The Secrets of Market Timing: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time with Allen Gannett

Thank you to everyone joining our next session. I'm excited to welcome Alan Gannett. He's going to be talking about the secrets of market timing, how to develop the right idea at the right time. Just a reminder before I pass it over to Alan, make sure you're dropping in the questions in the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, and Alan's going to make sure he saves about 15 minutes at at the end to go through all your questions. Allan, thanks so much for joining us. Take it away.

Thanks for having me. Hey, Saster. So as she said, my name is Allan, and I'm the author of a book called "The Creative Curve," which is a look at this question of what is creativity and can we actually harness it? And my background is, for a long time, I was actually a tech entrepreneur. So I ran a SaaS company. It was called TrackMaven. It was a social media data company. So we helped some of the world's biggest brands gather and aggregate all of your social media data in one place and find what are the patterns, what are the stories, what are the things that their consumers were saying were important to them. And, you know, when I was doing this work, one of the things I was really interested in is that a lot of the things we think of as sort of like nebulous and organic, like what marketing stories resonate, there's actually a lot of patterns behind. And so that prompted the research for the book, The Creative Curve. It came out in 2018. And what I did is I looked at three sort of pillars of things. One, I looked at the history of creativity, creative genius, creative greats, creative achievements. What is the truth behind the stories that are there? Second, I interviewed about 25 living creative greats. So these are billionaires like David Rubenstein, startup people like Alexis Ohanian, Michelin-starred chefs, Tony Award winners, Oscar winners. And third and finally, I looked at the science of creativity across all the different fields. This is psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and try to tease out what are the key lessons for us. And today what I want to do is I want to give you sort of a sliver of what I found that really focuses around this idea of how do you create the right idea at the right time? Because whether it's in the marketing of our businesses or even just in the creation of our businesses, that is really the central question. So I want to start by talking about the word creativity, because it's one of these words where we all sort of like think we know what it means. But when you actually think about it, it's kind of difficult because, right, when I throw paint on a canvas, it's not worth anything. But when Jackson Pollock does, it's worth millions and millions of dollars. So creativity is not about just creating something, it's about creating the right thing. And there are some people in our culture who are very good at this, right? And these are the creative geniuses. There's people who grace magazine covers, who have this like golden touch where they can literally just make these hits over and over again. So I want you all to think, who are some people you can think of when you think of the word creative genius? And these are the most common answers I get when I ask people, you know, when these are like offline times. And, you know, we have over here, obviously, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Queen Bey, Oprah. On the top right, we have Mozart, our sort of classic child prodigy. On the bottom right, we have Beethoven looking super creepy. No one ever mentioned my personal favorite, which is Taylor Swift, but that's okay. You know, she doesn't have flaws, you do. It happens. But the thing that I think is really interesting about this is when we talk about creativity in Western culture, the idea of creative genius and of creativity is intertwined. We can't separate them, right? It's a very individual act. But when you look at the stories throughout history of creativity, what you find is they often follow a very similar pattern. So let me give you one example. Paul McCartney. So Paul McCartney is the number one songwriter of number one singles. Say that 10 times fast. And what's interesting is he wrote the song "Yesterday," which is the most recorded song of all time. And the story of how he created the song "Yesterday" is actually very reflective of a lot of creativity stories, because what happened is the idea just sort of hit him. He said, I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and thought, hey, I don't know this, or do I? And he was actually so worried that he'd accidentally plagiarized that for a few weeks he went around to his friends asking them, hey, have you heard this before? And they were like, no, Paul, we haven't. He was like, are you sure? And they're like, yeah. And by the way, a fun little historical footnote, which is true, you can Google this, is that he only dreamed up the melody for the song. He didn't dream up the lyrics. So at one point he was working on the song and someone came into the room and offered him scrambled eggs as a snack. And so, as a result, as placeholder lyrics for a few weeks, he used this. I will sing it for you if you promise to silently applaud, because I can't hear you, but I will— I can sense if you're applauding. Okay, you ready? Scrambled eggs. Oh my baby, how I love your eggs. I believe in scrambled eggs. I can, I can sense that you're applauding. I feel much better about myself. My millennial insecurity is fading away. But the thing that's really important about this story is that it's archetypal of this phenomenon of this sort of flash of genius, this aha moment, this epiphany that we talk about creative geniuses having. And this is all part of the Western notion of creativity. And this is all part of the inspiration model of creativity. This is the way we think about creativity where It really has 4 key attributes. One, it's very individual-centric, right? We talk about these solo