Savanting Study 10
Breakthrough best practices for developing corporate and individual creativity to address the global shortage. The success of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs as worldchangers is shown to be due to staying in their creativity domains evident right from childhood. The inborn creativity of Steve Jobs available to only a few is contrasted with the logic-sourced creativity of Bill Gates that is available to all of us.
QUOTES
♦ The volatility and fast pace of today’s business world makes innovation, inventiveness, resourcefulness, responsiveness, creativity, and adaptivity essential in our leaders. “Chief executives believe successfully navigating an increasingly more complex world will require creativity.”
♦ For me, “innovation” improves an existing system. “Creativity” merges existing information systems to generate an entirely new, unprecedented system. I want you to absorb how actionable this definition of creativity is
♦ There are two types of creativity that I want to augment through the redesign of your job . . . . : (a) natural innate creativity such as is often attributed to Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple, and (b) the logic-sourced creativity of Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft.
♦ Would it surprise you to learn that studies show that 98% of the population are creative until the age of five? Entry into the cultural confinements of our education and religious institutions reduces the population to 2% creative by age 7. These are the findings of the NASA study conducted by Dr. George Land and Beth Jarman[i].
♦ From childhood through to their iconic success in the businesses they founded, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos only operated from their creativity domain.
♦ Studies show that, over time, being in flow trains or re-trains people to be more creative.[ii]
♦ According to renowned American cognitive psychologist, Howard Gardner, “All creative work occurs in one or more domains. Individuals are not creative (or noncreative) in general; they are creative in particular domains of accomplishment and require the achievement of expertise in these domains before they can execute significant creative work.”[iii]
♦ Most people are only creative in one domain – the territory of their strongest most rewarding talents and their greatest knowledge and expertise. One’s creativity domain is defined by one operating at one’s biological maximum.
♦ Unfortunately, the way we run our companies and organizations, has interfered with employee ability to enter top-talent flow state in our creativity domain and thus to be our most creative. Perhaps there would not be a creativity shortage if leaders learned how to harness hidden corporate creativity assets.
♦ You can identify your creativity domain by reviewing the theme of the pattern of top-talent flow events in your past. Your top-talent flow theme.
♦ Nature, as database librarian, automatically clusters relevant information systems to fuel this creative engine. “Coincidences” increase as this relevant information is re-combined outside of you. “Breakthroughs” increase inside due to the same re-combining of this positioning of relevant information in the portion of this singular maximizing machinery that’s inside of you.
♦ This spontaneous information phenomenon is why I called my 2019 book, Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, after the savants whose genius superskills are based on this phenomenon of spontaneous information.
♦ Savant brains are most often structurally incapable of absorbing, storing, and utilizing the massive amounts of information necessary to their superskills – musical expertise and repertoires, for example, or the encyclopedic displays of Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 blockbuster movie, Rain Man.
♦ One breakthrough or coincidence can bypass hundreds of steps to your “client’s” goal.
♦ Your breakthroughs, coincidences, epiphanies, and creative inspirations are not the only magic to arise from operating in your creativity domain, Nicholas. You’ve also undoubtedly experienced an instant knowing of the ideal directions in which to proceed. You may collide with an ideal model for how to achieve your “client’s” goal.
♦ Imagine if employers everywhere discovered they had creative people all along but thwarted their creativity in the way they managed them. Imagine corporate competitive advantage if every employee operated from their creativity domain. Imagine the joy if everyone achieved sustainable self-actualization as a result. Imagine if everyone in the world was operating in their creativity domain. Surely, we would have enough invention, creativity, innovation and adaptivity to solve all earth’s problems in short order.
Steve Jobs’ creativity domain
Steve Jobs was a gifted consumer engineer from childhood to death. His singular creativity domain crossed many disciplines and industries: personal computers (Apple II), graphical user interfaces (Macintosh), digital animation (Pixar), music hardware (the iPod), music distribution (iTunes), smartphones (the iPhone), and tablets (the iPad). He was an aesthetic genius to whom it was more important to create the best product than to sell the most. He was a legend in the field of innovative and interactive design.
Bill Gates’ creativity domain
Worldbuilder Bill Gates causes world transformation by unifying networks of organizations, businesses, hardware manufacturers, products, software, donors, charities, government agencies, and such. His worldbuilding creativity domain is how he created and generated structure for a multitude of industries, communities, and fields. To this day, Gates is unifying wealthy individuals and organizations for good works through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Key to the success of both Jobs and Gates was that they discovered their creativity domain in their childhoods and aligned their work and businesses to keep them in that space. You’ll want to read Chapter 15 from Savanting entitled Creativity from NonCreatives for my comparison of real-life events to make my case for the difference in their creativity and creativity domains.
Mark Zuckerberg’s creativity domain
Mark Zuckerberg’s future direction becomes predictable when you project the creativity domain within which he has operated since childhood. Think of the young boy who was inspired to build relationships among family and friends in so many ways. Zucknet, for example, was an intranet for his family, an instant chat system, a conduit for playing games and sharing music, all of which built meaningful bonds among communities of people.
It was predictable that he would grow up to facilitate relationship-building and the re-combining and unification of people systems at Facebook. Mark will be true to his creativity domain even if Facebook disappeared tomorrow.
If he can’t fix the divisiveness of the hate and misinformation arising within Facebook and return it to a force for unifying for the good of humanity, you’ll undoubtedly see him move to a new venue where his lifework can continue. The meaning behind Facebook will be gone for Mark. Otherwise, his health will decline as he fights against biology and doesn’t have the nourishment from the “relationship-building” he seeks.
Jeff Bezos’ creativity domain
Worldbuilder and off-worldbuilder, Jeff Bezos’ life is just as predictably true to his creativity domain. Think of his childhood addiction to science fiction books about off-worldbuilding, his valedictorian speech in high school about his “dream of saving humanity by creating permanent human colonies in orbiting space stations while turning the planet into an enormous nature preserve.”
With 20/20 hindsight, it becomes obvious why he served as President of Princeton’s Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and set up Blue Origin in 2000 to develop space tourism and colonization.
As a kid, Jeff told everyone he wanted to be a “space entrepreneur,” never a spaceman. This explains why he chose to work at entrepreneurial firms with large global systems after Princeton despite higher-paying big-company offers. The global spread and multi-industry diversification of Amazon now makes sense not just in terms of the profits but to gather the financing and experience he was going to need for space colonization. His departure from Amazon to Blue Origin should have surprised no one who knew his creativity domain.
[i] Nick Skillicorn, (August 5th, 2016), Evidence that children become less creative over time (and how to fix it),
TEDxTucson, George Land, The Failure of Success, Video
[ii] Steven Kotler, (Feb 25, 2014), The Playing Field, Psychology Today, Flow States and Creativity: Can you train people to be more creative?
[iii] Howard Gardner (1993), Creating Minds. New York: Basic Books, p. 145