Transcript of How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time

Transcript of How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time

Allen Gannett: Creativity is one of those things that we talk about a lot in our culture. In Western culture, we have this notion of creativity as this magical, mystical thing that strikes a few certain people each generation, and there’s the Elon Musk and Steve Jobs of the world and the Mozarts and the JK Rowlings, but for the rest of us normies, we’re just sort of left out in the cold. Allen Gannett: Of course, 100%. Allen Gannett: Yes. Allen Gannett: Yes. John Jantsch: Well, and I do want to get to your four laws of the creative curve because I think that’s … obviously, that’s a big part of the book, but I think it’s also … I think people need to hear that process, but I want to start with something before that. Allen Gannett: I mean this is one of the things that people sort of don’t realize. All right, so let’s talk about, then, the four laws because I do think that a lot of … there are definitely a lot of people, this is kind of ironic, a lot of people that are more left brain, and they need a process to be creative. Yeah, so number three I talk about in the book is that we think of these creative geniuses as these solo actors, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Oprah, but reality is, since there’s this social construct element to creativity, since it’s about what is valuable, you actually have to have a lot of different people involved, and I describe the different roles that you have to have in your creative communities, and there’s four that I talk about in the book. You see this a lot of times.

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Transcript

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Allen Gannett. He is the CEO and founder of TrackMaven, a marketing insights platform. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today called The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time. Allen, thanks for joining me.

Allen Gannett: Thanks for having me, man.

John Jantsch: A big premise of the book is to kind of debunk the creativity myth that you sit around and get this inspiration from a muse at some point in your life and that, in fact, there’s a science behind it. You want to tell me kind of your … it’s really the big idea of the book, I suppose, so you want to unpack that for us?

Allen Gannett: Creativity is one of those things that we talk about a lot in our culture. It’s on the cover of all these magazines. It’s this big topic in boardrooms. In Western culture, we have this notion of creativity as this magical, mystical thing that strikes a few certain people each generation, and there’s the Elon Musk and Steve Jobs of the world and the Mozarts and the JK Rowlings, but for the rest of us normies, we’re just sort of left out in the cold.

Allen Gannett: The thing that always bothered me is I’d always been someone who’d been a big reader of autobiographies and some of the literature around creativity. I run a marketing analytics company, so I spend a lot of time with marketers, and I didn’t realize the extent to which this had internalized with people. I thought people sort of knew that was the story but knew that, of course, that’s not actually how it works. I realized that, no, no, this is really how people believe creativity works, and so the book sort of came out of this frustration I had that I saw all these very smart people limiting their potential.

Allen Gannett: The book is split into two halves. The first half of the book I interviewed all of the living academics who study creativity, and I break down the myths around how creativity works using science and some of the real histories. I tell some of the real stories behind things like Paul McCartney’s creation of the song Yesterday, which has been over-hyped and over-sold for decades, and Mozart, which there was a whole bunch of, literally, things like forged letters and forged articles about Mozart that have become part of our common myths around Mozart.

Allen Gannett: In the second half of the book, I interviewed about 25 living creative geniuses. These are everyone from billionaires like David Rubenstein, Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer at Netflix, Nina Jacobson, the former president of Walt Disney Motion Pictures. She’s the producer of The Hunger Games. I interviewed even folks like Casey Neistat from YouTube and … really eclectic set of creative geniuses with the goal of saying, okay, if the science shows us that you can actually learn to become more creative, well then how have people actually done that? How have they accomplished that? The book is meant to both be a sort of myth-busting book but also actually be a practical guide to actually leveraging this yourself.

John Jantsch: I think there’s actually a lot of misunderstanding or misuse of the word creativity anyway.

Allen Gannett: Oh, totally.

John Jantsch: I do think that a lot of people that I run into, “Oh, I’m not creative,” which means, “I can’t paint like Picasso,” or something when, in fact, in my business, I’m not … If you set me down and say, “Make something,” I’m not a maker, but I could … I’ve built my entire career around taking other ideas and seeing how they fit together better, and I think that’s a creative science.

Allen Gannett: Oh, and totally, and this is one of the things that people … We have sort of a book cover mentality of creativity, I like to call it, where I wrote a book, there’s one name on the cover, but there’s so many people involved who are creative who make that happen. I mean there’s agents, editors, marketers, copy editors, proofreaders, research assistants, feedback readers, right? Every creative endeavor you see actually has a lot of different people involved, but we sort of have this book cover phenomenon, or I sometimes call it the front man phenomenon. In a band, we talk about the lead singer all the time even though there’s five people in the band. With creativity, we sort of talk about Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as if they’re these sort of Tony Stark-esque characters, and we forget the fact that Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak. Elon Musk literally has the world’s best rocket scientists working for him.