geniuses, whether it's Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Taylor Swift or Kanye West, right? It's very individual-centric. Second, it's easy for these people, right? We don't talk about them struggling, but rather these ideas come to them. They have this sort of innate ability. But even though, even though it's easy, Even though it's easy, it can still be overwhelming. So we talk about them getting into these sort of flow states where the ideas just sort of roll through them. And fourth and finally, these people can be sort of weird, right? They can be, you know, think about like, you know, Steve Jobs, for example. He was famously a jerk. Or look at Kanye's tweets, right? Like they're just a little bit different. And then fifth and finally, is that, you know, it's also— this is something that's unattainable. When we talk about creativity like this, we're talking about the creative haves and the creative have-nots, of these sort of normies over here and the rest of us who are really trying to create a great marketing campaign or create the next great product for our business. Adobe did a study and they asked people, are you living up to your creative potential? And only 25% of us say that we are. I am actually a big believer that all public presentations should have pictures of puppies and babies. So I think this is a good time for a picture of a sad puppy, because that's pretty depressing, right? This idea that only some of us can have this sort of creative greatness. By the way, there's a corgi. I actually own a corgi. This is not my corgi. My corgi is never sad. So the question that my research looks at, and the question that I tackle, is What if this idea, this inspiration model of creativity, what if this isn't true? And I want to show you some of the things you find when you start to look a little bit closer, when you look at the history of creativity, look at the science around creativity, when you look at the practice around creativity. So let me give you one example. Mozart. Mozart is like the, like, most prototypical creative genius ever. In fact, when I was working on this book, people would ask me at cocktail parties, well, You know, what about Mozart? So like, what about Mozart? Let's talk about Mozart. Um, you've probably sort of developed your image around Mozart around the movie Amadeus. Um, if you haven't seen it, you should. It got 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It did $220 million, which is $600 million inflation adjusted, at the box office. And the movie literally starts with Mozart as 3 years old, blindfolded, playing the piano for the Pope. Like, that's the opening scene. The narrator's this guy Salieri, who's Mozart's arch nemesis. He's another composer. And he says, um, you know, Mozart at the age of 3, he was playing for popes. At the age of 6, he wrote his first concerto. At the age of 8, he wrote an opera. He never had second drafts. It was like the voice of God coming through this child. And like, that's the setup for Mozart. And the problem is this idea of Mozart is just kind of comical. Like, it's not at all what really happened. So here's the real Mozart story. So Mozart had, um, what many of us might have also had, or maybe are, he had a helicopter dad. And his helicopter dad, when he was 3 years old, said, Mozart, I love you, but— which you should never say to a child, conditional love is very bad— But I love you, but you need to become a great musician. And his dad hired for him the best music teachers in all of Europe and started making 3-year-old Mozart practice the piano 3 hours, 7 days a week. 3 hours, 7 days a week at the age of 3. Now, he did not write a concerto at 6 or an opera at 8. That's all made up. We found a concerto we thought he wrote at roughly age 11. Turns out it was like kind of plagiarized. The first truly original concerto he wrote when he was 17. You might be like, oh, that's pretty good, except for two things. One, it's not his best. Second, that's after 14 years of practicing 3 hours, 7 days a week, under the conditional love of a helicopter dad, with the best music teachers in all of Europe. Like, you too could write a half-decent concerto. And by the way, his name, stage name, it's made up. Everything's a lie. Oh, and the idea that he never had second drafts, that was from a letter that was published in a music magazine in 1815. And the letter sort of was Mozart basically writing to a fan describing his composition process. It was republished later. The issue was that letter, it was made up. It was #fake news. The magazine publisher plagiarized— made up the letter in order to sell more copies of the magazine. So when you look at the history of creative genius and of creative practice, what you find over and over again is that we really have sort of internalized this sort of Hollywood entertainment PR version of creativity, not the reality of creativity. I mean, think about Steve Jobs, right? We have this image of him as a sort of solo genius, but from day one he had Steve Wozniak. He actually raised venture capital very early on. They had multiple employees. You know, later in sort of Apple's time, Jony Ive was a huge player. But from a marketing PR perspective, we focus on Steve Jobs. So that's an example from the history of creativity. What about the science? So what you find when you start to look at the science around creativity is that whether it's psychology or sociology or anthropology or neuroscience, over and over again, you find that the research does not support this inspiration model of creativity. So let me give you one example. So this is a study that was done in Austria, Sound of Music land, and they had a pretty basic question. They said, okay, if creativity and genius are so intertwined, Then why don't we take a group of people and have them do both an IQ test and a creativity test? Now, you'd expect when you do this that IQ and creativity should be correlated, right? The higher the IQ, the more creative you should be. And IQ is normalized on a bell curve. So if you have an IQ of 100, about half the