Episode 117: The 5 C’s of Creativity

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew. Each of us in this world has an interesting life to some extent, and if you tap into that well of your personal interests and your personal passions, each of us has got them, right? Like, Bobby, you've got very different interests than me. It's hard to believe that, you know, we get along, but, but at the end of the day are able to come to highly creative discussions, highly creative views on the world because we're tapping into our own personal interests and passions.

It is said often that we are a very creative business, and though creativity is at the heart of our industry, there's still very little discussion or training on the subject of creativity. How to be more creative, how to inspire our teams to tap into their creative potential. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. In today's episode, Mark Graham and I grapple with tactical ideas on how to be more creative and not just artistic. We're discussing creativity from creative sourcing to creative design. I share the 5 C's of creativity and how understanding them can unlock your immense capacity for problem solving. We discuss how your personal passions inform your best work, why many people get their most creative ideas while they are in the shower or out for a walk or during their commute, or the difference between creativity and ingenuity, and the story of how a simple, boring white mug with a creative message earned Microsoft over $1 million worth of free PR. In this episode, I reference a few resources which can be found in our show notes at community.commonsq.com. And as you listen, we'd love to know what you've learned about creativity. Give us a shout on social @CommonsQ or email me bobby@commonsq.com. This episode is brought to you by Commonsku, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. Begin your free trial now at commonskew.com.

5 C's of creativity: capture and collect, connect, clip and cultivate. This is a weird one— cogitate but cool. It's the most important part, by the way, that we leave out. And then community and communion. Here's what I mean. So capture and collect— learn from what inspires you. Some of the greatest artists in the world have been excellent at capturing ideas as they came to them. Many folks think creativity is sitting down and waiting to be inspired. But that's not what creativity is. That's an illusion, a sort of a myth that we've built up. Most musicians, most artists have been really good at capturing ideas as they came to them. So one of the things that we don't do as well as an industry is this very thing of capturing, collecting. Here's, here's what I mean. David Allen, the productivity guru, said that you should capture every single thing that's potentially meaningful. Here's, here's the thing. Your brain is for recognizing, not remembering. So your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. You can literally only hold— I think the science has proven something like 5 ideas at a time, like things at a time. This is why we can go to the grocery store and go down our grocery list and forget something, or we can go run an errand and realize we forgot something. Also, we just can't— the brain is not good for holding those things. And the reason why I'm passionate about this for our industry is, can you imagine hitting the show floor You're collecting creative ideas for, um, possibly hundreds of customers, if not dozens, at least dozens of customers for hundreds of projects, and you're going to walk through aisles for thousands of product. How are you going to capture and collect that, right? Not only that, but when you go around your daily life, um, and you're really good at this, Mark, where you're, um, cross-pollinating. Yeah, yeah, but you're cross-pollinating ideas from various disciplines or various things, whether Um, you know, for you, whether that's going to a concert or an art museum, these aren't disparate places that you disconnect from your business reality. You bring those back into your daily business, and you're really good at that cross-pollinating ideas. This— the second one is connect. This is also something that we tend to not do very well in the business. Um, every separation is a link. For example, um, connecting— creativity is about making connections. This is why when we sit down with a client and they say to us, you know, I want you to come up with ideas for us for this campaign, questions are the most important part of the creative process. One of the most important parts of the creative process. They're a bridge, they're a road to becoming more creative. Every separation is sort of a link, and it's our job to sort of connect these disparate parts. So this is why the