book | thinkit creative

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.

Important choices you need to make if you want to write a book

By Patrick Gant

Photo: thebbp on flickr

As a business professional, a published book can be one of the most powerful tools in your personal marketing arsenal. Not only does it deliver value to your readers by sharing what you know on a subject, you directly benefit, too.

It can elevate your profile as an authority on the topic you write about. It can reveal your passion. And if your book is really well-written, it also gives people a sense of what you’re like as a person, both on a personal and professional level.

But there are choices to make. Click to continue

The wisdom of uncrowding: why I don’t auto-follow with social media

By Patrick Gant

Last summer while I was in Boston on a trip with my family, we decided to take a boat tour of Boston Harbour. I didn’t get much from the experience. Granted, the operators did their very best to provide everyone on-board with a safe, informative tour, but the boat was awfully crowded and it didn’t take long before there was a palpable sense on the faces of most around me of “how soon will this thing be over?”

In contrast, a few days earlier we joined a small group and did a guided walking-tour of a coastal New England town that had a rich history and a great story to tell. Not only was the tour a lot of fun, we had the opportunity to get to know some of the others in that small group, such that by the end of the tour most were acquainted on a first-name basis.

Following large crowds are fine for certain things. They’re an inevitable part of professional sports and music, for instance. But the dynamic there is one on which you’ve all gathered to see a spectacle, getting to know the people around you is secondary. Networking, on the other hand, is more like a series of smaller groups. Each cluster has its own conversation, and each one works best when everyone is as engaged as a listener as they are as a speaker.

Too often, social media tends to be treated like a mass spectacle. For many, it’s tempting to assume that the end-game is about seeing how many follows they can get. They’ll engage auto-follow on twitter and sit back and watch as the numbers grow.

This is a mistake. Aggregation keeps you from finding out what’s important. And it impedes you from being able to demonstrate meaning and value to others.

I don’t auto-follow on Twitter. I never have. I’m choosy about whom I add, and the same is true of my activities on LinkedIn. There’s no value for me in amassing a large crowd if I can’t engage them in a meaningful way. Auto-following says “I don’t really care who you are” your main purpose is to just to add to my audience size.”

Here’s the real problem with being indiscriminate about amassing social media follows on a large scale. Unless you are a skilled performer and have an incredible amount of free time on your hands, you are not going to be able to reach out and get to know the people you are supposedly friends with. What’s more likely to happen—even after you weed out the thousands of tweetbots and other detritus—is that you’re still going to wind up with thousands and maybe tens of thousands of people who you don’t know at all and who contribute a great big zero to your conversations online. It’s also rather likely they are going to feel the same way about you.

As Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing, advises how important it is to pick the right crowd. That means it’s important to find a shared interest.

I don’t want the crowded, impersonal boat tour. I want that walking tour. Clearly I’m not alone. Shama Kabani, author of one of the top-rated books on social media recently explained why she unfollowed everyone on Twitter and started anew, explaining: “Anything that gets in the way of adding value is keeping me from doing my job.” Even among my small group of follows on Twitter, there’s been talk lately about how to do some much-needed pruning to get back to that sense of having valuable conversations with a well-defined audience of people who matter.

Audience attention is a finite resource. So it’s worth your while to spend it wisely. I’m online to connect with people one-on-one and to provide something useful that they can take and implement in their own work. The best way to do that is to keep things personal and friendly.

(Photo: Commons NZ Library).