world's smarter than you, about half the world's less smart. Obviously, since you all came to SASTR, you're on the far, far right, so Now, here's where it got really interesting. When they did the study, what they found was there actually was a correlation between IQ and creativity, but the correlation went away once you got to 104. Once you get past that threshold, you could have an IQ of 110 or 160. It turns out you have the same creative potential. This is called the threshold theory. It's been replicated over and over again. It's this idea that above a certain relatively average IQ threshold, we actually all have the same creative potential. And this is really telling, right? Because this means it's not 1,000 people a generation, 1 million people, 1 billion people. There are literally billions and billions of people that on a scientific level have the same creative potential. So the question for all of us is, how can we unlock this? And how can we use creativity in our work and our businesses and our marketing, in our entrepreneurial endeavors to actually harness this and unlock that creative potential? So What I want to do is I want to talk about timing, because timing is one of the aspects around creativity that I think feels the most nebulous to people. But there's actually a lot of science behind it. And to do that, I want to first go back to the beginning, because in the beginning, when I said that creativity is sort of hard to define, I didn't actually define it. So there's actually a really great definition of creativity from academia, and it's from sociology. And the definition there is that creativity is the ability to create things that are both new and valuable. And the "and" is super important because it's not good enough to just create something new, right? I went to Microsoft Paint and I created this, and it is certainly novel, but it's definitely not valuable. It's definitely not creative. Now, on the other hand, If you just create something valuable, it's not creative. So last year, for example, this is true, by the way, I learned how to do conditional color formatting in Excel. You look so smart. It's so easy. It's definitely valuable. It's certainly not novel and is certainly not creative. So we talk about creativity, what we're really talking about is that creating something that's new and valuable. And that's where it gets really interesting, because value is a social phenomenon. For every— for something to be valuable, we all have to agree that it's valuable. It's like money. Think about startups, right? Like, there were companies in the late '90s doing what Uber and Instacart did. At the time, it was novel, but we didn't deem it as a group to be valuable. So if we want to understand what creativity really is, we have to understand why certain things are deemed valuable. And to do this, there's actually a lot of really interesting research in sociology that's focused around the study of trends and hits. And this isn't just hits in this sort of pop music, sort of mainstream way, but hits are when a group of people, big or small, say that something's both novel and valuable. It could be a hit at an academic conference, right? It could be a paper. It could be a hit among a small group of startup CEOs. It could be a hit marketing tactic among SaaS marketers, right? Whatever group of people, big or small, say that something's both novel and valuable, we call it a hit. And so as a result, researchers spend a lot of time studying what causes things to become hits. So I want to give you an example of this. And to do this, um, we're going to participate in a little experiment. I want you all to think to yourself and try and come up with as many as possible. I want you all to think of some famous people named Lisa. Some famous people named Lisa. And Lisa Simpson doesn't count, and Mona Lisa doesn't count. Those are bad answers. And while you do that, I'm gonna sip of water. One sec. Okay, so hopefully you have some good answers. These are the 4 most common answers I get: uh, Lisa Marie Presley, Lisa Kudrow, Lisa Lampanelli, Lisa Bonet. Now the next question is, what do all of these women have in common? It's not that their name's Lisa. It's not that they're women. It's not that they're famous. But what do all these women have in common? So the answer is that they were all born in the 1960s. See, Lisa was the number one name of every single year of the 1960s except for two. It was a hit name of the entire decade. Everyone was naming their daughter Lisa. But what's fascinating is that just as it came into favor, it also fell out of favor. By 2018, Lisa had fallen to the 809th most popular name, and there were only 304— 302 baby girls in the entire United States named Lisa. The New York Times literally published an article titled, "Where Have All the Lisas Gone?" This is a chart of the popularity of Lisa, um, over time from the Social Security Administration. It's not good. And so the thing that's important is that when we think about hits, we have to think about the fact that they have a rise and they have a fall. And so I want to start by talking about the rise. And to do this, we're going to take part in a famous psychology experiment. This is a real psychology experiment. And, um, if any of you speak Mandarin or can read Mandarin, I don't want you to, uh, don't help anyone. Don't put the answer in the chat. But what we're going to do is we're going to look at this Chinese character. And I want you all to decide whether or not you think it has a positive meaning or a negative meaning. Positive meaning or negative meaning. This is part of an experiment. I have a sip of water. Okay. So, positive meaning or negative meaning. You have your answer in your head. So, here's the correct answer. The answer is nothing. It means nothing. It's a completely made-up character. I tricked you. See, this is from a famous psychology experiment done by a guy named Robert Zajonc, who's a very famous professor. And if you've ever taken a Psych 101 course, you've read lots of stuff that he's done. And he had this