Stemato.com - Stephen Tompkins’ Blog

Is it a new MacBook Pro with a fancy new copy of Illustrator or is it being a great draftsman who can mimic Picasso and Monet with ease? To me creativity is something much more ubiquitous and free flowing than buying a new computer or copying someone else’s idea. I know the old Picasso quote but I believe it is much more than the snarky Spanish Master says. It is like air either you breathe it or you don’t and most times it happens without you even knowing.

Creativity is about seeking out something just beyond your reach.  It’s about making sense of the black space and crafting original thought from it. Many accountants, lawyers and doctors all must utilize different mindsets and some do it with a masterful creative solution.  Whilst others needlessly toil away; forever mired in the bureaucracy of their day jobs.

As I end my training at Microsoft’s Atlas, I carefully take in quite a bit of information about ad serving, reporting and general data with hopes that it will eventually lead to the creative leadership I have grown accustom too. This “blocking and tackling” type work serves an important function in the process of creativity no matter what your job may be.  And therefore should never be underestimated or breezed over.

It lays your foundation with which you begin to craft your space. In the cycle of life it is your infancy that you measure everything else against. 

Most people think of Michael Jordan as the world’s greatest basketball player who won multiple championships with the Chicago Bulls. I always admired his game and thought of him as more artist than athlete. He was elegant, graceful and driven with a purpose to succeed. Despite all these successes there is another side of Michael Jordan that does not get as much exposure.

It’s a trait he shared with Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Burnett. You are probably thinking its inventiveness or creativity. While both of those are true it’s not the specific characteristic that I am thinking about. The trait I refer to is…

FAILURE

While everyone of the folks above has succeeded and become legends in their own right. They also have each shared terrific insights into the failures that helped them to achieve their goals in life. Let’s take a look at what they said.

Thomas Edison

‘Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.’ — Thomas Alva Edison

Edison is getting at a bigger issue of the natural “flight or fright” characteristic. Are natural tendency is to give up before we get to that “a-ha” moment. He is saying to just stick with it one more time and you could find a better solution.

Mahatma Gandhi

‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.’ — Mahatma Gandhi

Ghandi is telling us to always remember that freedom is a two-sided coin. We should not take the freedom to make mistakes for granted. It’s as important if not more than always succeeding.

Leo Burnett

‘To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas.’ — Leo Burnett

Burnett is saying essentially that creativity flows from mistakes. To become truly creative you have to be free to let your mind go wherever it may decide. Often it is the mistakes that lead us to the best idea.

Michael Jordan

‘I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.‘ — Michael Jordan

I think that pretty much sums it up! Look for me to fail sometime soon but the only difference is I will enjoy it much more this time.

What does it take to invent a new tool, product or idea? Ideas are born from somewhere deep down inside of us and can be as simple as Bellsouth’s Caller-ID or as complex as Google’s PageRank algorithm. Both of these inventions have something in common that is much less publicized - failure. That is right, it takes persistence and failure, to make something that improves our lives not some great creative mind.

Humility is most often learned the older you get because when you are young ego rules. I remember as a kid trying to come up with the most original and creative drawing in art classes. Its was the true test of whether you were an artist or just some hack with charcoal. We would debate incessantly classmates with great draftsmanship but poor ability to think in an agile and creative way. The reality of our situation was we were not original either. We did have one thing that set us a part drive. Because as we pontificated about the virtues of original thought we continued to test the boundaries of our own minds without fear of failure. We were free from the constraints of rigid academia to develop ideas, drawings, paintings, websites and more.

With retrospect I learned that age makes you more rigid and less willing to fail. Maybe its the reality of bills. One thing I always tried to keep in my core set of operational values is drive. Because with drive anything is possible. Dreaming big and performing agile is the combination that sets the passionate apart from the rest. I have also never lost the ability to turn my creative fire into well developed originality towards executing a better idea. Because eventually better will become original.

Don’t believe me ask Edison, Ford and Page?

When I was younger, I worried about the implications of having a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree opposed to a Bachelor of Science might have on my career. Would I be pigeoned-holed into being a designer all my life? Were countless beatings at the hands of mindless AE’s to become par for the course? As strange as those worries seem now they were grounded in the reality of my situation. Partly a combination of time and location, my vision was impeded by colleagues, friends and bosses.

I have been in New York for nearly four years now and have grown beyond even my own ideas. Mostly thanks to my BFA because without it I would have not been able to continuously assess, adapt and adopt to every situation thrown at me.

Assess - In art school, we learned to begin all our projects by using your artistic sensibility to assess the overall picture and begin to visualize different solutions. By taking a creative top-level strategic look at our problems we began to form a different type of thought. In sharp contrast to regular schools where you learn to only focus on one solution to most problems we learned solutions are not limited only by the mind’s capacity to develop them.

Assessing current events and thinking outside the box to offer up an easy solution.(circa 2000)

Adapt - Being made to constantly switch applications and learn to adapt to changing technologies at a sometimes dizzying pace readied me for this new changing economy. HTML to drawing and reading we constantly were honing skills that would help later on in adapting to different situations

This started as a sketch of the Lighthouse and evolved into a full scale rebranding.(circa 1998)
Adopt - Sometimes in the name of good design and others not so good design, we were always experimenting with new technologies and adopting it as part of our visual solutions. Being early adopters way back then made it all the easier to learn about influence and changing models of influence on the internet.

Some of my first email blast using HTML emails. (circa 2000)

Almost six years out of school and working now, I can finally say that I made the right choice pursuing my degree in Visual Communications. In the current economy, value is placed on creativity, problem-solving and being able to set oneself apart from a crowded field of normal thinkers.