The Quality Every Entrepreneur Needs to Succeed Long-Term

How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table, because this is Business lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss.

Hey everybody, Roland Frazier here. And I'm answering today a question of why is creativity so important in business? Why is creativity so important in business? We're going to answer several questions around that. The very first one that I want to talk about is what does it actually mean to be creative in business? And this is kind of cool because a few years ago I hadn't. Didn't have my own personal website forever. And I finally decided to put one together a few years ago and I hired a company called Influex to do it. And the guy, Dmitri Kozlov, who was absolutely brilliant, I met with him and we sat down and he, we started asking me questions and he's like, okay, I see the colors of the website. Like, how do you see the colors of the website? From having a conversation? But he did, and it was very impressive. And the colors that he picked. If you go to Roland Fraser.com you can see what he built. I thought he did a great job. And one part of the process was identifying your origin story. And I was like, ah, it sounds kind of bogus to me. And he's like, no, no, you got to get this guy to do it. And this guy named Patrick Coombs who he recommended. It was not inexpensive to have a conversation with Patrick, but he was going to help figure out my origin story. I'm like, okay, I'm going to trust the process. So I trusted the process and it was absolutely fantastic. We had a couple of conversations and then he came back and he said the. Really what I see is that you're 50% business and 50% creative. And I have a creative background as a musician and as a writer and an author and, and a creator in lots of different areas. Composer. Right. All of those things where I found that what I did, creating things from nothing actually really helped me in business because it helped me approach things in a way that was not the traditional way. And so when you say, what does it mean to be creative in business? I think what it means is that you're aware of, of the traditional scenario, the traditional players and the traditional solutions that are being offered in any particular business situation, but you have the ability to access areas of your mind that will give you new and different ways to approach those situations. And really, I think to me it's just the fact that you are aware that there are traditional ways of doing things and that they might not be the most efficient or effective. Right. How efficient is something is how quickly can you get it done effectively? Is how, how able are you to get the thing done that you want to get done? You might be efficient because you can do it quickly, but it turns out like a mess. Or it might be very effective because it gets done perfectly, but it's inefficient because it takes you too long to do it when you can get efficiency and effectiveness all at the same time. Bingo. Right? So being creative in business to me is that when you come in, you want to come in with a beginner's mind. You want to come in and understand and ask questions before you come to any conclusions. And you want to say, okay, how is it that you guys are doing things right now? And listen to that. And as you're listening, take note, but don't hang on to any of the things that you think that they've said that maybe are wrong or they could do different. Just let all the information wash over you. And then to be creative is to say, what if we assume that these were not the way that these things were done? What if they were done differently? Is there any way that we might do this differently? Let's just brainstorm a whole bunch of stuff. And so what you're doing is you're bringing your mind in, a beginner's mind. If you're a Zen person or an open minded, not already full fashion, and you don't accept that these are the ways that things are done, and you don't accept that these are the people who need to do them, or that these are the roles that these people need to have, or even that this is the best result, or that this is the right client. And then you say, okay, with all of these little Lego broken down building block pieces, how could I reassemble this in different ways that would get the result that we desire, but maybe using different people, or maybe having these people that we have doing things differently in terms of a process, or maybe with different resources that don't exist now, or is there a way to facilitate a, a faster accomplishment of this using some set of tools that we may or may not have, and if we don't have them, maybe we could develop them. It's just bringing that not committed to doing it the way it's being done and an awareness that there's very, very probably, not just possibly, but very, very probably a solution that is better than the one that's there. And having that creativity, having that attitude or that approach is how you are able to be creative in business. Okay, the next question that I get a lot is, what are the benefits of being creative in business? Oh, my gosh. I think there's so many. And the very first one is that it makes it fun. It makes it fun. Like if you are a creative person or just like most humans. The idea of having an assembly line where you take part A and put it on part B over and over and over all day, as an endless stream of parts come by you, and you're supposed to do the same thing over and over and over. That is the antithesis of creativity and the boring, boring, boringest life that I could ever imagine spending in business. So one of the benefits of creativity is that you get to bring your personality and your thought process and you get to gamify this puzzle of how can I solve for whatever challenge I'm facing? Or even. It's just if. It's just how can I improve this thing that I'm doing? What if I didn't need a human, for example, to take part A and put it on part B on that assembly line all day long, over and over? What if I could get a little robot that would do that? Right. Or what if we assembled or arranged things differently so that part A dropped on part B and we just have to change our manufacturing line? Or what if we could manufacture part A with part B already on it in the mold? Yeah. There's a whole. All these things that I think just becomes so much more fun and interesting. So I think from an engagement standpoint of yourself and the people that you work with or that work for you or that you work for, there's just a human interest, much more engaged kind of thing that comes from being able to be creative. The other thing that happens is innovations that improve effectiveness and efficientness, efficiency in the business. Right? So the innovations of how can we create a better product? How can we serve our customers better? How can we make our employees happier, how can we make our shareholders more