How curiosity drives your startup's success.
Beyonce, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet devour books. Ben Horowitz binges on rap. No matter how successful you might be, it pays to nurture and nourish your curiosity. Here’s why.
When Julia Ciccarone’s self-portrait, The Sea Within, won the People’s Choice award at this year’s Archibald Prize1, it spoke volumes about the nature of creativity. Artists, like entrepreneurs, can only ever think, invent, problem solve and express themselves using the inventory they have at hand, or more accurately, at mind.
Ciccarone spoke of the symbolism of the items shown in her self-portrait:
"I've depicted myself in a blanket that I have had as a child; I'm resting my head on a suitcase that my father brought out to Australia in the 1950s when he migrated from Italy," she said.
For sure, artists are driven and tormented by very different forces than a startup founder, but the principles at play in problem solving and creative expression are very much the same. The quality of your ideas is indivisibly aligned with the quality and quantity of the raw material you have to work with.
A blanket from a distant childhood. A suitcase from an epic adventure to a new land now folkloric in the family. An ocean roiling with change. You get the idea.
But I’m a founder, not a creative type
I spent 20 years working in an advertising industry famous for claiming the idea of “creativity” as its own. But just because advertising agencies use this word liberally doesn’t give them a monopoly on creative work. Far from it. What about art, music, literature, design and dance? Come to think of it, how about cooking, football, science and standup comedy? Or taking a business idea from the startup stage to scaleup and beyond?
Everything from agriculture and astronomy to zookeeping and Zen mastery are fundamentally creative endeavours. If Sapiens taught us anything, it’s that the cognitive revolution shot us to the top of the genetic pecking order with brain power that could compute and create like no other animals in history.
Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights - Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens.2
Building a business is an immensely complex and challenging creative task. That’s why so many startups fail - the complexity is too much. The challenges become overwhelming.
While the advertising industry's habit of spruiking “creativity” loud and often helped it build a place in the marketing stack, I often thought that its best examples of creativity weren’t the campaigns, but the companies themselves.
One of my old bosses earned himself a knighthood and an unbreakable grip on the trophy awarded to the UK’s highest paid CEO, year in, year out. He’d built a global empire by taking control of a struggling public company that made shopping trolleys and used it as a vehicle to acquire a slew of marketing services operations stitched together around the needs of clients. In its heyday there was a collective workforce of well over 120,000. But because his background was in finance (with an MBA from Harvard) he was frequently derided for being an “accountant” without a creative bone in his body. What his critics failed to appreciate was that in 25 years he’d created the world’s largest marketing services group, dual-listed on the FTSE and NYSE with revenues over AUD$30 billion. Those things and the fact that creativity isn’t a bone, it’s a process.
The most creative people I know don’t advertise their creative prowess through their identity or their job title, they just are. The question is, how do they make it happen?
The root cause of creativity
I’ve met countless startup founders totally fixated on what they’re doing. That kind of focus is a necessary (though insufficient) precondition for success. But if you’re not careful, you’ll end up living in a bubble of your own making, oblivious to, or disinterested in, the outside world.
If you’re not checking in with the wider world, and cultivating and exercising your curiosity, you might get caught up in your own BS. Suddenly, the bubble becomes an echo chamber confirming all your preconceptions and assumptions. At its worst whole companies and entire categories become self-referential. I’ve seen this happen in the advertising industry, the music business, telcos, consulting and publishing to name a few.
“People are more open to being wrong if they are fundamentally curious” - Brene Brown.3
Eventually, a failure of curiosity leaves people in once vibrant businesses dancing on the head of a pin in ways reminiscent of the classic disco tune from Flight of the Conchords, “Too Many Dicks on the Dancefloor.”4 Kodak. Blackberry. Blockbuster.
Confident humility
I’m not suggesting that you shouldn't value what you do know, but that you can’t possibly know everything. As psychologist, Adam Grant, explains, great founders are high on both confidence and the self-awareness required for humility.