theory, this hypothesis really, that how much people liked certain things and how positive or negative they thought things were, were related to how familiar people were with things. His idea was that maybe showing things to people more would make them like it more. So to test this, he took a bunch of made-up shapes, a bunch of made-up Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a bunch of made-up Chinese characters, and he showed those made-up objects to different groups of people different amounts of time. And then he asked two questions. One, how much do you like or dislike it, and do you think it has a positive meaning or negative meaning? And what he found was crazy. What he found was that merely being exposed to something made people like it more. And he called this, not surprisingly, the mere exposure effect. It's the idea that the more you're exposed to something, the more you like it. And this is why as marketers we have brand colors, logos, why we talk about consistency in messaging, because it turns out that as humans, we crave the familiar. But why? Well, it goes back to evolutionary biology. Think about one of your brain's core tasks. One of your brain's core tasks is to keep you safe. And it's learned over time that things that are unfamiliar represent risk. So think about this. Imagine you broke into your neighbor's house. I don't know why. You're really mad. And you went to the basement. I grew up in New Jersey. We had basements. They don't have basements everywhere. And you went to the basement and you saw this like super creepy door. You'd be like, I'm not going in that door. I don't know what's in that door. That's scary. I could die. I don't have life insurance. I don't want to go in that door. Now, imagine that same exact door with the same exact characteristics was in your grandmother's house and it's where she stored the wine. You'd be like, I love that door. Let's go in that door. Let's get some Merlot. So even though it's the same exact thing, merely manipulating how familiar we are with things dramatically changes our perception of it because we realize that things that are familiar are safe. They're not going to harm us. Okay. Interesting. But there's a but. If the more we see something, the more we like it, then why wouldn't the name Lisa just rise in popularity forever? Right? Why isn't everyone named Lisa? Why am I not named Lisa? Why aren't we living in Lisa Land? By the way, at one point, when you did a Google image search, this was the image that came up when you searched Lisa Lambe. So the question then for us is, why do things fall from favor? And to answer this, we're going to do another study from our friendly trickster Robert Zajonc. And, you know, he became pretty famous, and he had this sort of nagging concern. He thought, you know, The more you see something, the more you like it. Okay. But like, how does that explain boredom?

Right?

Like, certain points, I just get bored with things. I want something new. And he thought, well, maybe it's because flashing objects at people isn't really real life. Right? In real life, things are more complicated. We study them. We spend time with them. And so he redid his study. But this time, instead of using objects, he took something more complicated. He took abstract art. And what he did is he told people, don't just look at it, but actually study it. And then he did the same manipulation. He showed certain groups of people the art once, some people 3 times, some people 6 times, some people 25 times. And what he found was that the more people saw it at first, the more they liked it. But then at a certain point, they started to like it less and less and less. At a certain point, they said they actually want to see something new. And he realized that humans have this other core behavior. They also have this pursuit of the novel. They like things that are new. Why? Well, again, it goes back to evolution. Think about, you know, prehistoric hunter-gatherer days. When you were in a field, you were kind of hungry, and you saw this like weird mini strawberry thing. You'd be like, "Oh, I'm gonna eat this. This could be breakfast. This could be delicious." And so things that are new represent what's called a novelty bonus, where they have potential value and that motivates us to go explore it. That's why things like new restaurants, new experiences, new travel locations can be so exciting. But this also means there's a contradiction, right? Because on one hand, we seek out the familiar for safety. On the other hand, We seek out the novel for potential reward. Like, those are literally direct opposites. So how do we explain this contradiction? Well, it turns out that this contradiction is actually our brain's really elegant way of balancing risk and reward. We like things that are familiar enough to be safe, but yet in other ways novel enough to be interesting, to have a novelty bonus. See, when things are too new, They're actually scary. So like, imagine you were back in that field and you saw this like weird red pitted olive thing. You'd be like, I'm not eating that. Like, I don't know what that is. And that's good because this is a yew seed. It will kill you. And so the result is this phenomenon that academics call— this is the academic name, bear with me— the inverted U-shaped phenomenon between familiarity and preference. I thought that was a bad book title, so I rebranded it The Creative Curve. And it's this finding that when you map out how familiar something is with how much people like it, you see that at first people don't like it, then they like it more and more, then they start to get bored. Now, this might look similar to you to things like Crossing the Chasm type demographics. This is actually different, and I'm gonna explain how it's different. So this comes from psychology, and it represents an individual-level phenomenon, a group-level phenomenon, and a population-level phenomenon. And the things that are subject to this are really things that come from consumer behavior, because consumers have these contradictory urges. They