Thinking and doing the same things faster and better is not enough; we need creativity. Fortunately, creativity is a skill you can learn. This course will examine when, why, and how we can be creative. It examines the cues that trigger us to consider being creative. It provides a road map of the creative process – the process of changing our perspectives – and the kinds of outcomes that result from creativity. It examines how we can go through the creative process more efficiently and more effectively by examining what is changing about our thinking and how we can make those changes. The end result is more flexible thinking that can be used to recognize and develop new opportunities.
Why Persist?
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來自 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 的課程
Creativity Toolkit I: Changing Perspectives
113 個評分
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
113 個評分
課程 3（共 7 門，Specialization Innovation: From Creativity to Entrepreneurship）
從本節課中
Module 4: The Creative Journey
In this module, you will learn that creativity can be joyful, intrinsically motivating, and even liberating. You will also learn how to manage your organization so that your employees find ways to persist through the process as well.
與講師見面
Jeffrey LoewensteinAssociate Professor of Organizational Behavior
Department of Business Administration
Jack GoncaloProfessor
Department of Business Administration
As we learn that the creative process can be very difficult,
and clearly, some people pick themselves back up and keep going and other people quit.
So, I think, the real question then becomes,
why do people persist?
And also, how can we learn to be more persistent in our own work?
Yeah, you got to stick with that.
So, we focused a bit on the dark side of creativity, right?
It's not always easy.
There's rejection, loneliness, even the chance that you're going to be a misfit.
But it's not all negative, right?
I mean, it could be that creativity is its own reward.
It's often exciting. I mean,
we have the experience subjectively of,
"Oh, cool, what a great idea."
Right. We saw a little bit of that with Archimedes.
He'd be out of the bath tub,
why would he have the insight?
Right.
But it's not just something that happened in ancient times.
It's very much part of the creative experience.
Exactly. You get examples like that all the time.
So, let's see. I think,
wasn't it a mom?
Or no, it was a nurse,
after working with children for years.
What was her name?
Tiffany Criminis figured out that,
rather than giving medicine being a scary event,
what if I made the spoon to bring the medicine to you,
or the medicine dropper or whatever,
in the shape of an animal that was sort of friendly and
nice and wouldn't be a scary moment. It would be a cool moment.
If you hear her recount that,
you could really tell the obvious joy that that moment of insight brought not just
because it relieved the frustration that she had had for so long,
but also because she's helping somebody.
And so, that insight really was something that
was joyful and generated positive emotions.
But it can even happen in a place as cold as the financial world.
And there's a story of Daniel Glick,
who was trying to invest family members' IRA into real estate and he
realized that there is absolutely no platform
that would be something that would allow him to do that.
Then, the existing IRAs were just too narrowly focused on one kind of asset.
And so, he was very frustrated and
then he had this aha moment that he can actually create
a platform that allows people to
invest their IRAs in a broad array of different kinds of investments.
And so, that led to the creation of broad financial.
But again, you can tell in the way people talk about these experiences how exciting,
how positive, how joyful that moment is.
And so, creativity in a sense can be its own reward.
So, it's certainly true that that moment of insight could be accompanied by
feelings of joy and happiness at the thought that you
finally overcome your frustration and reached a creative solution.
But there's another element of the creative process
that could in and of itself be rewarding.
In my research, I've discovered that,
engaging in the creative process can actually feel liberating to people,
but allowing people to freely explore across different kinds of ideas and in
different directions is reportedly something that feels liberating to people.
The really great thing about that is that we've also
shown that giving people the opportunity to be creative,
because it feels liberating,
allows people to cope with different kinds of psychological burdens.
It's something that is interesting to me because you
often read about it in advice columns.
If you have a problem, maybe you should go seek a creative outlet.
So go do something creative and it'll somehow benefit you psychologically.
But there was no empirical evidence to actually back that up.
So, what we did was an experiment in which we randomly
assigned one group of people to think about a big secret that they were keeping.
And in another condition,
they thought about just a small minor secret they were keeping.
And the problem with thinking about a big secret is that,
psychologists have shown that it's literally something that feels burdensome.
It weighs people down and so,
it's a psychological burden that actually makes, for example,
you overestimate how steep a flight of stairs are,
or it makes you overestimate how heavy something is,
because the psychological weight of carrying that
secret is really experienced as a physical and psychological burden.
But the good news is that,
we were able to show in a subsequent task that we gave people
the opportunity to be creative by just simply
asking them to generate ideas with the instructions that,
as they generate ideas,
they should try to think of creative solutions.
