The Power of Routine

Creative Outliers have a greater tolerance of ambiguity multi-tasking, and, yes, distraction. When you both notice more and feel more empowered to react, there is a greater tendency to go off on tangents.  This is why having a practice can be so helpful. We have all heard of the authors who write a few pages every morning. It has been said that Jack Londen only wrote four pages per day, but this generated well over a thousand published pages.  Writing a few minutes of music every morning also can yield similar results.  No matter how you do it, getting centered every morning can get you to flow sooner and more reliably. 

As creative outliers, you can invent your morning or night practices if you are a night person. What you do and when you do it is not the most crucial part; consistency is.  Consistency eventually becomes habituated and being a creative type, it is likely that you have purpose-designed practices comprised of behaviors to achieve your very own goals. We can program ourselves to automate specific behaviors to achieve specific desired results, including even getting into a flow state.

A practice is not the same thing as just throwing yourself at what you are doing all of the way. A practice is an opportunity for a more balanced, sustainable integrated, productive life.  I knew a National Geographic photojournalist who, when he was not flying around the world shooting, got up early every morning and completed all of the things he needed to do by 11 AM, which gave him the entire rest of the day off. At 82, he is incredibly productive and free as a bird even now. He has led multiple adventure expeditions worldwide and is still contributing to all sorts of projects but amazingly seems to do all of this between 5 and 11 every day.

A practice is a set of constraints that can set you free. To get terrific at anything requires a tremendous amount of work. And this work has to be intentional, deliberate, focused and primarily automatic. Automatic behaviors, also called habits or routines, make the heavy lifting of doing great work a lot lighter because something feels amiss when we are not doing it. When desired behaviors are automated, they dramatically reduce the overhead associated with creative expression, enterprise creation and even research and discovery. 

In addition to the reasons delineated above, there is another underlying principle at work here. Routines can be “Forces of Convergence”.  When creative outliers inevitably and involuntarily have piles and piles of new ideas right in front of them at every single moment, it can be incredibly useful to have a force of convergence applied to prevent, delay or at least manage distractions.

In fact, for some of us, it is imperative, for we can be very good at surfing waves of new ideas and insights.    And our curiosity creates incredible appetites for new interesting, exciting projects, which can be problematic. I was once told by a colleague decades ago, early in my professional life, that I was the company’s best starter and he was the best finisher, but he could never come up with a tiny fraction of the ideas I had.

Knowing we love to fly and explore, it would be crazy and even counter-productive to try and prevent this natural, somewhat involuntary tendency. Still, we could design lives that get a full day’s work completed in the first part of the day, leaving free a ton of time to fly around and explore like my friend, the super-productive photojournalist, did. This is possible because some creative outliers also have abnormal amounts of energy to expend. And these are the ones who can benefit the most from routine.

Cultivating routines to act as appropriate forces of convergence for you will radically increase your productiveness and effectiveness.

Outlier Sanctuary

Creative Outliers tend to be sensitive which can push and pull them in different directions than less imaginative more mainstream folks. This means as the outside impinges upon them, they often feel more compelled to respond. This can take the form of a large range of types of responses. Entrepreneurs see problems and say let’s start a company to address this. Artists, writers and composers may feel the need to emanate into the world some expressive response. This can grow tiresome not only to the creative outlier but also to those around them who get taken along for the ride.  This can strain relationships, especially with those who are at times less sensitive and less compelled to act

Additionally, not all responses are constructive. Examples include substance abuse and depression especially when the outside news we are bombarded with is so negative.  There are however more constructive sanctuaries such as reading, meditating, waking nature and many many more but for creative outliers what seems to work the best is creating and expressing which some of the time if appropriate and passing muster, makes it into the outside world. These creative acts can evolve into creative processes and some of the time workflows, which may even be able to be monetized. 

Using your creativity to create a practice where you can be, at least to some degree, insulated from the chaos of the outside world is doubly useful. You retreat from negativity and you create more works. What an ideal example of adapting.  This iterative expressive creative dance can be a very healthy constructive response to being bombarded with a typical seven-twenty-four bummer news cycle.

As creative outliers are empowered to manifest more responses and options to the more observed and experienced external (internal) phenomena, they tend to have a larger emotional dynamic range. When someone is gifted they can have more of everything. More problems. More issues. More responses. More options. And more ability to habituate positive practices which can function as a sanctuary. Those who have more know this can be double-edged. More can be a blessing or a curse depending upon how it is managed, instead of being mangled.     

Practices also can be habituated. Habits are nothing more than automatic behaviors. If there are positive expressive creativity serving behaviors you have learned help with your workflow or expressive process, they can also be habituated into practices that can shield you from the vicissitudes of external and even internal chaos.

In short, they can provide sanctuary, a safe personal place in a crazy world. For some, this happens accidentally but one can actually lower the overhead associated with creative expression by habituating creative behaviors which are consistent with whatever your creative identity is. 

Three simple steps to sanctuary.  First, determine, discover or invent your creative identity. Second derive some behaviors consistent with this creative identity. And then third, habituate (automate) these behaviors into a practice that takes no effort because it is a habit that you feel incomplete if neglected.

You have just consciously invented your very own personal sanctuary. 

