Hungry beast vs ugly baby

15 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by fastcompany.com

That sounds like a great novel. A hungry beast against an ugly baby … Okay maybe not.

So what is the beast and what is the baby and what does Creativity Inc. teach us about creativity with them?

The beast is the business machine. It's the fire that needs constant fueling with money-making products. It's marketing and sales and finance departments that need more stuff in the pipeline to sell and make money.

And unfortunately it's necessary.

The baby is best described in Ed Catmull's own words:

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it's often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films "ugly babies." They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.

The baby is the new. It is the flash of inspiration. It is the brilliant idea you had in the shower. And it needs protection from the beast.

Ed Catmull explains that protection doesn't mean isolation or that the beast never gets fed. Balance is needed in the organization.

…the new needs protection. Business-as-usual does not. Managers do not need to work hard to protect established ideas or ways of doing business. The system is tilted to favor the incumbent. The challenger needs support to find its footing. And the protection of the new—of the future, not the past—must be a conscious effort.

So I felt like this idea didn't really apply to me because it's about not letting your need for efficiency and revenue get in the way of being creative and taking chances on ideas. I felt this only applied to businesses or maybe self-employed creatives.

But then I realized that this totally applies to me. I only write part-time, but I do write in order to sell books. And because I don't have much time to write, I try as much as possible to be efficient about my time. In that sense, I don't take risks. I only think about the deadline. I've been focusing on getting product out the door too much and I need to allow my ugly babies a good environment to grow.

I have a goal to finish and launch a book every year. This means that I really need to be efficient with my time and hurry every step of the process along. But I need to learn a few things from this part of Creativity Inc.

Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.

If we let the beast win:

This kind of thinking yields predictable, unoriginal fare because it prevents the kind of organic ferment that fuels true inspiration.

So instead of making a goal to have a book out every year, I need a goal to write several great books. Changing my goal like this will be following his advice to "hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions."

Protecting the new and balancing the beast are so important for sustainable creativity, both for a company and an individual (whether the individual seeks financial reward for his creativity or not). "Something…that is essential to creativity: a culture that protects the new."