who, what, when, where, why, and how is so important. It sounds so basic. Most people are going to yawn at how basic that is. But here's what happens with buyers when they call us. They're so busy and you're so busy, you know what the only question we tend to ask when it comes to projects is when. Yeah, we don't ask, why is this important to you at this time in your business? Who is this for? Who are these folks to your organization? I mean, the more you can ask questions like, for example, how do we want the recipient to feel when they receive this particular project? Another, another tactic for questions. We do a lot of projects for events. Well, there's also there's— we typically get the at-event promotion request. You know, they need something to give away because they're going to some event or they're celebrating something. We don't ask the pre-questions like what's happening before this, leading up to it, or the post-questions, what's going on after. Trade show might be a great example, but questions are a bridge. They're a way to connect every separation. It's a way— it's what separates, I think, the seasoned pros from the amateurs in this business are those that are really good at asking questions so they can create this connection, this link. The other thing, Mark, one of my favorite aspects about this connecting is sort of seeing through something, like making connections between products. There was a quote, you know I'm going to quote something. There's a quote by James Baldwin that said, I remember standing on a street corner with the painter Buford Delaney down in the Village waiting for the light to change. He pointed down and said, look. I looked and all I saw was the water. And he said, look again, which I did. And I saw oil on the water in the city reflected in the puddle. Right? Two people can look at the same thing. One of them can see something completely different. A lot of it is about us seeing subject matter and then stop seeing that subject matter as it is. So when I talk about making a connection or seeing through a product, a good example, one of my favorite stories in the business is the Microsoft mug story. And if you've ever heard this, Mark, the Microsoft mug story about the million where the PR director at Microsoft claimed they got $1 million worth of free PR over a white mug, your typical C-handle mug, right? I don't know what it goes for today. $1.59, $1.69, whatever it might be. One of the questions we tend to ask in this business, and it's the wrong question, is what's new? What we don't typically ask is what works. And what I mean by that is the white C-handle mug has been around for, I don't know, decades. I don't know how long it's been around, but it's around the basic white mug that ended up in the cabinet. We're typically looking for some sort of creative idea, but a lot of it is how we see and make a connection to this product and really view product as a canvas. So every product we go on the show floor— what's funny to me is that two distributors can walk on the show floor and because they serve different type of clientele, they automatically have different type of DNA. They see different canvases when they walk on the show floor because that's what every product is. Every product's a canvas. This Microsoft mug, though, had a simple black imprint on one side and a blue imprint on the other. It's like reflex blue imprint. It couldn't be more boring than this product. This mug, the reason why it became $1 million worth of free PR is that Oracle and Microsoft had a database server product that was competing against each other, and Oracle's was something like $4 or $5 million higher than Microsoft. When Oracle was out there pitching their database server product, Microsoft— when they understood Microsoft was in the, in the game, um, they would start lowering their price. So Microsoft thought they would come up with a campaign, um, with a mug, and they would outfit all their salespeople and have them blanket the Oracle community with this mug. And here's what it said on the back. It said, instructions for use. Number 1, place mug prominently on your desk. Number 2, when Oracle salesman pitches $5 million of overpriced software, glance down at mug. Number 3, Oracle salesman spots mug, offers 20% discount. Number 4, skip steps 2 through 3 and call Microsoft instead. Save millions and get the industry's highest performance enterprise solution with no bitter aftertaste. Now at COMDEX. You might remember back in the day, Mark, COMDEX used to be the technology show of the year, Vegas, every year. Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, was the keynote speaker at COMDEX that year. Microsoft thought they would hand these mugs out to people as they entered the auditorium.