like things that are old, but they also like things that are new. And so the result is that you see that trends go through these distinct phases. I like to break them down like this. The first phase, what I call fringe interest, This is when, you know, just the people who are the deepest in a field, just when they like something. So think about like fashionistas. Like if you watch Men's Fashion Week this year, the big trend among men's coats was these like big unstructured coats. Now you're probably like, ah, it's kind of weird, I'm not going to do that, that's not really me. But in a few years you will because that's how trends work. Now the next stage is actually the most important stage. It's kind of sad that it comes second, but the next stage So I call it the sweet spot. And this is when ideas are familiar enough, they're safe, and with a little bit additional exposure, they go from low preference to high preference very quickly. When we talk about creative genius, what we're really talking about is some people, some creative greats, have this ability to consistently create ideas that are in the sweet spot of the creative curve where they continually move what they're doing to constantly be in this spot and not become too new or too familiar. So like, let me give you an example of something that's in the sweet spot right now. There's been this big explosion in the past 18 months of interest in non-alcoholic spirits. So it's been this combination of the sort of health and wellness trend with the sort of craft cocktail trend where people are like, okay, like, I like cocktails, but I don't want the hangover. And so you've seen this huge development of non-alcoholic spirits, and this is something that's familiar but it's novel, right? It takes something you've seen before but presents it in a new and novel way. Now, ultimately though, ideas eventually reach what I call the point of cliché. This is when things are overexposed. So like, I'll give you an example that's a late 2000s reality TV show reference. This might get lost on some people, but, uh, I don't know if any of you watch the show Jon Kate Plus 8. It's on TLC. The whole idea was they have 8 children, crazy stuff happens. Well, for a while they were on the COVID of like every magazine, and Jon Gosling, the father character in this reality show, he started wearing the clothing brand Ed Hardy. And according to Don Ed Hardy, the original tattoo artist, This guy, John Gosling, was responsible for Ed Hardy becoming overexposed and cliché because Ed Hardy was doing $900 million a year in sales. Today it only does $20 million. So eventually ideas become overexposed. Now, the next stage, what I call follow-on failure, and this is really important if you work at a big organization, because what you'll see is that a lot of times startups, new competitors will come in They'll create something in the sweet spot. They'll grow as it becomes popular. And then big organizations see it and they go and create their own version. But by the time they actually create it, it's too late where it might be popular for a little bit, then it'll quickly fall from favor and they'll lose that credibility. And so this is actually really important. Think about like a great example of this is almond milk. Almond milk is super popular right now. But it's starting to decline. You're seeing people talk about the environmental impacts. You know, oat milk is a better option. And the result is, if you're in a big CPG company, from the data, you could be tempted to say we should create something using almond milk. But in reality, by the time you create it, it's probably going to fall out of fashion. And so this is one of the reasons why oftentimes best practices or trends are not things you should do, but rather telling you what has already been done and you should avoid because they're eventually going to fall from favor. Now, the last stage is sort of like the most obvious, which is that eventually things fall out of favor. They become out of date, right? Like don't open a disco record shop. Don't start collecting Beanie Babies. Like these are bad ideas. So the question then for all of us is, How do you create things that are in the sweet spot of the creative curve? And the answer is to get the right amount of familiarity and novelty, where it's familiar enough for your audience to be safe, but novel enough to just push them slightly and be interesting and new. And when you think about products, when you think about trends you've interacted with, you start to see this pattern quite a bit. I mean, think about I actually think Apple is a great example of this. So we think about Apple as like radical novelty, right? Like they're new and they're innovative. But we all remember Apple in the early '90s created the Apple Newton, which was their tablet device, their first attempt at a tablet device, and it was a failure. It was a flop. It was too new. People were like, ah, what is that? Fast forward to today, and the iPad is a huge, widely successful business. A lot of you probably built apps for it, right? But if you think about the development of the iPad, well, the iPad was an iPhone without a phone. The iPhone was an iPod with a phone. The iPod was a better MP3 player. One of the biggest mistakes we have when it comes to understanding trends, when it comes to understanding creativity, when it comes to understanding timing, is that often we confuse the right idea for the best idea. Consumers don't want the most features, the most advanced thing, the thing that has all the bells and whistles that are technically possible. They want the thing that for them in that moment is the right balance of the old and the new. And I want to give you an example of this, and to do that I'm going to tell you a story. And it's a story that maybe you've heard before. Um, it has to do with a startup, a startup that started at an Ivy League campus in a dorm room, and it was sort of that a few friends started that was a social media startup, and it allowed people to connect with each other and, you know, all