Are you stimulated for success?

Isaac Yeboah Business News Jul - 08 - 2013 , 04:28

Over the next four weeks, Bernard Otabil will be exposing you to creativity and innovation in the development of a successful life.

Have you ever wondered why some are more successful than others? In other words, have you ever thought about why some are able to quickly come up with ideas and not only that; also go ahead to implement those ideas whereas others struggle to come up with just an idea?

Well, it is all to do with how some are more creative than others; the process of assembling ideas by recombining elements already known but wrongly assumed to be unrelated to each other.

Creativity, which is about idea generation and innovation and which is about the implementation of those ideas, have combined to make our world a better place today.

In fact, whenever you find something nice or interesting that you admire, you should really know that someone had to spend some precious time thinking about developing that product or service.

Creativity made people such as Richard Branson, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates household names. They had ideas, vision, and they decided to go ahead with them.

In the end, they were able to stand out from the crowd, becoming people of real influence. That could also be you if you decide to apply yourself more to doing creative things.

Let’s take a few moments to try and explain what indeed creativity entails. Spending time in the classroom for more than four years teaching students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, creativity and innovation has exposed me to some of the important practical leanings of creativity.

I have taught engineers creativity and innovation at MSC and MBA levels, as well as BSc undergraduates.

Students have often come to class, especially on their first day, thinking that creativity is only for the ‘creative arts’. They see the musician, the footballer, the dancer, the poet, the creative writer, to mention but a few, as the only creative people.

They often struggle to pinpoint ‘creative people’ in the business field. Many seem oblivious of the fact that idea generation, the first process in the development of a venture, involves lots of creative intelligence.

Of course you can excuse them for their lack of understanding of creativity as it applies to the business field because artistes such as Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger; sportsmen such as Tiger Woods and Lionel Messi have taken creativity to a different level in their respective fields.

Businesses, it would seem, are not so good at promoting the creative inputs in their products and services. Their concentration on the bottom-line seems to cloud this whole idea of touting their creative credentials.

That should not be so and that is why for the next few weeks, we will be spending time on what we need to do to earn more money in the first place, and then think about how to save and invest what we have made afterwards.

We will be looking at creativity and its impact on us, that is, if we are to become successful individuals. This is because if you are creative, you become vision-directed and therefore you are often able to see beyond what ‘ordinary’ people see. That way too, you will be able to identify ideas that seek to provide valuable products and services.

Okay, with all that stated, let us now look at how we can all develop the creative juices that will help us to travel beyond our scope to become examples and possibly blessings to others.

As stated above, creativity is a process. That creativity is also a process, implying, among other things, that it is more like a skill than an attitude and that you can get better at it with practice.

Robert Bresson has a nice way of looking at how we should always strive to be creative. He says that “An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.”

Therefore that process also involves how you can think of as many uses to which an object can be put to and developing other ways to create value for others to enjoy.

Let us just do this simple exercise. Just spend just a minute to think of an object. Now identify as many different ways of using the object as you can. As you do that you realise that you create different ways of using that object.

As an example, creating these ways could involve asking yourself the following key questions regarding a shoebox:

• “What is a shoebox for?”
• “What could you use a shoebox for?”
• “How many uses can you think of for a shoebox?”
• “Can you think of 100 uses for a shoebox?”

Not asking the right questions in life also prevents you from becoming creative in the things that you do. When you think about issues and also make the effort to probe into alternative answers and solutions, you will always find out that there is always a better way of doing things.

It is not that difficult at all. The very simple things that you do on a daily basis could become your source of creativity. Consider the following exercise too;

Think about one product or service you’ve used today:

• Can you create a better product/service?
• Can you develop a better process to access the product/service?
• Can you sell that product/service to a different market?
• Can you find a different way to make money from the product/service?

That is how it starts. Once you start looking at products and services this way, you soon realise that you can also provide that service and develop that product differently.

Writing this column over the past years, l have often had requests from readers on how to develop a good business idea to start a successful enterprise or generally on how to invest their money wisely.

Oftentimes, it has been difficult explaining in clear terms to the reader what they should do because in situations like these, you cannot use ‘one size fits all’ as the remedy.

This means that unless you are able to consider individual situations in detail looking at a person’s disposition to risk, you cannot always say you have given the right answer. It can get difficult because we are all different in many ways.

However, l still have some good news on this. The good news is that over time, successful people have left clues that when you follow you are most likely to also get ahead in life.

Some of the clues that l have come to appreciate are the fact that most businesses that have become successful and have been sustainable over the years are built around the concept of ‘satisfying a need’.

The other clue is that the identification of problems or hurdles have encouraged most of these people to find ways to solve them; developing enterprises to address the problems.

After all, generally, people do not just buy a product. They buy the improvement, the benefit, the enhancement and the outcome. Therefore, if you develop a product and it does not really perform exactly what it says on the tin, then your clients will get fed up with you and abandon you along the way. You wouldn’t be fit for purpose!

Consider the following example also. If you visit a hardware shop to buy a drill, you actually don’t need the drill per se but rather a hole. The drill is only the means to get that hole; what you actually want.

So if the drill says it is meant for a 12mm hole, you would want to have a 12mm hole in your wall. If you find anything more or less than that, you will often go berserk!

When you are creative, connecting with ideas comes naturally. Creativity in actual fact results in ideas that have potential value. That value is what people will be prepared to pay money for, and when you get paid for what you do, it makes it much easier for you to build up more resources.

The other thing that you need to know about creativity is that, it is also about recombining elements, meaning the process is one of putting things together in unexpected ways.

Build your ‘what if?’ scenarios to ensure that you get your creative juices flowing all the time.