For reasons I’m not exactly sure why, I was recently asked to present to a venture capitalist firm in the US about the creative process.
There were a ton of points, but one that got them the most bemused was this:
In essence, the point of the slide was if you spend your energy focused on what someone else has done, they’ve won.
The reason for the bemusement was they didn’t see creativity in terms of forging new opportunities, but exploiting existing ones.
Make something slightly better than someone else.
Leverage others efforts to be cheaper than someone else.
Ride trends to grow faster than someone else.
But in all cases, it was using creativity to build on others efforts rather than create their own.
On one level I get it. Fast followers is a business strategy that has grown all manner of companies … from Hollywood to Apple. However for a VC it was kind of strange to me until I looked into the numbers involved, and understood why it was starting to be much more preferable to go to the zoo than to keep looking for Unicorns.
That said, they kept asking me why I thought comparison was wrong.
And of course it isn’t.
Comparison can have many benefits from increasing standards to ambition.
However, in the creative development process, it can be a real danger.
Because when someone looks at work in the early stages of development and starts using comparative language … the result is ideas get undermined because of it.
The focus is shifted.
Clarity is distorted.
It hands control to the commentators not the creators.
Of course people are entitled to their opinion, but too many rush in and kill the potential of something by judging it as finished when it’s still in creation.
What makes it even worse is when that judgement is done by comparing the work on the table to something someone else has done – however loosely – at some point in time in history.
When that happens, those people are not just robbing the creatives of the excitement they have about creating something new, they’re robbing everyone of the potential of what something can become if it’s allowed to breathe.
It may be inconvenient to project management, timesheet obsessed, bean counters … but ideas grow, they’re rarely born fully formed.
So if you want to stand a chance of creating something that can change everything, then the best advice is trust the talent, support the work and stop being a fucking joy vampire.