That's awesome.

And what happened was they got kicked off the property and asked to— and of course they went to the streets because it's Vegas and they started handing it out to people as they got out of cabs. Basically, they tried to put this mug in the hand of everybody that walked into the show. Ellison himself took one of these mugs to the podium and tried to denounce it. And that's why the communications VP said they got a million dollars worth of free PR out of a simple white mug. My point in bringing this up is that our job is to make connections, to see every product as a blank canvas. We need to learn the difference between subject matter and content, or subject matter and output, subject matter and, and the art and stop sort of buying into this lazy selling around just what's new. What's new is important, but not nearly important as what works, right? So talk about being creative. You couldn't think of a more boring product.

I suppose when I think of creative people in the promotional industry, I, I, I think on one hand I try to think about people that are creative from a design perspective. But then I also think that there are people that are creative from a product perspective. So they're not necessarily the kinds of people that will be able to design a fancy logo for you. They may not have any skills there, but they are just really creative when it comes to their product sourcing ideas.

That's a great point, a great observation. You know, there's a perfect example of that— Jon Vo. Yeah, you know, the Jon Vo story, Doodle for Google. Yeah, you know, here, here's this— talk about a creative solution, sourcer and provider. A Doodle for Google is that annual contest open to students in grades K through 12. Students were invited to create their own Google Doodle for the chance to have it featured on google.com. Jon was tasked with putting together these submission kits that would be sent to art teachers in schools all across the country, tens of thousands. And it's submission forms, contest rules, 4-page brochure. And John said that for the first year he worked with Google, the judges would pick one winner from every state. That winners would receive $5,000 towards anything they wanted. The client didn't know how to begin and ask if they could help. So, you know, John first started, it was his job to curate prizes for 50 different schools with no set rules or standards or precedents. He had to source things like pottery kilns or giant touchscreen displays before they were popular, laptops and tablets. Last year, Doodle 4 Google reached out to put together school survival kits for the winning school in Puerto Rico who was still recovering from Hurricane Maria. After the project was completed, they felt they should do more for the school, and they tasked John with supplying musical instruments for the musical program. Google didn't have a budget in mind— sounds familiar— so he was going to provide them with costs. They basically provided a wish list of instruments, and John had to source musical instruments to get to Puerto Rico. And then he finally figured out that he needed to buy these within Puerto Rico to get shipped to Puerto Rico. Now you're a promotional products distributor, suddenly you're sourcing musical instruments in, in Puerto Rico for a school. So I, I agree with you completely. We're talking about two different types of creative. You know what we're really talking about, Mark? I think the word that I— we don't use enough in the business, and I think it ties together, or it may answer more this type of professional you're thinking of— ingenuity. Ingenuity, I think, is, is a little bit different than creativity. You know, at their best, distributors are ingenious. They take a simple product that anyone and everyone else can get, they turn it into a unique experience that no one else can emulate. That's ingenuity. Um, now you have creativity, I think, where it's where we think of the designers, you know, where we think they're designing nothing into something. They're not, but, but still, that's a little bit closer. But I think in that closer— a perfect example, what you were talking about in terms of Jon Vo and what he was doing, Absolutely.

And I, you know, I think that like this is becoming, becoming so much more clear to me as we're, as we continue this discussion. You know, I think another angle to this is when you're getting into this business, whether you're new in the business or you've been in the business for a while, I feel that the best distributor salespeople or the best, most quote unquote creative distributor salespeople seem to have some kind of anchor or inspiration in another world that exists outside of the promotional products industry. And that is where I feel the best among them.

By the way, can you elaborate on that? I think you know what you're talking about, but let's elaborate on what you're saying. Yeah.

So I know that that's theoretical, but I'm going to give you an example drawn from personal experience.

Okay.

So when I first got into the industry, Anyone getting into the industry, I knew nothing. So I didn't know where to buy pens versus USB drives versus hooded sweatshirts. Of course, I figured that stuff out after a little while after having attended trade shows and met sales reps and, you know, asked questions and all that kind of stuff. But that's kind of the basics of the business. But this sort of this other anchor or this other inspiration that I had coming into the industry is that I was inspired by the experience that I that I had in as a student and also as someone that attended summer camp in terms of my relationship with cool merchandise. I didn't call it promotional products. Promotional products would have probably made it sound kind of nerdy at the time, but for me it was branded merchandise. And so that was the experience that I had, and that was always the thing that anchored me and was my guide when I was first getting into the industry. So I was, I was not— I, or sorry, I was inspired by that experience. So as a result, I felt I understood those markets, which meant that everything that informed how I found suppliers and products was all informed by this external thing that I had that had nothing to do with the promotional products industry.

Yeah.

And so that, that was always my, my my safety net, so to speak. And it's where I could actually speak from a position of confidence, which is funny because when you first get into the industry, you have no business having any confidence because you don't know anything.

Yeah.

And so that, I suppose, that opinion that I had that was influenced by this outside thing gave me that confidence and gave me that direction. And I think ultimately informed my creativity and curiosity when going and pitching those initial clients. And of course, you know, the rest is history because you get more and more clients, you get more and more confidence, you know, you then start to have additional North Stars, you know, beyond just the initial one. So that's, that, that's just something that I have observed, particularly with my colleagues at Right Sleeve. And then subsequent to that, with all the exposure that I have had, and I know you have had too, with all these incredible distributors that we've seen through the Common Ski community.

Yeah.

Um, I think that that is something that unites, I think, most of them.

