Steve Jobs never went to an Ivy League School…
Play F-Ab-G-C in a certain rhythm, and you can get Boston’s More Than a Feeling. Play it slightly different, and you get Smells like Teen Spirit. Look at everything the Beatles have done with the small amount of chords out there.
Next to the Sun, the biggest renewable resource out there is going to be creativity. Creativity is going to differentiate the future economies in a world where change can happen rapidly and violently, and logical knowledge can only extend you so far. Between Facebook and Google, I’ll always side with Google, because the company is generally an innovative bunch. Facebook is the next Microsoft.
The latest jobs report is a result of not only the previous financial crisis, but also due to technology limiting the need for a lot of people to do repetitive work. You can only have X number of financial analysts, or Y number of assemblymen, before outsourcing or software can render those functions obsolete. Take a look at what the advance of cloud technologies mean for the traditional IT department (hint: it’s going extinct).
At least for the tech industry, the rate of change is pretty high: technological advances in chip production have pretty much followed Moore’s Law, and the industry itself approaches the next big thing pretty rapidly. For labor in this world, the most effective guard against being left in the wind is to be coveted, and to be coveted you have to either be, or have created, something scarce. Create something scarce, and then you win.
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But I’m totally fascinated by creativity, especially within music, film, and design. Those are two pretty good muses for me, and I like being around people who are creative. It’s like being out there and exploring, without needing to deal with air turbulence from a long flight, or the free fall of a sky dive. A concert, an art show, a start-up convention, whatever. The point is that I think being in this creative bubble only fosters more growth personally, and helps you to flex your own creative muscles. That can only help in a world where things get more and more fixed, and I don’t think they can teach that at the high-end schools. And if you think about it, that is quite the opportunity for the rest of us, if we focus our energies on thinking outside the box.
More articles on creativity when it hits me
