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March 8, 2007
Creative Gut vs. Number Crunching
Posted by Brad Abare | Filed under: Creativity
Jon Steel wrote a great article in the January 22 issue of Adweek titled "The Unprofessionals." He makes the argument for downtime and dismisses the critics who say creativity must be powered by logic. At Personality™, we continually blur the lines between right brain and left brain thinking which causes many internal debates as it relates to which side should win. When the data to support instincts are absent, we run the risk of becoming extinct if we continually suppress our creative gut. Steel expounds in these choice nuggets:
- The quest for professionalism is making creatives "less effective, less interesting, less intelligent, less persuasive and less creative."
- Leonardo Da Vinci said, "It is by logic we prove, but by intuition we discover." In the Information Age logic is king "meanwhile our most valuable asset--intuition--being imprecise, unquantifiable and therefore unprofessional, must be hidden from view, locked away in the creative department like the retarded child of a medieval monarch."
- "It is experience, not information, that provides the inspiration for ideas; experience not only of brands, categories and boardrooms, but also of life itself. We need a life, we need distance, to make sense of it all."
- Our best ideas come in the shower because "it's what Da Vinci suspected when he observed that 'the greatest geniuses accomplish more by working less.'" We need to roam around more outside of the contexts of our professional job.
- The effect that our always-on connected society has had is numbing. "It's estimated that the effect on a human brain's processing ability of waiting for a Blackberry to flash, a computer to chime, or a cell phone to ring is equivalent to smoking two big fat joints." Clients aren't paying us to smoke joints.
Is Steel more professional as a result of him unplugging and allowing his creative gut to guide? Admittedly he says no. "But I deal in the currency of ideas, not information. And by that measure I'm probably a whole lot richer."
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