these things. And now, of course, you've probably now figured out what startup this is. Startup called Campus Network. Haven't heard of it? Campus Network actually launched a month before Facebook at Columbia University, started by the class president at Columbia. It went super viral. The founders of it left school like the Facebook team did to work full time on it. For a while, it was actually the biggest competitor to Facebook. Stanford— the Stanford Daily, the campus newspaper at Stanford, actually wrote an article sort of comparing the two to them. And one of the things that was so interesting about Campus Network was that it actually had way more features than Facebook did. In this quote, for example, Carrington Lee talks about how Campus Network had a blog, a photo album, Messenger, a bulletin board. And those things are all in Facebook now. But when Facebook launched originally, it was so bare bones. Right. There was poking. There was directories. There was photos. If you think about things like the newsfeed or groups, these are things that came much later. But Campus Network actually had these features, features that would later become essential to Facebook's success. It had them from the beginning, but it failed. Adam Goldberg is a sort of Mark Zuckerberg of the Campus Network story. He was the founder and CEO. He was one of the two founders. And what he said I thought was really interesting was that what Facebook did so well is that they didn't overwhelm their users with features. They added them slowly without being overwhelming, which is really this idea of the familiar and the novel. If you think about— go back to 2004, 2005, like people at the time would still use pseudonyms online. Or like, I remember my, my like AIM username, which is like too embarrassing to say. But the idea of using your real name on the internet That was a big enough jump. Like, that was Facebook's jump. Campus Network was also broadcast everything you're doing, post all the photos of your life, do all these things. Mark Zuckerberg once said, when it comes to building products, the trick isn't adding stuff, it's taking things away. The important thing for all of us when it comes to creating the right idea at the right time is not to look at it as this magical thing. But it's rather to think about it critically. Because really, when we talk about creating the right thing at the right time, what we're saying is, is it the right thing for my audience? Are they prepared for it? Not is it the most technical or the most advanced or all these things, but is it the right thing? Is it at the right point of the creative curve where it's familiar enough to be safe, but novel enough to be interesting and new? Now we're going to go into Q&A. We're going to have about 15 minutes for Q&A. But before we do that, I want to end with a question. And the question that I have for all of you is, you know, when you look at creativity, it's this crazy concept. It feels very scary. But when you look at the history of creativity, you look at folks like Mozart, you really see a story of hard work. When you look at the science around creativity, what you see is a lot of science showing us that creative potential is very widespread. And when you look at the practice of creativity, What you're really seeing is the learnable art of timing. So when it comes to creativity, the question I like to ask is, are you your own worst enemy, right? What are you telling yourselves? What is the negative self-talk? What are the stories that you've told yourself about your inability to be creative, your inability to create that great idea? And is that really true? Because history and science shows that it isn't. Thank you very much. We're going to go into questions. I'm going to unshare my screen in order to do that. If you want to learn more, definitely feel free to check out my website. And let me stop the share. Stop share. I did it. And I'm going to Q&A widget. There's a chat widget and a Q&A widget, but if you can put them in the Q&A widget, that would be very helpful. Okay. So someone asked, what are the best strategies for overcoming a creative block? So one of the things I talk about in the book that I think is really important is that when we think about creativity, a lot of the advice, which is not correct, is that just do it. Like, just go out and like write 1,000 words a day or just, you know, do, do, do, do. The reality is when you look at how creativity works, it happens in the right hemisphere of our brain. And it's like a little cliché to talk about left brain, right brain, but it's actually— there's a lot of scientific rigor behind it. So The right hemisphere of our brain connects sort of disparate ideas together. And what's interesting is it does it right below the level of consciousness. So it's constantly sort of connecting ideas together and seeing if things fit. And only once the ideas form do they sort of pop into consciousness. They sort of like raise their hand and say like, hear me, hear me. And this is why we experience aha moments in quiet places, like in the shower, on your commute, on a walk. It's not that like your shower is that inspiring. It's, but rather those are moments when your left hemisphere, your very conscious brain, is sort of suppressed. It's quiet. And so you can hear the ideas that have been percolating in your right hemisphere. And so this is why you hear all these stories about folks like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg who spent huge amounts of time, um, huge amounts of time in solitude, going on walks, thinking, digesting all those things. Bill Gates spends a week a year in a cabin by himself. So the two pieces of advice I have when it comes to beating creative block, the first is to create moments of silence in your day. Doesn't have to be meditation. I don't like meditating. Don't me. I don't like it. But I like walks. That's meditative, right? So find things that are silent. You can experience what's already going on in your brain. And second is to give your right hemisphere the raw ingredients. So