[Music]
what could possibly go wrong well as
we’ve seen with this little thing quite
a lot so we’ll see how this goes
so here comes 18 minutes on quantum
mechanics polymaths dirty dancing and a
very poorly thought-out idea for skiving
off work in life as in business people
talk about things going wrong but not so
in science in science nothing goes wrong
it’s just that the the outcome wasn’t
really what you expected it to be and
this is the essence of experiment the
course of action adopted without you
really being sure about what the
outcomes going to be carried out to
support refute or validate a hypothesis
it gives you insight into
cause-and-effect in science you don’t
just put things together and at random
and so wonder what’s going to happen if
I do this you first examine phenomena
that exist look at ways to test them
sometimes your tests will end in
agreement confirming what you thought
sometimes they will end in dispute
leading to new ways of thinking and
sometimes they’ll fail to give any
nonzero result at all this happened in
the 1800s the 1880s actually there was a
painstaking six-year experiment six
years that’s longer than most businesses
exist for to detect the medium in which
threw light travelled or supposedly it
failed entirely to achieve that goal but
in doing so it opens the pathway for
quantum mechanics and relativity so it
went wrong or not at all or as my
daughter would say saws but also lulls
it just depends on the span of time you
use to define your conclusion it’s about
experiments not expectations expectation
as you will find as you travel through
life is the source of all sorrow at the
moment that you look upon your career as
a series of experiments your life will
change forever now how could a science
here how could a scientist you are is
pretty much defined by what you do next
when your experiment turns out in a way
that you didn’t expect
so to how good a creative thinker you
are defines what you do next when your
career doesn’t quite turn out the way
you expected it to so how did good
scientists become good or pretty much in
the same way that good creative thinkers
become better creative thinkers a couple
of years ago I left the company that I’d
founded 20 years previously it wasn’t
just some job it was my life it was all
I’d ever known I was very well paid I
made sure I paid me the big bucks it was
a perfect job top of the tree a little
bit respected a little bit well-known
sweet why leave well it’s kind of
because I don’t know what I do when
people ask me you know it’s kind of like
the quintessential cab driver question
what do you do then I’m kind of like oh
god oh I’m a designer and I hope that
just shuts everyone up but it never does
because then they come back and they say
hi what sort of things you design oh oh
I don’t know stuff oh that’s a nice hat
jumper ear you’ve got tell me about it
hopefully that gets us off the question
but whilst I don’t know what I do I kind
of do know what I want to do everything
you know write the theme tune sing the
theme tune
so Little Britain oh I want to write
design I want to make I want to weld I
want to build furniture and medical
equipment
I want to make artificial limbs I want
to bring things into being that are both
beautiful in function and inform and
help make the world a better place
that’s not too much to ask is it well
for a lot of businesses out there it is
too much to ask and that’s a problem
it’s a problem for the people that work
there who have their abilities
restricted because of structures that
surround them and it’s a problem for the
businesses who pay a lot of money for
their creative assets to where they
could be far more potent and therefore
lucrative conformity kills creativity
most people don’t actually realize that
they’re conforming they simply feel in
some abstract way that they need to be
more creative so they go on courses
designed to help them get more creative
or they read self-help books apparently
to unlock some hitherto unknown treasure
trove of creativity within themselves
it’s a very healthy industry Google how
do I get more creative apparently you
take your shoes and socks off and walk
on grass
well I tried that in Shoreditch nearly
stood on a syringe so I certainly
wouldn’t recommend it this world has
some very odd ideas regarding creativity
not least the notion that it can be
taught even the idea of coming up with
an idea was in itself rebranded in the
50s and 60s
how the hell Brunel or Edison ever came
up with anything without first throwing
a ball around their friends play word
association ideation games is a mystery
to me
that’s my only flight
lap it up but the issue isn’t that
people are less creative and therefore
need to be more creative
they’re simply reacting to environments
that erode their natural creativity so
stealthily that it’s they that believe
they’re the ones at fault that they are
the ones that require creative
