Occasionally I’ve worried that my emphasis on the uncomfortable aspects of creativity might strike some people as dwelling on things that are best underplayed or endured silently, and then I ask myself if it might be prudent to suppress this truth or to tone it down or sweeten it by overemphasizing the fun and rewarding aspects.
Then it occurs to me that my favorite and most exciting projects were ones that were allowed to run their course through the painful stretches and to come out on the other side to breakthrough. And the less satisfying ones, the ones that felt predominantly unpleasant (thankfully, few), were the ones where well-meaning (or nervous) people interfered and tried to shut down doubt and dissent, anesthetize the pain of (as yet) incompatible perspectives and establish an instant superficial peace.
So I am going to continue to hammer on the importance of embracing perplexity and anxiety as a means to innovation. I believe it is terribly important to get real about what is involved in our work, so we can support it, work more effectively and avoid wasting energy fretting needlessly over “things going wrong”, when in fact they are going right.
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From a 2007 Fast Company article profiling Yves Béhar:
Yves Béhar’s ability to anticipate—and incarnate —consumer lust routinely brings executives to his door, saying, “We want to be the Apple of our industry.”
And Béhar has an impertinent question for them, too: “Do you have the guts?”
Show this to your average executive, it will appear to mean: “are you prepared to try something and assume the risk that it might not work as you hope”?
This stress of unforeseeability — let’s call it “nervousness” — is certainly part of the pain of the dealing with the new and unknown, but it is not the primary source of the pain. I don’t think it is what Béhar is talking about.
To get a clearer sense of specifically what kind of guts are needed to be Apple and what you must be prepared to undergo read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. It’s for want of this kind of guts — and not the ingenuity of Jonathan Ive or the executive prowess of Tim Cook, and really not even Steve Jobs’ own prophetic powers — that have prevented companies from inspiring their customers the way artists have.
Just think about it, and see what you notice.
Those are some uncomfortable truths.
Discomfort is an uncomfortable topic.