to consume a lot. And so one of the things I found when you look at stories of creative genius is that if you go into it, you find that they're also some of the biggest consumers of creativity. So like jazz musicians will listen to every single jazz album imaginable. You know, startup founders who work in technical products will read every single article in academic journal about those things. And so what you need to do is consume a lot. Your right hemisphere has those materials to work on. Someone asked in the chat, what's my Peloton handle? Should be out of frame. Oh, well. How can founders and leaders align on opposing creative directions? So I think one of the key elements that feels inelegant when it comes to creativity is actually data and iterations. And when we talk about creativity, feels very like nebulous and organic and all this stuff. But actually, the The best creatives are very, very focused on feedback and iteration. You know, writing my first book, I found that like there's this whole sort of world of writers where like you sort of share your work with each other. You get feedback. You use that. That's a huge amount of sort of iteration of getting something right is collecting feedback. In movies, they have a whole sort of testing methodology to actually test and see, is this idea right? The movie Fatal Attraction, for example, which won Best Picture Oscar, the entire ending was reshot because when they tested it with preview audiences, it scored terribly. The ending was viewed as like junk. And I think we think about this kind of obviously when it comes to startups, things like the Lean Startup methodology, the use of A/B testing. But all of these things are really important. So I think the key thing is to not make it an emotional discussion. But rather what are the questions we're trying to answer and how can we gather feedback to understand, is this idea at the right point of the familiarity-novelty continuum for our audience? Tom asked, could you repeat the phrase you had around avoiding best practices and can you dig in on this further? Yeah. So this is like a huge hangup for me. And I'll give you an example. Podcasts, like everyone started a podcast, right? Like you probably have a podcast. No judgment. But everyone starts the same podcast. Like, it's always like, we're going to interview CEOs about their startup journey. And like, oh, like, it's really like, no more. And the problem is people start these and they don't work. And they're like, well, why isn't it working? Lots of other people have done its work. And that's exactly why it's not working. Right. Those other platforms became successful when they were at the right point of the creative curve. Now it's too familiar. If you're another creating another startup CEO podcast, people are like, it's been done before, please don't. Like, you need to think about how do you add your own novel twist? Like, maybe you should do a podcast where you interview the spouses of startup CEOs, talk about what's the family aspect of doing that, or the parents of CEOs, right? You want to take what's popular and use that not as a best practice, but rather what not to do and what to potentially add a new twist of novelty to. Um, Caleb had a nice comment. Thank you. Um, Storm asked, to what extent does luck factor in creative output and marketplace success? So this is a really great question. And, you know, one of the things I studied was one-hit wonders. I actually didn't put this stuff in the book, because I thought it was really interesting, but it didn't quite fit together. But one-hit wonders are sort of an example of luck, right? Like they created the right thing and they never did it again. And what did they do wrong? What did they do right? Well, the thing I found was that they stopped consuming. They stopped being curious. And when you look at people who have been successful over long periods of time, look at folks like the Beatles, for example. The Beatles consistently changed their style. So they were constantly just like one step ahead of their audience. They weren't three steps ahead. They didn't keep creating the same album over and over again, but they were constantly consuming and using that information, that knowledge, to know where things were in that familiarity-novelty spectrum and iterate on what they were doing. Um, someone asked, what's the best piece of advice you heard while interviewing people for your book? This wasn't advice that was said, but something that I observed. So I interviewed David Rubenstein, who is the billionaire, um, co-founder of Carlyle Group, sort of one of the grandfathers of private equity. He's also on the board of 25 nonprofits, including the Smithsonian, Harvard Kennedy Center, Duke. Like, not bad. And the thing I thought was so interesting was I was like, at the time I was doing a lot of data work, and I was interviewing him And he kept asking me questions about data, like how does big data technology work? How do all these things work? And he was like deeply, deeply curious. And I think he's 69 now, maybe 68. And the thing is that the reason why he's had this long, successful career, and he's known for this, is he's constantly curious. He's constantly consuming information. He's constantly doing what I call reverse mentoring, which is this idea of like, if you're a mentor, Right. Part of the benefit of having sort of mentor-mentoree relationships— I can't pronounce it. I don't know. It's late here on the East Coast— is that you also learn things about what's happening on the fringes. Right. What's new, what's on the sort of the young end of culture. And so I think that idea of if you want to have a long and sustained career, keeping up the curiosity, whether that's through reading, whether that's through mentoring or doing things like that. Best piece of advice for simplifying a complicated SaaS model? Well, I'm going to generalize this a little bit to thinking about products. I think like one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make, especially when they're product-centric folks