Individual Flow Trigger: Creativity
Individual Flow Trigger: Creativity
How optimal performance demands the art of life
In this edition, I’m breaking down the basics of the Creativity flow trigger, real world examples of it being applied, and
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Creativity
If you look under the hood of the flow trigger creativity, you see two things: pattern recognition, the brain’s ability to link new ideas together, and risk-taking, the courage to bring those new ideas into the world. Both experiences produce dopamine, driving focus and, of course, flow.
How I Use Creativity😎
The best part about my opportunity is sales was the freedom to do certain things how I wanted because I was the District Manager. Of course, this mainly increased the risk/high consequences, but it did increase my creativity also. The dynamic was great! Even though I was a DM for the sales company, I was the business owner of the office in Florence with full creative control over how it operated.
Florence was one of those small college towns where football was everything. The University of North Alabama was the main school in the area—it was a D2 program then but recently they’ve moved up to D1. I did exactly what I did back in Mobile when I recruited on campus but in Florence, I focused on; that’s right, you guessed it; student-athletes.
A volleyball player on the team was from Mobile, so I recruited her immediately. And from there it just snowballed to more student-athletes—including Lamonte Thompson. He was the hometown hero and big man on campus. He was the starting running back that made his way onto ESPN’s Top 10 Plays a couple of times. After a stellar career at UNA, he signed as a free agent with the Baltimore Ravens then retired after a short stint. He now has a successful business in Florence called LT Custom Cabinets.
Being creative to get the right people on the team definitely helped us achieve success. Florence was also a very blue-collar area. Very rugged and gritty. So we chose the nickname #TeamGRIT. In fact, after every group interview I would run, I’d play a couple of slideshows where applicants could have social proof of the conferences and trips we took. But I also played a video in the mix—it was Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk on Grit. So much alignment with me now being a peak performance coach.
How The Greats Use Creativity 🤌🏾
On Tuesday, December 14, 2021, Stephen Curry achieved a milestone that he’s been aiming for nearly his entire career. Sinking a three against the New York Knicks, Curry surpassed NBA legend Ray Allen’s total of 2,973 to become the all-time leader in total 3-pointers made during the regular season. During a feature on ESPN that commemorated the moment, Curry expressed “The interesting part is the way you have to reimagine the way you approach the art of shooting. You have to figure out a way to keep elevating the skillset, especially with shooting…reimaging what that looks like every year is what I found is the spirit behind it all.”
His creativity could be seen as early as his freshmen year of high school when he was the starting point guard for the varsity team. His dad was an 11-year pitcher in the Major Leagues, so people assumed his future was either baseball or basketball, two sports he was already dominating in. He played safety his sophomore year but didn’t like the position. So he decided to try out for the starting quarterback position for his junior year. While other players did the typical things to prepare, Mahomes often did his own thing. In the third game of the season, he led his team to a 38-33 comeback victory by producing 506 yards of total offense and four touchdowns. He ran away from defensive linemen and linebackers for 121 rushing yards and put up 385 passing yards. Mainly on the strength of his creativity. His high school offensive coordinator is quoted saying, “Some of that creativity began that night,” Cook said. “The key was to not overcoach him. Sometimes we overcoach kids.”
If you’ve watched the Winning Time series on HBO, you know how the Showtime Lakers changed the game with their creativity, and the role Magic played in that. But to set up how we’re going to end this book I want to touch on his creativity off the court. From 1998 to 2010, Johnson’s company owned more than 100 Starbucks stores. Johnson wanted to bring Starbucks to the inner city, and he had to convince Schultz that his coffee shops would prosper there. His boardroom pitch wasn’t enough to win Schultz over, so he changed his strategy and invited the CEO to one of the movie theaters he owned at the time. It happened to be opening night of “Waiting to Exhale”, starring Whitney Houston, and the theater was packed. Johnson recalled during a 2010Wharton presentation: “Our biggest screen had 500 women inside. All of a sudden every woman thought she knew Whitney Houston personally and started talking to the screen. So Howard grabs me about 20 minutes in and says, ‘Earvin, I never had a movie-going experience quite like this.’ With a little bit of creativity, that got him the deal.
This Week’s Book Recommendation📖
The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime’s work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments—and lifetimes—of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.
“I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.” —Rick Rubin
Last Words…
To cap this off, if you want more flow in life, you have to do 3 things consistently:
Constantly load the pattern recognition system with the raw materials it needs to find connections. This is the reason to read 25-30 pages a day in a book outside of your specialty.
Learn to think differently. Instead of tackling problems from familiar angles, go at them backward and sideways and with style. Go out of your way to stretch your imagination.
This might be the most important: make creativity a value and virtue. Your life needs to become your art!
So along with getting curious and staying curious as we’ve talked about before in previous editions…
Make sure you get creative and stay creative as well.
Hope this added the fuel to ferociously launch your week! ♾️🔥🚀
See you next Monday! 😎
And when it comes to the infinite game of life…
Choose Flow.
Be Brilliant.
Ball Out.
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