A nomad's guide to creativity

Author and the co-founder of Genius Steal, Faris, says habitation makes us blind, that we stop seeing the world around us when we commute every day. It's only when we do something different that we force our brains to pay attention.

Six years ago my wife Rosie and I left New York City, where we had been living for five years.
We had a few speaking gigs booked over and used them to slingshot through Europe, South East Asia and then Australia, before returning to the United States. We had planned to travel and explore for a while, but within the first few months people began to reach out to us to see if we were open to various consulting and freelance opportunities. We turned some down, and accepted a few others, once we established that we could work on then remotely. By the end of the year we started to realize there might be a viable business model here, and so Genius Steals was born — and we have been traveling ever since. There is no roadmap for what we are doing, the world isn’t setup for global nomads. We have to constantly find new solutions to live and work this way, and I believe that this also makes us better at what we do.

Genius Steals is a nomadic creative consultancy, so named because of what we believe about creativity. We work with brands from the Coca-Cola and Accentures of the world to startups that you haven’t heard of (yet), and agencies of types, all over the world. We consult on business and brand strategy, innovation and inspiration, through sprints, workshops and keynotes. We believe originality is a myth, that nothing can come from nothing, that one cannot invent without inventory. In fact, the Latin word inventio is the route of both words, because memory and imagination are intimately linked. Ideas are new combinations and the best way to have better ones is to constantly expose yourself to the best ideas the world has to offer, as broadly as possible. Whilst living nomadically is logistically complex, it also means we are constantly exposed to new stimuli, which is crucial for creativity.
 

Habitation makes us blind.

We stop seeing the world around us when we commute to the same office every day. We are cognitive misers, because brains requires huge amounts of energy, and it’s evolutionary adaptive to use it as little as possible. You may have had the experience of getting into the office and having no memory of the journey. You may have it all the time. It’s only when we do something different that we force our brains to pay attention, parsing the new conditions and context. Obviously travel is great for that, but any deviation to a routine can open our eyes, even just taking a different route to work.

What makes an idea good?

That was what T.S. Elliot was trying to explore when he wrote the line that inspired our company’s name. A way of gauging how creative something was without simply relying on subjective opinions. “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” he wrote, but it has been passed down to us as in altered forms, and then attributed to various people that almost certainly didn’t say it. “Good artists copy, great artists steal” is usually attributed to Picasso, for example. Elliot went on to say that good poets steal from “authors remote in time, alien in language, or diverse in interest”. What makes an idea good is when a non-obvious combination can be created in an intellectually satisfying way.

The dynamic tension holding the two seemingly unrelated elements together is what we mean when we say something is creative.

That’s why metaphors are more sophisticated than similes. Aristotle wrote that “the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor; . . . it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”

Finding the similarity in different things is a uniquely human ability because it requires abstraction, the ability to think a level or two away from something specific and see a pattern, or derive general rules from examples.

Effective metaphors, according to Aristotle, are “lucid, pleasing and strange”, which suggests both clarity in meaning and luminosity, fun or satisfying to hear, and uncommon.

Good ideas are non-obvious, non-trivial combinations that work, intellectually and for the job at hand.

The most satisfying are the ones that take on the qualities of effective metaphors: They are “lucid, pleasing, and strange.” Something obvious is not creative. The least obvious combination that solves the problem at hand is the most effective, because it less obvious, more interesting, and less likely to have been explored before.

So, to have better ideas, get out of your comfort zone, find inspiration wherever you can, and remember, genius steals.

Faris Yakob is the author of Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World and the co-founder, with his wife and partner Rosie, of Genius Steals. Their newsletter “Strands of [Stolen] Genius” was named one of “7 essential reads for the curious creative" by Hubspot. Follow him @faris

This article first appeared in issue 1 of new members-only Marketing Society publication EMPOWER. Members can read the issue here. If you've forgotten your login details please email our Editor.