re-education can you teach somebody how
to be creative this is a question I get
asked a lot and my answer is no you can
but you can teach them how not to be
creative something our educational
establishment appears to excel at but
that’s a rant for another day creativity
as we all know is the ability to make
connections teaching somebody how to be
more creative simply revolves around
getting them to combine what they
already know in new ways and this is all
lovely right up until the point that
that person runs out of knowledge making
connections is a good trick gaining
expansive knowledge is the real trick a
wide run a wide range of understanding
is key to creativity understanding goes
beyond knowledge knowledge goes beyond
information understanding means that you
own your knowledge reading some books
and going on courses just isn’t enough
we’re essentially talking about the
acquisition of a bunch of all-consuming
hobbies when I say all-consuming
I mean obsessive I mean if you aren’t
already on the autistic spectrum I
thoroughly recommend getting on it
because you’ll find that it really helps
with the obsessive bit doesn’t help so
much with the winning friends bit but
swings and roundabouts acquiring
multiple hobbies has the magical
consequence of exponentially increasing
your ability in the one area where you
have the most talent your brain isn’t a
fixed mass that shapes your behavior
your behavior acts
shapes your brain literally dr. Alvaro
Pasquale Lyon professor of neurology at
Harvard Medical School says that if a
gardener takes a serious interest in
engineering her neurons will phone will
form new pathways to previously isolated
regions of the brain amazing so it might
be a mistake just to do one thing if you
practice multiple things you actually
get better at any one of those things to
strengthen those neural pathways however
we’ve got to repeat it simply picking up
a pamphlet on nuclear propulsion systems
and leafing through it just isn’t going
to cut it and people use hobbies have
allowed them to become skilled in
multiple areas and then for
exponentially skilled at a certain area
have a name and it isn’t smartass it’s
polymath polymath some recent articles
have lamented are an endangered species
these articles highlight the contrast
between the the specialists that seem to
run today’s world rather than the we’ve
stood up there rather than the polymaths
of the past centuries from sowing baking
painting botany
astronomy made motorcycle maintenance
serious hobbies teach you a wide array
of things that can be applied to a
surprisingly wide and unrelated set of
problems in life unfortunately
it requires a tremendous amount of time
to become skilled at any one thing and
of course if you want to master several
well that’s tripling your practice time
so having a hobby isn’t the problem
finding the time is which kind of brings
us onto this 10,000 hour theory which
I’m sure many of you heard of
popularized by mr. Malcolm Gladwell it
was first noticed in the nineteenth
century that it takes about 10,000 hours
to be good at anything that’s about ten
years although there is another group of
experts at the moment trying to disprove
this theory but maybe they’re just
annoyed that it took them longer than
10,000 hours
maybe they just don’t like a smart ass
regardless the amount of information on
anyone’s subject is growing daily and so
that number goes up 10,000 hours is
fairly long time and that’s just to
become an expert one thing but as we’ve
spoken about you need to become an
expert at a few things for it to have
any tangible impact on your creativity
the point is great creative people are
often good at one thing they want to do
lots of things their minds want to roam
they want to see the world in different
ways they want to imagine different
possibilities and we like to think that
we can label certain people as creative
and then we can go and put them in a
creative department and we can ask them
to channel their creativity into making
an exciting film about toilet rolls but
the creativity is like dirty dancing you
can’t put it in a corner it will quite
naturally it will quite naturally want
to break out into other creative areas
and how can business structures is how
can business structures support this
requirement for freedom now must be said
that I have been exceedingly fortunate
in my career I’ve been allowed
unhindered creative freedom working
across a multitude of different mediums
and technologies both during my time at
AKQA ‘add now at the very extraordinary
native whose staggering body of talent
and work owes everything to their values
and philosophies that actually have bear
more resemblance to a 21st century Bauer
house than they do to a actual
traditional business but the reality is
that my experience is the exception and
a huge number of businesses squander
their their creativity through a
misplaced sense of shortsightedness and