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Everyone tells stories. We have to because the amount of life impinging upon us is too great to absorb, and stories allow us to focus on a subset of reality in order to be able to process it. Stories are not only how we communicate with each other but also how we communicate with ourselves.

Stories combine context and knowledge in experiential data reduced digestible packages, which sometimes become passable batons to permit us to communicate with each other over space and time like movies, operas, paintings, and symphonies. And they usually have a beginning, middle, and end again to make them digestible but the reality is less linear and less predictable, and less digestible than this. 

Reality is decidedly not linear, it is nonlinear and we all carry with us multiple endings, beginnings, and middles to choose from. Is this the same as a multiverse? Or parallel universes? Probably because we need to reduce the complexity of the real world in order to process it for one thing is certain, the universe we live in is quite dimensionally vast, and it is also dynamically adapting as are we and everything in our universe (or universes).

In fact, oftentimes, differences in options come from looking at the same reality from more than one perspective. Some people are better than others at tolerating ambiguity (diversity?). Some people feel threatened or confused by too many options, but they too have a legitimate point, for there are those who are too comfortable with ambiguity and too uncertain of where they are in their worlds which can make it difficult to properly adapt to circumstances.

This is why stories are so important. They are a means of convergence on shared realities. They may be wrong or incorrect depending on which perspective is the reference. But in order for a society to operate, there do have to be some shared stories, just as for each of us to operate, we have to tell ourselves stories that are fairly consistent, or we would be all over the place, never converging upon realities that are useful to us because they can not be operated upon or within.

Think about it.

What stories are you telling yourself? And your friends? And your neighbors? And you polling places?

Remember although stories are powerful and necessary they may or may not be true. And they may or may not be true at some points in time but true at other points in time.

If you are a creative outlier, you may have stories that are not mainstream and that may get you in trouble. Be conscious of the stories you tell others and the stories you tell yourselves and remember stories do have a context within which they live. They are not absolute for they, like the universe are constantly adapting to the dimensions they are taking into account. 

Constraints are Critical

Creative Outliers – have you ever wondered why (external) deadlines seem to be such excellent motivators? Do you sometimes do your best work right before it is due? Creative outliers tend to be very curious people.  We can spend most of our time learning, sometimes, instead of expressing ourselves. This can be a seductive escape from putting ourselves on the line by exposing our creative output to others and even to ourselves, as we tend to be even more critical of our results or even works in progress than the outside world. Ever heard the phrase “paralyzed by perfectionism” or “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough” directed at you?

Most of us benefit from constraints. Sometimes we can even effectively supply those constraints internally instead of having to rely upon the outside commitments. Ultimately if creative outliers are to become innovators, we learn the power of applying constraints. Sometimes it is simply a matter of needing to get paid by honoring external commitments. 

What if there are no external constraints? What if there are no external commitments? What if there are no deadlines? Will the new hybrid, partially virtual world we are moving toward increase the need for us to apply constraints internally? And what constraints other than time apply? How about skill, talent, equipment, collaborators and money? How about the timeliness of your contribution? Or windows of opportunity? Or in more general terms the market? 

Hopefully, we creative outliers get to the point where we welcome constraints because they can and usually do save us from ourselves. Almost every time a creative person completes a work or a project, they can immediately tell themselves what should or could have been done differently to improve things. Hey, we are trying to harness infinity here. Of course, we rarely run out of ideas. 

In addition to having been paralyzing myself by perfectionism and being told by the president of Cogswell Polytechnical College, where I was a dean, to stop making the perfect the enemy of the good enough, I once received a surprisingly relevant piece of advice from Amar G. Bose, then the Chairman of Bose Corporation where I worked for the decade from 1980 to 1990. 

I was trying to convince him of my latest idea that we had to rapidly move into some new market because the window of opportunity was now. He laughed and said, “When I founded Bose Corporation, there were already 75 speaker companies in the United States, and now there are 300. Bose Corporation’s revenue is larger than the other 299 combined”. He elaborated and I am paraphrasing here; you do not have to worry about when you get to the party if you are the best one there. What you have to worry about and focus all of your energy on is being the best you can be and showing up. Now, conventional wisdom, with its short-term orientation, would probably dismiss this advice. I have often recalled what he said, as he truly had built a powerful and dominant company in the audio world, which even today is an extremely valuable brand.

Amar Bose is no longer with us, and there may not be anyone left at the company defending this particular stance. As an outsider, the company does not appear to be doing as well as when he was defending the integrity of his ideas regarding how to be in the highly competitive consumer electronics market. Of course, Dr. Bose was aware of deadlines and shipping products; he was running a profitable multi-billion dollar privately held enterprise. 

I wonder about the dynamic nature of balancing constraints as part of the creative process. We each have a pile of potential constraints, as does every person in the world. Presidents, dictators and CEOs alike all have resource and time constraints. Almost no one has as much money or time as they can imagine using as we each have to manage within limits.

But if we are to harness the infinity within, we can not let these constraints overwhelm us and instead use them as critical to our creative processes because they represent forces of convergence that we each desperately need in order to stop learning and start shipping results. Hopefully, we can show up with the best results we can deliver!