and engineering-centric folks, is they do what is the best from a technical perspective or maybe a technique perspective. Right. Like, oh, there's this really powerful thing we can do now because this technology has enabled it. And reality, like, maybe your customer just wants Outlook to work, right? They don't need you to do this big crazy thing. So I think one of the key things to understand is where is your audience in their experience? Because oftentimes, as people who are creating something in a field, we're sort of super users, right? We're more advanced than them. So this is why when I look at, like, the success of, like, apps like Wish, for example, the sort of Amazon competitor that's growing like crazy. It's a very simple product and it's one that seems like it would have been sort of out of date, but it's actually where the audience was. Like the idea of ordering stuff from another country and getting it delivered and like, it's like that was actually something that people were ready for, but it actually hadn't been done before. They didn't need to be more complicated than that. Michael asked, what is the value of doing market research? You know, it's, it's essential. And one of the things I found that I thought was really interesting was how even really successful companies often use pretty lo-fi technology to successfully do this. So in the book, I talk about, um, I spent a day with the flavor team at Ben Jerry's, which is like the best job in America, and they're all like weirdly very skinny, which like I am. And, um, The thing I thought was so interesting was that they have this very methodical process, but it's simple. So they spend most of the year consuming information about food trends. A lot of times, literally, they'll go to like different cities and go to restaurants and farmers markets and health foods markets and see sort of what's percolating. But then they'll actually take those things, um, they'll take those things and come up with 200 ideas per year, and they're just written down ideas. Like vanilla with cherry chocolate fudge chips. I don't know, whatever. And then they have an email newsletter, about 750,000 subscribers. They split up that list of 200 ideas. They email it to the subscribers and they ask 2 questions. One, how likely are you to buy this flavor? And two, how unique is it? Which is basically how familiar is it and how novel is it? And this is really smart because if you just ask people how likely are you to buy it, all of your flavors would be caramel cookie brownie crunch, which might work on an individual scale, but when building a line of products, you can't just have all caramel cookie brownie fudge. So what they found is that balancing these two things, the uniqueness and the likeliness to buy, led to the best long-term results for the brand. But like, that's not simple. I mean, sorry, that's not complicated. It's not expensive, right? Any of us can do that using SurveyMonkey and like really basic tools. You use things like Google Surveys. So market research is essential, but market research does not have to be complicated. If you ever see the forms that movie researchers use after showing a movie to a preview audience, like, it's really basic. Like, it's like an NPS score basically on like the ending, certain characters. It's not, it's not actually that complicated. Someone asked, how do you know if you are too far ahead of the curve? This is where you'll see that there's excitement about your idea with certain groups of people, like sort of very early adopter types, but you won't get good success. It's sort of like getting that mainstream adoption. And I think one of the things that's important to understand is, are you able as your company, as your business, to shift your market yourself, or are you just fundamentally too early? And so you think about— we talked about before how Uber and Instacart, there was '90s equivalents in the first dot-com bubble that failed. And obviously what happened was over time, people started using their smartphones, started using GPS. These ideas became a lot more comfortable to them. So when it came back around, it was the right idea at the right time. So I think you have to look in question Are you as a company or as an individual going to be able to single-handedly move how familiar people are with a certain concept? I think that's really the measure of it. Hi, Amanda. Hi, Mackenzie. Thanks for the nice words. I appreciate it. Dan asked, what creative were you most hoping to interview for the book that didn't respond to your interview request? People are actually pretty responsive. There was, there was not a ton of people who just didn't respond. A lot of people said no because they're busy. Like, obviously I tried to interview like the Elon Musks of the world, like didn't work out. But people are pretty nice. And one of the things I found that was interesting is, you know, I interviewed like Ted Sarandos, who is now the CEO of Netflix. At the time, he was Chief Content Officer. And I cold emailed him and he was like incredibly nice, incredibly gracious. And I found that people who are the most successful were actually the most likely to reply. Not necessarily say yes, but the most likely to reply. I think that's like a really interesting testament to their ability to manage their time and their ability to sort of be open to new experiences in a way that I didn't find when I looked at people that are sort of like in the, you know, in the upper quartile, but not that top 1%. Amelia asked— should I miss track, maybe— what's your favorite platform to manage social these days? There's a lot of really good ones out there. I think one that's sort of underappreciated is Octopost, which is B2B-focused and has, like, cool, like, Marketo and Salesforce integrations. So it's definitely, definitely something worth checking out. So we are at the time, and thank you all so much for all the wonderful questions and tuning in today. I hope you have a great rest of your day and a great rest of your SaaStr at home experience. Thank you very much.