focus ideally if they were being
strictly truthful with themselves they
would prefer to hire creative parrot not
polymaths that is to say individuals you
can you rightfully
same thing day in day out roughly the
same kind of squawking reasonably
manageable until somebody squawks
something a bit different than a few
months they are everyone’s squawking
that’s they in tune and so on and so
forth the pattern repeats and for all
the talk of originality and authenticity
these companies would really prefer that
originality and authenticity to be on
Rails they would prefer you to stay
focused they would prefer you to not do
the thing that you’re doing and do the
thing that they’re asking they’re the
ones that people that will probably
described at school is lacking focus
where we all know that they’re really
talented but when they can be bothered
it is literally channeling my school
report so we hire them anyway we give
them attractive remunerative packages
fancy job titles and we try and manage
them and then we’re surprised when they
get bored and leave so when you guys go
out and start your businesses you need
to think about how are you going to
nurture this desire for people to be
Polymathic now for that idea of skiving
off work why not companies providing
house incubators for their people to
support their hobbies or businesses
let’s say that that needs about 20% of
anyone’s time it’s quite a lot of time
maybe it’s madness but it fully depends
on how far you look into the future and
what you believe the cost-benefit to be
taking 20% away from any employees time
and potential bill ability doesn’t sound
all that smart and it’s certainly not
very smart if they’re correspondingly
less efficient but what if that time was
spent enriching their minds providing
the means to acquire ownable knowledge
that would result in more imaginative
ideas they’d be 20% more creative 20%
more effective they’d be happier they
wouldn’t leave quite as much and you’d
save a lot of money on rehiring it
really shouldn’t come as any surprise to
you that I’m not asked to go in lecture
of business schools
the main hurdle that businesses do need
to get over is the that’s got nothing to
do with what we do here syndrome
everything has everything to do with
everything but until businesses realize
that what people crave is freedom
talented creatives will continue to
leave and this is of course all enormous
ly inconvenient for business owners I
mean why can’t people just stick to the
bloody tasks in hand well they can and
they will for a time but then they’ll
tire and they’ll ask to go on a training
course which might do the trick for a
while but the future for creativity
within business is reliant on getting
ahead of the creative conformity curve
it’s up to you the businesses that you
start that you go into to instill
practices and values within them that
encourage support and even demand
Polymathic creativity because with well
stocked brains the creativity will
follow and I for one would far rather
work with polymaths than parrots which
brings us back to the start of all this
what could possibly go wrong just being
honest probably everything but that’s
okay really is because remember your
life your career your businesses are
just a series of experiments not
expectations and there are just four
rules as far as I’m concerned that can
pretty much guide you through anything
that life throws at you number one is be
obsessive be obsessive about learning
and stop wasting time on meaningless
guff number two is but don’t be
obsessive about planning plan what you
need to do immediately next and then do
it and then plan the next bit number
three be the best at what you do if you
know deep down in your heart that you’re
not the best then go and find some
think you can be the best step and the
last one is don’t let your decisions
become Dogma if something no longer
makes sense that you made a decision on
a few years back make the change now
following these rules experience has
shown me isn’t going to win you many
friends it’s going to annoy a lot of
people but it is the right thing to do
so I’m just saying the point is if
you’re thinking correctly your reaction
to you but what if it goes wrong
shouldn’t be one of fear it should be
one of curious excitement because when
things go wrong and you’re following and
following the rules you’ll discover more
about yourself than you ever imagined
you’ll discover those uncharted paths
those opportunities that you didn’t even
know existed and what could possibly go
wrong
becomes one of the most inspirational
questions you’ll ever ask yourself by
releasing yourself from expectation
you’ll be happier and you’ll probably
end up somewhere completely unexpected
as one of my greatest inspirations
douglas adams the author once said i
haven’t ended up where i expected to be
but i have ended up where i meant to be
thank you very much i hope you have a
wonderful day
you