I, I think you hit a huge key. In fact, I think it's very practical too. It's not just dreamy. It's the fact that most of the entrepreneurs I respect from a creative aspect, whether creativity means artistic creativity or they're just incredibly creative entrepreneurs, is they have a rich, adventurous life outside of their business work that infuses their— when I say adventurous, I don't necessarily mean just physically adventurous. They're curious. Curiosity is a big part of their life, and that informs their work. And you remember, there's a book on creativity by Mihaly— and I'm going to botch his last name, but you know who I'm talking about— where he said creativity does not happen inside people's heads, but in the interaction between a person's thoughts and a sociocultural context, which is exactly what happened to you in camp. Yeah, and exactly. And I just interviewed Cindy Jorgensen, who does a lot of adventure vacations. She started back in 2011 doing adventure vacations. We'll have that podcast up on the blog. But she started doing these adventure vacations and it completely transformed and infuses her work that she does today. And we actually unpack that about how it leads to a more adventurous business life. But I'm with you 100%. You look back at even just examples of Steve Jobs. Who was famous for going not to other technology shows, but to things like architect— architecture shows. And we all know he got, you know, the inspiration for the first Mac or Apple design from a Cuisinart, right, from some other industry entirely. So all of these things, us being hopefully polymaths and autodidactic, we also cross-pollinate. And so if you're new in the business, I think that's— that's the practical aspect of that is cultivate a rich— cultivate a rich curious life outside of work because it will absolutely impact the work that you do on a daily basis.

I remember back to Commonsku sessions that we had in New York, and Bobby, you had interviewed on that panel Lisa Pine with Axis Promotions. And what was amazing about Lisa is that she had a background in singing opera. Yeah, right. Super, super interesting. And it was amazing to me in her answers to your questions as to how it is that she became such a great success at selling promotional products is that she had this like very unusual background, this creative background in singing opera, and how it is that she brought it, as well as in the world of education, mind you, as well. She had that going for her as well. And how she brought those experiences into the world of promotional product selling. And so I thought that, that's, I mean, a great real-world example.

Yeah.

And I think at the end of the day, for people that look at outwardly creative people and they themselves go, oh, I would never be as creative as that person.

Yeah.

I'm not sure that I buy that at all because when you frame it like you just did right now, like at the end of the day, each of us in this world has an interesting life to some extent. And if you tap into that well, of your personal interests and your personal passions. Each of us has got them, right? Like, Bobby, you've got very different interests than me. It's hard to believe that, you know, we get along, but at the end of the day are able to come to highly creative discussions, highly creative views on the world because we're tapping into our own personal interests and passions.

Yeah. Well, it's also a direct tie to one of the other C's in the 5 seeds of creativity, and that is community and communion. And so as you and as Lisa were involved in these other communities, that was a big part of feeding the work. And there's a quote by Brian Eno. You know Brian, his work with U2, Talking Heads, one of the most famous music producers of our time. And he had this great quote on community. He has actually a portmanteau, the the addition of two, two words, scenus and genius. And he calls it a scenus, that most of the creative geniuses that we think are geniuses out there weren't geniuses at all. They're actually a part— they were actually— he calls it a scenus. They were part of a scenus. So he said, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky and Rembrandt and so on, who sort of appeared out of nowhere, produced artistic revolution. That wasn't a true picture at all. What really happened was that there were sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people. Some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, all sorts of people who created an ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. And this led me to thinking about all of the groups that I could think of. You think of the Algonquin Roundtable or the Impressionists or Greenwich Village in the '60s, where, you know, Dylan would not have emerged were it not for Greenwich Village in the '60s. Or take the Inklings. Can you imagine this? We can't. It's hard for us to fathom today. But there would have been a time where if you walked into a pub in Great Britain called The Bird and the Baby— it was actually called The Eagle and the Child, but they called it The Bird and the Baby— and on a Thursday night you would have walked up to the very top floor and you would have heard J.R.R. Tolkien reading something that he wrote called Lord of the Rings. Yeah. To C.S. Lewis. Who are the others in the room? Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams. Lewis was going to get up soon and read something from what he wrote called, you know, The Chronicles of Narnia. And you would have not known it back then that there would have been this incredible incredible outpouring. But there you go again, another community, an ecology of talent that rose out.

Beat Generation, same thing, right? 1950s, Jack Kerouac, you know, Allen Ginsberg. I even think to some extent, like, look within the promotional products industry and look at—

yeah, that's where I'm going with that, right?