And the people who were given the opportunity to be creative,
reported that their burdens were actually lifted.
So, we gave them tasks, for example,
that psychologists have used to tap into the sense of physical burden by,
for example, estimating how steep a hill is.
In all those tasks,
the people who had the opportunity to be creative were less burdened.
So they were actually able to accurately estimate how steep that hill is or
how heavy that set of books are because that burden had been lifted for them.
So, that's just an example of how creativity can,
again, be its own reward,
that engaging in a creative process can lead to feelings
that may help you overcome certain kinds of psychological burdens.
So if the creative process is bumpy,
it's challenging, it's difficult,
it's frustrating, and then you come up with something and people reject it,
why do people persist?
Well, many people enjoy the process itself so much that it doesn't really feel like work,
or they love the work so much,
it's a passion for them and a personal commitment.
Not everyone feels that way about their work, I understand.
But if you have the passion for what it is you do,
then all the other issues can fade away in the background.
There's a story actually about a mathematician, Grigori Perelman.
He was a Russian mathematician.
He ended up solving one of
the most famous problems in mathematics, the Poincare conjecture.
And indeed, he even won a prize,
a standing prize of one million dollars for whoever could solve it.
Well, he turned down the prize.
He figured, "I solved it.
I was fascinated in doing it.
I don't need the money. I have the personal satisfaction of the creative journey."
So, if intrinsic motivation,
that real joy and passion for the work,
really helps us overcome all these bumps in the road,
I think it helps to think about,
how do we foster that at work?
In our workplace, how do you look for that kind of joy?
And in conversations I've had,
I think it starts even in the interview process where,
there was a tendency maybe to focus on knowledge,
skill, and ability, but you also want to look for joy.
And in fact, I had a student one year who took my creativity class and
was really interested in working for a particular product design firm that is very,
very good for creativity.
In fact, famously so.
But during the interview,
he inadvertently asked about his salary,
and they responded very coldly and said,
"Look, our salaries are competitive.
But if that's all you care about,
you're not going to be a fit here."
And of course, he didn't get a call back.
So, I think what they got right part of why they fostered such a creative environment,
maybe because they're good at looking for people who have that joy and passion.
And if you ask about your salary within the first five minutes,
chances are, you're not going to be that kind of person.
Absolutely. And when we look for this,
when we talk to people that we want to hire as well,
which is, do you love what you do?
Because in many areas of work,
it's not about how much I can pay you relative to the competition.
It's, do you have a real passion for what it is we're engaged in?
And can I find that passion based on
talking with you and hearing your excitement in your work and what you do?
And so, I guess, we're all after Edison who famously said,
"None of it felt like work.
I never did a day's work in my life."
He was known for only getting four or five hours of sleep a night,
being sort of obsessively focused on his work.
Eighteen hours a day.
The other complexities that maybe we're good at selecting on joy, right?
So, we bring this person into the company who
has inherent joy for the work and then we don't let them be creative.
You also have to think about giving them autonomy or ways of doing that as well.
Absolutely. We love you have a passion for your work.
Now, do this. So, the issue there is we see companies giving employees time.
So either whether it's assigning you to
a project that's deep in the heart of your passion,
or giving you time to work on something you're passionate about.
So, 20 percent time or 10 percent time or Fridays or me days or whatever
the framework is that organizations do to give
people an opportunity to take a left turn or a right turn and try something different.
Even if it's playing ping-pong in the middle of the afternoon.
The scary thing is that it doesn't look like work.
So, people are reluctant to do that.
But if you have to work on a project.
We talked about with associations.
Sometimes, you need to sort of let your mind go and
all of that and as long as you need to blow off steam from a tough meeting.
But there's also, I think, an element of,
"This isn't exactly the thing my company wants me to do, but it's related.
And let me explore that,
and have the joy of finding out if that goes somewhere."
And that can be an opportunity to take that autonomy and that joy,
and lead you somewhere that no one else was necessarily looking.
So you pick the right people,
and then you let them pursue their passion.
So, part of creative persistence just involves loving your work.
Because if you love your work,
you're immersed in it and you can kind of tune out some of the negative things
like rejection that happens inevitably, right?
You'll keep going. But the other side, I think,
we've also seen is that,
if you care enough about what happens at the finish line, right?
That the recognition and the value of having done it,
then you'll also put up with a fair amount along the way,
even if you don't love all those steps along the way.
So, there's more than one tool that you can use to pull yourself through and persist.
And persist.
