Eunice knew one thing about her work: it gave her an outlet for the creative juices that overflowed from within her. She didn’t particularly fit in well at work, not with the other workers who mostly ignored her. But Eunice knew that her employer deeply valued her. Other employees came and left, sometimes by their own choosing and other times by firing or layoff. Yet Eunice persisted, she knew not because of her personality or charm but because of her creativity. She could look around the workplace and see the imprint of her creativity on nearly everything, from the style of its branding and marketing to the designs of its products and processes. And that imprint immensely satisfied Eunice, who knew she was in the right place as long as her employer accepted and valued her creativity, and as long as she jumped out of bed every morning to run to work to express more of it.
Creativity
Creativity has a role in careers. Creativity is the ability to envision and do something of beauty, proportion, symmetry, and value in an original way that others haven’t done in precisely the same way before. Creativity feeds employers and fuels employees. You are at your best when you are creative, and you know it. Doing only what someone else has shown and trained you to do may get you a job. Taking what someone else showed you how to do but then doing it better through innovation will not only keep you employed but give you a career. As an innovator and creator, you’ll become a leader. People don’t follow followers. They follow innovators. Employers and their customers and clients appreciate workers who follow protocols. Many things don’t deserve innovation. Many things need to be routine. But even in the routines, people appreciate the sense that they’re interacting with a living, breathing, thinking human being, someone who could and would alter the routine if they perceived the obvious or subtle need for it. Respect and value your creativity.
Thinking
That’s creativity, to respond to the whispers to think and act originally in the moment. And employers rightly value and expect thinking. When a worker proceeds mindlessly on with routines in the face of a screaming demand to change them, supervisors will ask exasperatedly, What were you thinking? The answer, of course, is that the worker wasn’t thinking, when we should be thinking if we’re to be more than automatons, another robot in the employer’s factory. Living the full human experience is to elevate one’s existence beyond autonomic and subcortical responses, those physiologic responses and habituated or instinctual behaviors that allow us to function unthinkingly in work and other environments. Opening the eyes of your mind to purposeful thought and action, surveying and exploring a wider range of the infinite possibilities that lay before you, is our maker’s creative invitation to his partner-image humans. Think. Use your head. Our divinity lies within our creativity, not our automaticity.
Exploration
You should know what creativity means to you. Beyond the opportunities of care and obligations of duty, creativity may be what keeps you going. Your exploration of the fertile ground before you continually leads you on to your next adventure. Repeating yesterday’s routine steadies, relaxes, and reassures you. But refreshing today’s routine with an insightful and creative alteration reinvigorates you. Your creativity keeps you alive and aligned with your maker. It also nourishes and enlivens those around you, giving them a new lease on life. You are an explorer, not merely a settler. Examine your yearn for exploration, to discern the career toward which it leads you. The career in which you would be most creative may be the career in which you would be most engaged, satisfied, and productive, and the one in which you endured the longest. Don’t underestimate the vital role creativity plays in career choice, pursuit, and satisfaction.
Value
Creativity has an essential connection to value. Indeed, an act is creative only if it discerns, pursues, fosters, and adds value. Original acts that instead have no value are not creative. They are chaotic, disruptive, and disturbed. It isn’t creative to come to work with your pants on backward and start crowing like a rooster. That’s just weird and wouldn’t be contributing. But to come to work with an idea for how to make work better, and then to experiment with that idea until perfecting it? That’s creative. Employers generally welcome the truly creative, not the disruptive. Weirdness doesn’t impress employers or their customers or clients. So, think of it: where do you sense that you bring the most creative value? In what career and what field or sector are you most likely to envision and implement new forms, processes, and protocols, and new expressions that add beauty, symmetry, order, and value?
Property
In careers, creativity can even lead directly to valuable intellectual property. If you design an original product or use for a product, you may obtain a valuable patent for yourself or your employer. If you design an original process, you may obtain a valuable process patent for your employer. If you design an original image, you may obtain a valuable trademark for your employer. If you create an original expression, you may obtain a valuable copyright for your employer. Law protects patents, trademarks, and copyrights for use and license by their owners. The most valuable asset that some firms own is their intellectual property. Just ask Coca-Cola the value of its secret proprietary formula. And someone came up with that formula in a creative act. Don’t think that your employer regards your creativity as a tolerable distraction or curious capacity. Think instead of your creativity as a core attribute that your employer greatly values.
Combinations
Even if you don’t think of yourself as particularly creative, don’t underestimate your creative capacity. You don’t have to be an artist, bringing new things to life out of thin air, to be creative. Creativity, especially in the workplace, tends to involve progressive adaptations or unique combinations of existing forms. You don’t have to make a new thing to be creative. To be creative, you may only need to modify an old thing or combine old things in new ways. You have probably already done so in large or small ways, perhaps without even recognizing your creativity. That creative adaptation is why we enjoy visiting someone else’s home or workplace, where we inevitably see large or small differences, not so much in what is in the place but in how its occupants arrange those things in different and original patterns. And we’ll often leave with a fresh inspiration for change in our own home or workplace, saying to ourselves, why didn’t I think of that? Don’t fear creativity. Instead, recognize that you are and should be creative, even and especially in your career.
Engagement
If you still doubt that employers value creativity, consider that employee engagement is one of the bigger issues that employers face, if not the biggest issue. Studies indicate that less than one third of U.S. workers, and barely more than one fifth of workers in other nations, fully engage in their work. Yes, the vast majority of us at work are there just for the ride and the paycheck, or maybe just to get out of the house. That unfortunate state of the workplace reflects itself again in the adage that 20% of workers do 80% of the work. It’s why the first thing that venture capitalists do when acquiring a company is cut 80% of the workforce: they’re not really needed, as long as the new owners can identify the essential 20%. While that may be an exaggeration, the lack of engagement at work nonetheless hurts not only employers and their customers and clients. It also hurts both the engaged and disengaged employees. Don’t let yourself fall into a job or career from which you disengage. Choose and pursue a career that keeps you engaged so that you can live worthwhile.
Journal
Title My Creativity your Career Journal’s next section, after the What I Do section. In this section on your creativity, first articulate what creativity means to you, how you see it vitalizing or inspiring you. At the same time, describe where you might need to modify your view of creativity to better reflect or further embrace it. Have you been misdirecting your creativity, whether for attention, distraction, or harmful disruption rather than for value, beauty, truth, inspiration, and productivity? In the course of your reflections on your creativity, weave in examples of where you have been most creative, including specific examples of what you created, and where you have been least creative, missing opportunities to innovate and grow. Add a commitment to be more creative and consistent in envisioning and pursuing the original things that you could do with the opportunities before you.
Key Points
Creativity is a key attribute of high-value workers.
Creativity demonstrates original thought above autonomic responses.
Workers who deploy their creativity create value for their employers.
Creative products, processes, and expressions are valuable property.
Adaptations and combinations of existing things are also creative.
Creativity demonstrates and increases worker engagement.