money? All of these things, how can we create a better world? Comes from being creative. So a huge benefit to everyone. Being creative creates improvement. It creates innovation, and it creates advancement and evolution so that we all get better served in the process. And I think, to me, those are huge, huge, huge benefits. And. And I can't think of how dull the world would be if we didn't have creativity applied. If that was like somehow filtered out and we were always on that assembly line. Think about how we've come in manufacturing from the innovation itself of the assembly line, which made manufacturing crazy, more efficient, but horribly more boring. And then Toyota coming up with the Toyota way and saying, you know, well, we can actually increase performance dramatically by relying on the observation of the workers. This is creativity applied to a non creative kind of process. Right. A manufacturing line. You can actually bring creativity to a thing that's kind of tried to suck the creativity out of everything and it still improves. Right? Because nobody was ever able before that to do all the things that Toyota was able to do with the Toyota manufacturing system. So it's just kind of impossible to, to suck the creativity out of everything and, and still end up with something that's going to evolve. If you aren't creative, somebody else is going to be. If you aren't evolving, someone else is. And you will ultimately be out competed. And that's a huge benefit, is that creativity truly enables you to survive and to thrive. So another question that you hear a lot is how can I encourage and increase my creativity? And that's kind of cool because it's been something that's been very interesting to me throughout my life. And there's a guy named Edward Dabano who has a whole bunch of books on creativity. There was a art book or a thinking book several years ago called Drawing on the Left side of the Brain which was designed to get us to be full brain people. And I think one of the things in terms of like what are some of the things that you can do to encourage creativity? Number one is you can encourage creativity. You can tell your coworkers and your employees and your bosses and your partners and your friends, hey, I really would appreciate if you think of new, better or different ways to do the things that I'm doing. I would appreciate it if you would share those with me. And then when they do share, don't be defensive and say, oh, that will never work because of what's the stupidest idea I ever heard? Actually praising the people who are giving you this input and this innovation and these ideas is priceless, right? Because we all want to be praised. And so if you punish people for bringing innovative things to you and creative things and trying to introduce this creativity into anything that you do, you will absolutely stomp it out. And you don't want to do that. So how can you think about causing people to want to be creative? Tell them and then encourage them and then reward them when they do. And this could be through a Formal process where if there are efficiencies that are brought into a manufacturing process, or increased customer satisfaction, or fewer injuries, or any of these things that improve the business in any way, it makes more profit that you give rewards for that. That would be like a systematized creativity encouraging system, right? But as far as how you can increase creativity, I think it's just the approach. It's being. It's an awareness that you can always do things better. It's an awareness that there may be 10 different ways to accomplish the same thing and you only have uncovered one of those things and you need to uncover the others and search for those. Because one or more of those may be significantly better than the thing or the way that you're doing things now. And that alone should really incentivize creativity. You could also do research and participate in creativity enhancing exercises. The brain is like a muscle, right? The more that you use it, the better it gets. Creativity, I think, is like a muscle too. The more that you encourage it and the more that you engage in creative things, Creative thinking, creative writing, participating in creative hobbies. All of these things where you can help the maintain the plasticity of your brain and encourage new neural pathways so that those pathways might be something that the thing that you've done the same way for a hundred years runs down and triggers something. And you're, you're like, oh my gosh, I could do it this way. Talking to other people who are creative, hanging around with people who think differently, having a diverse workforce, ethnically, racially and gender wise, and socioeconomic class wise, politically. Be open to hearing new ideas and always be thinking of how does this relate to the ideas that I have? How does this relate to the beliefs that I hold? How can I challenge the beliefs that I hold? How can I encourage other people to challenge my beliefs? And how can I reward those people? When we have positive dialogues about how to do things differently, all of that goes into encouraging creativity. And I think that you'll find that if you start doing some of those things, even if it's like, I've never played an instrument, okay, we'll start learning guitar or piano because it'll cause you to draw on different centers of your brain. And those centers that haven't been activated or active before start churning and then they'll be processing the things that you think about as well. Also, taking time to allow your subconscious to process challenges that your conscience is trying to solve is a fantastic way to get problems solved. If you've ever experienced thinking about any kind of challenge or problem that you were trying to solve. And then you went to bed and you woke up the next day and you're like, ah, I've got it. Because you weren't thinking about it consciously. You gave it to your subconscious to run and work and it happened and you solved it. This is something that Salvador Dali and also Nikola Tesla did. I think it was Tesla that would sit in a chair with a couple of marbles and wait until he almost had drifted off to sleep and they were held over a metal plate. And just as he was drifting off to sleep they would fall so it would wake him up again. And he was trying to stay always in when he was thinking like this, always in that twilight of subconsciousness. And he would find that he would start thinking consciously about a problem and then start to fall asleep, turn it over to his subconscious. He would fall asleep, drop the marbles, wake up, and either have a solution or go through that process again. So any of those are things that you might use to help yourself trigger your creativity. And so those are the things that I think creativity adds to and helps with in business.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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