wise to the game. No amount of link baited traffic is going to erase the impression that you’ve snookered your audience into reading something that just wasn’t all that good or memorable. Your best ideas and your readers deserve better than that.

Do the unexpected
“State the opposite, not the obvious.” That’s what Sam Horn says in her book “Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd.” Sometimes the best way to present an idea is to turn it inside out and say something that goes against conventional wisdom. Often that’s where real insight lives. Longtime CreativeBoost readers know that I’m quite fond of that particular strategy.

Yummy, tasty morsels
Break your ideas up into smaller ones. Assign a subheading to each one. Notice how I do that with by blog posts and newsletter? It’s a great way reward your readers for their attention and to honour their time. The trick is make it look like it’s not work to read things all the way though.

Hey, much like what you just did! See how that happened?

Less what you know, more how you find

By Patrick Gant

“I don’t think I create anything. I’m really serious. I discover the ideas.”
—George Lois, art director & creative risk taker

The longer I work in this business, I find I do better work in less time. I’m going to tell you how I do this.

Most of my time is spent reading and teaching myself better ways to solve business problems. Writing is an outcome of that process. But the effort that goes into it is significantly slanted toward the research and thinking side of things.

Creativity is the act of connecting things. It implies an important and different way of working that is as relevant to writing and marketing as it is to pretty much any profession today.

Instead of spending my time recalling and applying factual knowledge—the nuts and bolts of what I know, or am supposed to know—I engage in combinatorial play.

I read from disciplines outside of my wheelhouse, from physics to philosophy. And I find things in there that connect to the work that I am paid to help solve.

In fact, I find more things there to help me than in playing it safe reading marketing textbooks and dull listicles online.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in the investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, nailed down this idea decades ago. “Worldly wisdom,” he says, comes from being able to build mental models from multiple disciplines, “because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.”

Right now, I’m reading about chaos theory and the work of Benoit Mandelbrot. Not for any other reason than that it makes me curious.

Without getting bogged down here into the details of his fascinating work on fractals, one of the key things I’m learning is that when we start by applying a simple rule to things, complex structures emerge.

And each time we do this, the results are different. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a lot.

With this approach, you can’t predict where the knowledge trail is going to lead you, only that it’s going to land you on a different point on a map each time.

It’s out of that work that interesting ideas and new ways of tackling age-old problems emerge.

A century ago, being good at digesting and recalling facts was a rare enough skill to keep you gainfully employed for life. It’s still valuable today, but it’s not rare anymore. That phone or tablet that you’re probably reading this on right now gives you access to that kind of knowledge better and faster than ever before.

Having the ability to take knowledge and press it together in unusual ways to create that worldly wisdom that Munger talks about—that’s the new scarcity.

Being a rule-breaker is a compliment, not a criticism

By Patrick Gant

I’ve been following Richard Florida’s work for a number of years since The Rise of the Creative Class. In this presentation (see below), he makes several excellent points about the growing role and value of creativity today.

With parallels to the 1930s and earlier eras of hardship, the rush of new ideas and finding a better way of doing things tends to come about most often when a society’s back is against the wall. It’s when rules get broken that people start doing interesting, daring things.

This isn’t just executive-level challenge. Real creativity—the kind that makes things, and makes them better than before—has to take root in every level of an organization.

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