what could possibly go wrong well as
we’ve seen with this little thing quite
a lot so we’ll see how this goes
so here comes 18 minutes on quantum
mechanics polymaths dirty dancing and a
very poorly thought-out idea for skiving
off work in life as in business people
talk about things going wrong but not so
in science in science nothing goes wrong
it’s just that the the outcome wasn’t
really what you expected it to be and
this is the essence of experiment the
course of action adopted without you
really being sure about what the
outcomes going to be carried out to
support refute or validate a hypothesis
it gives you insight into
cause-and-effect in science you don’t
just put things together and at random
and so wonder what’s going to happen if
I do this you first examine phenomena
that exist look at ways to test them
sometimes your tests will end in
agreement confirming what you thought
sometimes they will end in dispute
leading to new ways of thinking and
sometimes they’ll fail to give any
nonzero result at all this happened in
the 1800s the 1880s actually there was a
painstaking six-year experiment six
years that’s longer than most businesses
exist for to detect the medium in which
threw light travelled or supposedly it
failed entirely to achieve that goal but
in doing so it opens the pathway for
quantum mechanics and relativity so it
went wrong or not at all or as my
daughter would say saws but also lulls
it just depends on the span of time you
use to define your conclusion it’s about
experiments not expectations expectation
as you will find as you travel through
life is the source of all sorrow at the
moment that you look upon your career as
a series of experiments your life will
change forever now how could a science
here how could a scientist you are is
pretty much defined by what you do next
when your experiment turns out in a way
that you didn’t expect
so to how good a creative thinker you
are defines what you do next when your
career doesn’t quite turn out the way
you expected it to so how did good
scientists become good or pretty much in
the same way that good creative thinkers
become better creative thinkers a couple
of years ago I left the company that I’d
founded 20 years previously it wasn’t
just some job it was my life it was all
I’d ever known I was very well paid I
made sure I paid me the big bucks it was
a perfect job top of the tree a little
bit respected a little bit well-known
sweet why leave well it’s kind of
because I don’t know what I do when
people ask me you know it’s kind of like
the quintessential cab driver question
what do you do then I’m kind of like oh
god oh I’m a designer and I hope that
just shuts everyone up but it never does
because then they come back and they say
hi what sort of things you design oh oh
I don’t know stuff oh that’s a nice hat
jumper ear you’ve got tell me about it
hopefully that gets us off the question
but whilst I don’t know what I do I kind
of do know what I want to do everything
you know write the theme tune sing the
theme tune
so Little Britain oh I want to write
design I want to make I want to weld I
want to build furniture and medical
equipment
I want to make artificial limbs I want
to bring things into being that are both
beautiful in function and inform and
help make the world a better place
that’s not too much to ask is it well
for a lot of businesses out there it is
too much to ask and that’s a problem
it’s a problem for the people that work
there who have their abilities
restricted because of structures that
surround them and it’s a problem for the
businesses who pay a lot of money for
their creative assets to where they
could be far more potent and therefore
lucrative conformity kills creativity
most people don’t actually realize that
they’re conforming they simply feel in
some abstract way that they need to be
more creative so they go on courses
designed to help them get more creative
or they read self-help books apparently
to unlock some hitherto unknown treasure
trove of creativity within themselves
it’s a very healthy industry Google how
do I get more creative apparently you
take your shoes and socks off and walk
on grass
well I tried that in Shoreditch nearly
stood on a syringe so I certainly
wouldn’t recommend it this world has
some very odd ideas regarding creativity
not least the notion that it can be
taught even the idea of coming up with
an idea was in itself rebranded in the
50s and 60s
how the hell Brunel or Edison ever came
up with anything without first throwing
a ball around their friends play word
association ideation games is a mystery
to me
that’s my only flight
lap it up but the issue isn’t that
people are less creative and therefore
need to be more creative
they’re simply reacting to environments
that erode their natural creativity so
stealthily that it’s they that believe
they’re the ones at fault that they are
the ones that require creative
re-education can you teach somebody how