Like Promo Kitchen, in terms of a very diverse, quirky group of very distinct personalities on the distributor and the supplier side. Like, that's an example right like before our eyes.

Yeah, yeah. When I do, when I do this class for distributors, I ask them, where's your scene? Where is your scene? I tell them about Promo Kitchen. Like, if you don't know about Promo Kitchen, you need to be involved in this organization because that's your tribe, that's your people. Jerry Saltz has a great article on how to be an artist. And one of the, one of his how-tos is commune with your own all the time, form small gangs, be a vampire, stay up late with other artists around you. But I love his idea of form small gangs, right? We all want to belong to a tribe. And to know that, you know, because there's a misnomer out there that creativity happens in a vacuum and that the real creative genius is this lone wolf, this tortured soul. And most of those are true. I know. But yeah, even still, though, I can have 3 days of solitude where I'm working on my own and I've got to be around other people. Other people inform my work. I have to have other folks. Mark, you've been a great influence in my work and other people have been, you know, even those that we think are alone are not alone. They've attracted a tribe to them that helps inform their work. If I were sitting across having coffee with a young entrepreneur about this, I would tell them, do that purposefully. It's not going to happen on accident. Anyways, I'm really passionate about this last point because community is another big misnomer when it comes to creative people. One other thing too. So another C here is clipping and cultivating to an idea's essence. To an idea's essence. If you were to go through Apple's training program, you would be shown Picasso's Bull. Mark, you're a huge Picasso fan. You've read the biographies. He has this famous painting that he did of 11 bulls, and he starts with a very detailed picture of a bull. You can see the muscles on the bull. You can see the snout, the hooves. But over the iterations of 11 drawings of this bull, all those details vanish, and the last thing you see is this stick, this figure of just line drawing that's unmistakably a bull. The point being, Apple makes their employees go through this creative process because they have to learn that a big part of the creative process is clipping and cultivating to an idea's essence, getting down to the most— the simplest is often the most beautiful. I was reading Susan Sontag's journal. She wrote that mathematicians say of a certain equation, it's beautiful because it's so simple. So beauty comes from elegant simplicity. There's— this has huge ramifications for our business because if you're sending your client a 20-page PDF full of crap that you found through a search and you're not clipping and cultivating down to an idea's essence for your customers, then you're just a mouse click away from being an online order. If you ask the right questions, that leads to cultivating to an idea's essence or cultivating to a project's essence. An example I use a lot is that client will call you. They're busy and they're harassed. You're busy and harassed, and you'll just simply take an idea or take something without asking a lot of questions. And because you didn't ask a lot of questions, you don't have a lot of answers. You don't know what to look for. You don't know what connection to make. And so you end up guessing and just sending them tons and tons of ideas, hoping that they do the work of finding the right idea, when in reality the most creative artists tend to cultivate down to an essence.

Bobby, I think that's a really interesting point, and I'm going to see whether I can, I can maybe complement what you've just said in, in terms of your idea there, that if you think about You think about the best businesses in the world, for example. You know, they all start with a simple vision statement in terms of who they're serving and the problem they're solving. Okay? And so, I'm thinking a little bit out loud here, but as a student of entrepreneurship, I look at a lot of really successful businesses and I'm fascinated like, why are they so successful? Even though many of them have grown to be massive, extremely complex organizations, they all started with a simple idea. I'll give an example with a company we all know. Google is right now a massive, very complicated company with lots of different tentacles in its business model. Okay, yeah, but it started and to some extent still remains guided by this notion of organizing the world's information and making it accessible to everyone. Yeah, and like, that's an incredibly powerful comment. It's a very, very impressive and powerful vision statement, but it's also incredibly simple, right? Like, we're taking all this information online, we are organizing it and making it available and accessible to everyone.

Yeah.

So I don't know if I'm stretching here, but if you then tie that back into a promotional products campaign, okay, now you might be thinking, Mark, how are you going from Google's vision to a bunch of yo-yos for a trade show? Well, I'm going to try to make this happen. I'm going to try it here. Is that, you know, one of your earlier points, Bobby, is that The best, most creative distributors are the ones that ask those questions, the ones that ask questions like, what do you want your customer to feel when they get this product? As a question. Or what is your marketing objective? Or what kind of ROI are you expecting from this?