Allen Gannett: The idea that these people are rolling these boulders up a hill by themselves is just not true, and so I think we’re surprisingly susceptible to these sort of PR person propagated narratives around creativity, because I also think, John, we kind of like it. We kind of like the idea that there’s something out there for all of us that’s going to be easy. When we talk about our passion, I think we’re slightly actually talking about, well, waiting for something to be easy, but nothing in life is easy.

Allen Gannett: You look at Mozart, and we talk about him as if he popped out of the womb playing the piano, but the reality is, when he was three years old, his dad, who’s basically a helicopter dad, was like, “You need to become a great musician.” Under the conditional love of his father, he started taking lessons with literally the best music teachers in all of Europe, and he practiced three hours seven days a week his entire childhood. This is not the story of it being easy for Mozart. This is the story of him doing the really hard part when he was young. I think we like this idea that, for some people, it’s easier, for some things it easy, because it kind of gives us an excuse.

John Jantsch: Well, and I also think that the narrative that is simple is a really useful device too because people can then share it, and they don’t have to … What you just went through, nobody wants to tell that story.

Allen Gannett: Of course, 100%. Everyone wants to believe it’s just straightforward.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think you go as far as saying that just about anybody with the right motivation and the right process could practice and develop a skill, so let’s … Since I mentioned Picasso, could I paint if I had the right motivation?

Allen Gannett: Yes.

John Jantsch: I mean, right now, I will tell you I can’t.

Allen Gannett: Yes.

John Jantsch: I don’t think I could paint anything that anybody would see commercially interesting, but-

Allen Gannett: Totally.

John Jantsch: Right.

Allen Gannett: There’s two different parts of creativity. There’s the technical skill, and then there’s creating the right idea at the right time. On the technical skill side, we actually have now decades of research on talent development. What’s amazing, this is something I didn’t … I didn’t expect it to be this much of a consensus when I started writing the book, but the people, the researchers who spend their time studying talent development have come to the conclusion that, at best, natural-born talent is very rare and [wholefully 00:06:47] overblown, but more likely than not, the idea of natural-born talent actually doesn’t really exist.

Allen Gannett: It’s really that these people typically start very young. They have access to a lot of resources or maybe they were working on another skill, like the daughter who always played baseball in the backyard with her dad and then, by the time she was 12 and she went to her first-ever track practice, she was such a fast runner, and they’re like how did she learn this? It’s like, well, she was playing baseball in the backyard for seven years.

Allen Gannett: In the book, I actually profile the story … It’s actually one of the few stories we have of someone tracking their skill development over a long period of time. It’s the story of Jonathan Hardesty, who’s this painter who, at the age of 22, having never painted before, decided that he wanted to become a professional painter, and he proceeded to … For whatever reason, he was active on a online forum, and he created this forum thread which said that, “Every day, I’m going to post a picture of my painting. I’m going to paint every single day,” and for the next 13 years he did this, 13 years.

Allen Gannett: It’s a really amazing story being able to see he was such a terrible painter when he started. I got permission from him to use one of his first-ever sketches in the book and one of his sketches from much later, and it’s shocking. What he did is he followed, actually, all of the best practices that we have from research on talent and skill development on becoming a great painter, and now he teaches all these courses and classes on becoming a fine art painter and all this stuff, and his paintings sell for five figures, and so he’s a really great rare example of someone starting when they’re old. I think it’s hard because, when you’re older, you’re busy. You don’t have that much time, and there’s not a father or mother figure sort of bearing down on you, forcing you to get through the hard part.

John Jantsch: Well, and I do want to get to your four laws of the creative curve because I think that’s … obviously, that’s a big part of the book, but I think it’s also … I think people need to hear that process, but I want to start with something before that. One of the things that I have observed in my own life and in watching a lot of other people is that motivation has a tremendous amount to do with this.

John Jantsch: I’ll give you an example. I taught myself how to play the guitar when I was in junior high, and it wasn’t because I ever envisioned becoming a famous rock star. I saw it as a great … It turns out junior high girls love guitar players. That was a huge motivation for me to just take this thing on and do it myself. As silly as that example is, I think that that is probably the key to unlocking the whole thing. Isn’t it?

Allen Gannett: I mean this is one of the things that people sort of don’t realize. I think the reason why we see so many young people who seem to be very…

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