to be creative this is a question I get
asked a lot and my answer is no you can
but you can teach them how not to be
creative something our educational
establishment appears to excel at but
that’s a rant for another day creativity
as we all know is the ability to make
connections teaching somebody how to be
more creative simply revolves around
getting them to combine what they
already know in new ways and this is all
lovely right up until the point that
that person runs out of knowledge making
connections is a good trick gaining
expansive knowledge is the real trick a
wide run a wide range of understanding
is key to creativity understanding goes
beyond knowledge knowledge goes beyond
information understanding means that you
own your knowledge reading some books
and going on courses just isn’t enough
we’re essentially talking about the
acquisition of a bunch of all-consuming
hobbies when I say all-consuming
I mean obsessive I mean if you aren’t
already on the autistic spectrum I
thoroughly recommend getting on it
because you’ll find that it really helps
with the obsessive bit doesn’t help so
much with the winning friends bit but
swings and roundabouts acquiring
multiple hobbies has the magical
consequence of exponentially increasing
your ability in the one area where you
have the most talent your brain isn’t a
fixed mass that shapes your behavior
your behavior acts
shapes your brain literally dr. Alvaro
Pasquale Lyon professor of neurology at
Harvard Medical School says that if a
gardener takes a serious interest in
engineering her neurons will phone will
form new pathways to previously isolated
regions of the brain amazing so it might
be a mistake just to do one thing if you
practice multiple things you actually
get better at any one of those things to
strengthen those neural pathways however
we’ve got to repeat it simply picking up
a pamphlet on nuclear propulsion systems
and leafing through it just isn’t going
to cut it and people use hobbies have
allowed them to become skilled in
multiple areas and then for
exponentially skilled at a certain area
have a name and it isn’t smartass it’s
polymath polymath some recent articles
have lamented are an endangered species
these articles highlight the contrast
between the the specialists that seem to
run today’s world rather than the we’ve
stood up there rather than the polymaths
of the past centuries from sowing baking
painting botany
astronomy made motorcycle maintenance
serious hobbies teach you a wide array
of things that can be applied to a
surprisingly wide and unrelated set of
problems in life unfortunately
it requires a tremendous amount of time
to become skilled at any one thing and
of course if you want to master several
well that’s tripling your practice time
so having a hobby isn’t the problem
finding the time is which kind of brings
us onto this 10,000 hour theory which
I’m sure many of you heard of
popularized by mr. Malcolm Gladwell it
was first noticed in the nineteenth
century that it takes about 10,000 hours
to be good at anything that’s about ten
years although there is another group of
experts at the moment trying to disprove
this theory but maybe they’re just
annoyed that it took them longer than
10,000 hours
maybe they just don’t like a smart ass
regardless the amount of information on
anyone’s subject is growing daily and so
that number goes up 10,000 hours is
fairly long time and that’s just to
become an expert one thing but as we’ve
spoken about you need to become an
expert at a few things for it to have
any tangible impact on your creativity
the point is great creative people are
often good at one thing they want to do
lots of things their minds want to roam
they want to see the world in different
ways they want to imagine different
possibilities and we like to think that
we can label certain people as creative
and then we can go and put them in a
creative department and we can ask them
to channel their creativity into making
an exciting film about toilet rolls but
the creativity is like dirty dancing you
can’t put it in a corner it will quite
naturally it will quite naturally want
to break out into other creative areas
and how can business structures is how
can business structures support this
requirement for freedom now must be said
that I have been exceedingly fortunate
in my career I’ve been allowed
unhindered creative freedom working
across a multitude of different mediums
and technologies both during my time at
AKQA ‘add now at the very extraordinary
native whose staggering body of talent
and work owes everything to their values
and philosophies that actually have bear
more resemblance to a 21st century Bauer
house than they do to a actual
traditional business but the reality is
that my experience is the exception and
a huge number of businesses squander
their their creativity through a
misplaced sense of shortsightedness and
focus ideally if they were being