Right.

So just a series of questions that are foundational questions that in some respects there is a vision that is being articulated for this particular promotion by asking those questions. And by doing so, you're actually simplifying what it is that you want from this. Like, we want our customers to absolutely love our brand because our brand is, is, is based on community and based on, um, togetherness and based on connection. So we want to produce a promotional product that is going to enhance that.

Okay.

And, and so I wonder if we really look at the most successful promotional products campaigns, you tie them back to a vision, you tie them back to a simplistic, um, uh, a simplistic point of view, that then I think that that's a great foundation on which great creativity can, can grow. I—

no, I'm totally tracking with you. When you look at some of the, um, creative agency models in this business, for example, you've said this before, they have a very strong opinion about themselves and their clients. And you can simplify what it is that what they're doing for customers. 12NYC, you know, we're storytellers, we build tangible brand narratives through custom and private label merchandise. It's a beautiful statement. It's both— it's simple and yet aspirational. And I think I'm following you there. And you look back at simplicity and down to an essence, you look at the complexity of what Google is, and you go to that Google search page.

So much of it just comes down to like this simple essence of an idea, right? It's like, and, and, and, and a lot of the greatest things in our world, whether they're in business or arts or nonprofit, um, there's usually this very interesting tension between the sort of clarity and simplicity of the vision around that business or the vision of that campaign with with how complicated it seems on the outside, right? Like, Bobby, look, look at your time at Robin, right? Like, you, you were arguably in the most challenging and complex side of the promotional products business, delivering company store programs. Think of all the stuff that could go sideways and does go sideways in doing a company store program with fulfillment and e-commerce, right? Like, it's, it's probably bringing back, like, nightmares to you right now. But the point is that a company like Robin was so good at executing these complicated programs because the very best programs you did were rooted in this simple mission, right, as to like what you were doing for the client. And you've said, you've told many stories in your classes. See, I've even listened to you over the years. Hard to believe. You've told all these stories in your classes as to how, you know, you've gone to that crusty bank manager and you've talked about what your program does for them and how it is that they immediately brighten up with excitement when they think about what Robin has done for them through the company store program.

That's right. And, you know, it's funny, our mission was we make branded products simple because they were so complex. The interesting thing about that, it was a fucking mess. And I'll give you, you know, I was coming back from Vegas this past year and I got on the plane and I was coming back home. I was on the plane with some former competitors of mine who ran a very large distributorship. And I was talking to a friend of mine And we were talking about the business and I said, well, how's it going? And she's, well, it's a fucking mess. And I said, of course it's a fucking mess. That's what the creative process looks like. And this kind of ties a little bit into sort of managing creatives or managing creative artists, if you'll follow me here, is that when our mission was to make branded products simple, but if you were to work on the inside, it was messy. You're dealing with fulfillment, warehousing, distribution, and the errors and the mistakes and e-commerce. And this goes for any creative endeavor that you do. Because it's typically that proverbial tapestry, you know, where you see a tapestry on the wall and it looks gorgeous on the wall, you turn it over, it looks like a fucking mess. It's stressful, it's mind-numbingly chaotic. You wonder whether you question your sanity, your skill, but then it comes together. Not perfectly, but the random notes and minor chords sort of get strung together into something symphonic. So you have to step back and look at the whole thing before you understand you played a role in something pretty fucking magical.

So, so people who are listening to this are now like, great, creativity sounds to me like on one hand, very simple and clear, but on the other hand, incredibly complicated. When can I just go back to, you know, selling out of a catalog? I'm happy to do it at 30 points because this whole like, you know, high margin stuff doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

And I hear that, I hear that tension that exists. And I hear folks push back on that. But when you look back at your own life, some of the most complex situations you've ever been involved in turn to be the most symphonic of your life. Yes. Would I just take a $30,000 hat order with a one-color spot on it? Sure. Who wouldn't do that? What I'm suggesting is I think the things that are worth doing the most typically have some form of complexity into it to where we end up simplifying it down to some special essence.