“You are very ambitious and pretty self assured that you could do great things, but you're also very aware of your own limitations and weaknesses, and you know you’re human and you’re fallible. I started realising that that's really the combination that I’ve seen in most of the great entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with and studied” - Adam Grant5
I’ve always loved this model from McKinsey, it’s such a simple way to put your ego in its place.
Ask yourself, how much do you really know about anything? Try out this for an answer: There’s 5% you know you know; 15% you know you don’t know; and 80% you don’t know you don’t know. It takes courage to think this way but it’s so worth it because there’s always 95% of under or unexplored territory to gather insights from.
One of the best books I’ve read on this subject was written one Sunday afternoon in 1939 by James Webb Young. As you may have guessed, “A Technique for Producing Ideas” is a short book, only 64 pages long. What takes you an hour to devour will take you a lifetime to put into practice. Although, happily, you’ll feel the benefits instantly.
“What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which ideas are produced; and how to grasp the principles which are the source of all ideas.” - James Webb Young.6
Webb Young argues that in any kind of creative act or problem solving situation, from architecture to detective work, you need to have an abundance of raw material to work with. He breaks that raw material into two categories - general and specific. You can only acquire that raw material by being relentlessly curious in an open, enthusiastic, childlike way.
No, it’s not Don Draper, it’s James Webb Young at work.
The technique Webb Young lays out relies on, “The Simple Five-Step Formula Anyone Can Use to Be More Creative in Business and in Life!”
Here’s the nutshell:
Step 1: Gather raw materials. Gather both specific and general raw materials. ...
Step 2: Digest materials. Start putting different pieces of information together...
Step 3: Internalise materials unconsciously. ...
Step 4: The Eureka moment. ...
Step 5: Bring ideas to life.
The key to Step 1 is - you guessed it - curiosity, the enthusiastic pursuit of wonder.
Startup founders are usually great at gathering specific material. Feedback loops and data are rich sources of learning, but they skew toward questions you’ve already framed and asked, not the ones you didn’t know to ask in the first place. If tech startups had been around in Webb Young’s day, then he would almost certainly have called for more breadth in the founder's mind mix.
“I remember, a couple of years ago asking both Reid Hoffman [LinkedIn] and Sarah Blakely [Spankx], how did you have the confidence to just go for it? They both gave me different versions of the same answer. They both told me that they weren’t confident in their knowledge and skills, they were just confident in their ability to learn - Adam Grant.7
Specific raw materials tend to drive iteration. General raw materials are the stuff of pivots, giant leaps and major strategic shifts. You’re going to need plenty of both types on the founder journey.
Depth and breadth
Popular thinking suggests that specialisation and “depth” is the key to success in any given field - the 10,000 hours approach advanced by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers.8 But there is a body of evidence that supports a more nuanced view, that “sampling” leads to superior, long-term performance.
“I found a raft of studies that showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed. There was a nearly identical finding in a study of artistic creators” - Daniel Epstein.9
Having worked in creative industries and been a founder myself, I’ve come to the view that breadth is hugely undervalued in business in general, and in startups in particular.
Keeping your mind open and being willing to be amazed is a superpower and it could mean the difference between falling at the next hurdle and getting over it. Or the difference between mediocre and remarkable outcomes.
For both entrepreneurs and artists, who and what you learn from on your journey has a way of finding its way into your work. A blanket. A suitcase. An ocean.
Stay curious!
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ABC News https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-01/archibald-prize-peoples-choice-award-self-portrait-lockdown/100424080
Sapiens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind
Brene Brown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bren%C3%A9_Brown
Flight of the Conchords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Conchords
Adam Grant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Grant
James Webb Young https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Young
Adam Grant interview on How I Built This Ep359 https://www.npr.org/2021/08/18/1028826501/live-from-the-hibt-summit-adam-grant
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers https://www.booktopia.com.au/outliers-malcolm-gladwell/book/9780141036250.html
Daniel Epstein, Range https://www.booktopia.com.au/range-david-epstein/book/9781509843527.html