strictly truthful with themselves they
would prefer to hire creative parrot not
polymaths that is to say individuals you
can you rightfully
same thing day in day out roughly the
same kind of squawking reasonably
manageable until somebody squawks
something a bit different than a few
months they are everyone’s squawking
that’s they in tune and so on and so
forth the pattern repeats and for all
the talk of originality and authenticity
these companies would really prefer that
originality and authenticity to be on
Rails they would prefer you to stay
focused they would prefer you to not do
the thing that you’re doing and do the
thing that they’re asking they’re the
ones that people that will probably
described at school is lacking focus
where we all know that they’re really
talented but when they can be bothered
it is literally channeling my school
report so we hire them anyway we give
them attractive remunerative packages
fancy job titles and we try and manage
them and then we’re surprised when they
get bored and leave so when you guys go
out and start your businesses you need
to think about how are you going to
nurture this desire for people to be
Polymathic now for that idea of skiving
off work why not companies providing
house incubators for their people to
support their hobbies or businesses
let’s say that that needs about 20% of
anyone’s time it’s quite a lot of time
maybe it’s madness but it fully depends
on how far you look into the future and
what you believe the cost-benefit to be
taking 20% away from any employees time
and potential bill ability doesn’t sound
all that smart and it’s certainly not
very smart if they’re correspondingly
less efficient but what if that time was
spent enriching their minds providing
the means to acquire ownable knowledge
that would result in more imaginative
ideas they’d be 20% more creative 20%
more effective they’d be happier they
wouldn’t leave quite as much and you’d
save a lot of money on rehiring it
really shouldn’t come as any surprise to
you that I’m not asked to go in lecture
of business schools
the main hurdle that businesses do need
to get over is the that’s got nothing to
do with what we do here syndrome
everything has everything to do with
everything but until businesses realize
that what people crave is freedom
talented creatives will continue to
leave and this is of course all enormous
ly inconvenient for business owners I
mean why can’t people just stick to the
bloody tasks in hand well they can and
they will for a time but then they’ll
tire and they’ll ask to go on a training
course which might do the trick for a
while but the future for creativity
within business is reliant on getting
ahead of the creative conformity curve
it’s up to you the businesses that you
start that you go into to instill
practices and values within them that
encourage support and even demand
Polymathic creativity because with well
stocked brains the creativity will
follow and I for one would far rather
work with polymaths than parrots which
brings us back to the start of all this
what could possibly go wrong just being
honest probably everything but that’s
okay really is because remember your
life your career your businesses are
just a series of experiments not
expectations and there are just four
rules as far as I’m concerned that can
pretty much guide you through anything
that life throws at you number one is be
obsessive be obsessive about learning
and stop wasting time on meaningless
guff number two is but don’t be
obsessive about planning plan what you
need to do immediately next and then do
it and then plan the next bit number
three be the best at what you do if you
know deep down in your heart that you’re
not the best then go and find some
think you can be the best step and the
last one is don’t let your decisions
become Dogma if something no longer
makes sense that you made a decision on
a few years back make the change now
following these rules experience has
shown me isn’t going to win you many
friends it’s going to annoy a lot of
people but it is the right thing to do
so I’m just saying the point is if
you’re thinking correctly your reaction
to you but what if it goes wrong
shouldn’t be one of fear it should be
one of curious excitement because when
things go wrong and you’re following and
following the rules you’ll discover more
about yourself than you ever imagined
you’ll discover those uncharted paths
those opportunities that you didn’t even
know existed and what could possibly go
wrong
becomes one of the most inspirational
questions you’ll ever ask yourself by
releasing yourself from expectation
you’ll be happier and you’ll probably
end up somewhere completely unexpected
as one of my greatest inspirations
douglas adams the author once said i
haven’t ended up where i expected to be
but i have ended up where i meant to be
thank you very much i hope you have a
wonderful day
you
Please follow and like us: