Utkarsh Amitabh explains the creative cliff illusion: your first ideas feel good but rarely transform anything. Research from Kellogg shows that sticking with harder, messier concepts leads to real innovation. He built Network Capital's advisory networks specifically to protect risky ideas from getting killed too early.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Utkarsh and I'm the CEO and founder of Network Capital. Today I'm going to talk to you about the creative cliff illusion, which essentially means that the fastest ideas we get are not the best ideas. A couple of researchers and professors at the Kellogg School of Management have explored creativity and idea generation at scale and come to the surprising insight that whether it's a meeting or a discussion to explore new pivots and ideas, our first ideas are not the best one. In fact, if we stick with some of the most hard and intense and rigorous ideas, the chances of producing path breaking insights expands exponentially. So what does it mean for you? First realization is that efficiency is not equal to creativity. Here we're talking about creative output, essentially ideas and insights that transform your company or your personal or professional life. So speed is not equal to innovation. What you want to keep in mind is that when it comes to brainstorming, more ideas are almost always correlated with better ideas. In other words, if you want to get or enhance the quality of the execution of your ideas, just as a first step, come up with more such ideas. And once you come up with more such ideas, do not discard the ones that seem impractical or not so feasible at the end of the meeting when everyone is in a rush to conclude it. Don't just pick the idea that seems most convenient or gets most whoops. The more challenging ideas are the ones we need to stick with, the ones we need to explore, and we don't really need to execute them. All we need to do with horny ideas is to give them the time to mature and create a tribe of advisors and people who are a part of our challenge network to help uncover the insights of such ideas. This research has made me understand why certain kinds of people, every few months they have something brilliant to share, and their ideas seem transformational and not just additive or incremental. What it seems to me is that these are the people who stuck with the ideas and explored and not abandoned the ones that seemed less practical, but explored them from all corners and taken the logical course of action. So whether you're a student, a young professional, a CEO of a company, an investor, there will be ideas thrown at you for your consideration. You owe it to yourself to consider them with an open mind and really dive deep into the ones where there seems to be a high risk, but also a disproportionate chance of a possible reward. You can't put a number to it, at least initially, so you need to train yourself to understand The Creativity cliff. The most important concept to keep in mind is that the more you tell yourself that your best ideas are there in the past, the more you start believing it. So I as a person, I tell myself that my best ideas are yet to come. My best idea of today hasn't just gone out, I have put in my best. But there is more to come. As we speak, there are a couple of ideas that I'm mulling with when it comes to the Network Capital Summer School which starts on June, or the side hustle fellowship on June 5th. The whole reason why some of these ideas are still in my mind is that there is a debate going on in the team, in our larger ecosystem, of what might be the course of action. So instead of jumping to a conclusion, what I've done is that I'm still thinking, still mulling with. I have a ready baseline option, but if I'm not able to exceed my thought process, I'm going to go with it. But if I do come up with an insight with the help of my team, that makes the experience of our participants, of our students, much better, then absolutely I will go for it. I will not succumb to the creative cliff illusion. If you look at the entire journey of Network Capital, we started as like an uber for mentoring and making one on one connections for mentors and mentee happen. From them we discovered that essentially peer mentoring is our calling. And we got a lot of support from our community on that endeavor. And now we pivoted to the Netflix for Careers model where we looked at our peer mentoring ecosystem, our board of advisors and thought that if we can produce Netflix type of shows but focused in people's lives and careers, it will not just be interesting but also educational. And then we've complemented the live cohort based fellowships on top of our Network Capital TV model. Now you can call these all standard business pivots or you can also call them that our best ideas are in front of us, they evolve and they take shape in surprising and serendipitous way. Planning absolutely helps, but only if we truly believe that our best is in front of us. And the ideas that will be truly transforming our personal professional life can be unearthed can be explored. We just need to stick with them. Have a wonderful day and see you on NetworkCapital TV as part of the Summer school or the side Hustle Fellowship or a wide range of fellowships that are starting in a few days. See you. Cheers.