I mean, at the end of the day, we're not saying anything that others haven't said, that anything that's worth doing in this business in 2019 and beyond has to have some level of— I, I don't want to use the word complexity, but it has to have some nuance beyond just delivering a product from a supplier's warehouse. Because that, that is where you get the transaction sale, and those days are rapidly coming to an end. So the nuances above and beyond that in terms of the value that's being added— and yes, that may be complexity, but at the end of the day, this industry is full of really smart people who can apply brainpower, ergo value, on top of the products that are being ordered by, by their customers. And I think that's really what you're getting. You're talking about the essence of creativity right then, right there.

All right. I'm going to make a last point, Mark. The last point about creativity is sort of— this is going to surprise people and it's going to sound so boring, but it's about cogitating and letting ideas cool. There's a great book by Brewster Geisland called The Creative Process. Honestly, one of the best books, in my opinion, on the creative process. It includes interviews and articles from folks like Einstein, Van Gogh, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, lots of folks. The intro is worth the price of admission for this book. But one of the keys— this was also discovered. Nancy Andreasen wrote The Secrets to the Creative Brain for The Atlantic. It's a great article in The Atlantic. And Bruce de Geisselin uncovered this as well. Many people who study the creative process uncover this. And that is— and I'll read a quote to explain it. Among the conditions to which every inventor must submit is a necessity for patience. The development desired may have to be waited for, even though its character has been clearly intimated after the first suggestions, which allows anticipation of anything at all. A long gestation may be required. The need for such hidden organic development at some stage of the creative process appears to be universal with all artists. I repeat that last part. The need for hidden organic development at some stage of the creative process tends to be universal for all artists. Here's what I mean. The Lion King. Mark, we've all probably seen The Lion King. You remember The Lion King? There's— you remember the scene in The Lion King where there was these The hyenas, and they did this luau to try and distract the hyenas from attacking them. That scene was written about by Don Hahn in a book called Dancing Corn Dogs and the Knights. Great book about Disney creativity. And what happened was they'd hit a roadblock in terms of coming up with ideas for their clients. One of the things that I ask folks is, where do you get your most creative ideas? Most people will respond, they either get their most creative ideas while they're walking or while they're in the shower, while they're running. They're typically— what they've— what's happened is they've let go of the idea consciously, and their subconscious has gone to work on the idea itself. Not only that, there's something magical to the cyclical pattern of whether it's running water, running legs, whatever it might be. But you'll find that most creative artists will find that they get their inspiration when they're doing other things on the idea that they're working so hard on. And that, back to that scene in The Lion King, They were filming, doing test films with that, and the movie got real dark and they needed an element of humor. At that point, they didn't have the luau scene in there, and the movie for a Disney movie had gone too dark for too long. It was just too dark. Kids weren't going to be able to handle it. And the test audiences were proving this. So they weren't getting the right reaction. They weren't getting the right cyclical of emotional responses for this movie. So they had to go back to the drawing board. What do we do here? They were so stuck. Finally, they got frustrated and they just ordered pizza and said, forget it, let's not think about this for a while. And this is where Don Hahn had a this breakthrough. They ordered Hawaiian pizza, and this is when the breakthrough occurred, right? Somebody said, what about a luau? And there you go. And what happened was, you know, back to, back to that whole walking or going in the shower, whatever it be. If you understand that that's a part of the creative process, you can bake that into your day, whether that is— if you have that huge project that you have for a client and it's due in the afternoon, what might be smarter is to work on that in the morning and then let it sit for a little bit. Let it simmer on the back burner of your mind because you know that that's actually a part of the creative process. Not only that, it emboldens you a little bit to know that your subconscious is so powerful and it's working on an idea when you're not consciously working on it. It releases a lot of tension for those of us that are in the creative field. Anyways, Mark, I wanted to sort of COVID those 5. I think they're They're critical for our business. There are so many aspects to the creative process that we can incorporate into our daily work. And I will admit, just like you and I have sort of rambled through this conversation and stumbled through it, the reason we have is because it's a pretty esoteric process. It's not easy. It's difficult. But there are at least some signposts along the way.

Absolutely, Bobby. Well, I think it's, you know, I think that these are important discussions to have. I think that some of them, you know, they're It's tough to put a formula on this, and I don't think that you're doing so, and maybe the closest that you did was by articulating those 5 C's, but I think it's a fascinating thing to talk about and how it applies to what makes this industry so compelling.

Thanks, Mark.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SkewCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.comandsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.