The Creator's Mindset: Curiosity, Vision and the Evolution of Ideas.

We Would Never Have Made That

At Affinnova I sat with a room of senior executives who ran brands most of the world has held in its hands. I sat in rooms like it many times, with client after client, starting about two years after I joined, when the product was really starting to work. On the screen was a grid of package designs. They assumed an agency had made them. None of them had been chosen by a committee. They had been evolved: consumers reacted to combinations of a product's parts, round after round, and the combinations people preferred survived and recombined.

We ran a live round in the room. The design one executive's team had championed for months held on for a while, then lost to a combination nobody on her team would have picked. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “We would never have made that.” She said it with something close to wonder.

The best idea in the room was one that no one in the room would have made.

The Core Idea

The creator's mindset is disciplined curiosity joined to a vision strong enough to pull people forward. Curiosity without vision produces interesting notebooks and nothing else. Vision without curiosity produces conviction that cannot learn.

Ideas improve by evolution, not by inspiration alone. The best ideas are bred, tested, recombined and selected, often over years. Treat your own ideas with affection, and without sentiment.

Ideas Are Bred, Not Born

In the 1970s John Holland formalized genetic algorithms at the University of Michigan. Nature solves hard design problems without a designer: a population of candidates, a way to measure which do better, and a method for combining and varying what works. We brought that logic to a human question. What will people actually choose? It changed how I treat my own thinking.

1. Variation comes firstThe first version of an idea is usually the least original. If you only have one version, you do not have a choice. You have a bet.
2. Selection must be honestSet up a test that can tell you something you do not want to hear, and then listen to it.
3. Recombination is where breakthroughs liveThe winner that day was two ordinary ideas nobody had put together. The creator's job is often less to invent than to connect.
4. Mutation keeps you from settlingLet in the unexpected: a new field, a strange conversation, a book you would not normally read.

Your idea is not you. It is a hypothesis you are carrying for a while. When it loses, you have learned what to carry next.

Curiosity Comes Before the Project

Leonardo da Vinci left thousands of notebook pages and lists of questions nobody had paid him to answer. Three of his habits shape how I work: relentless questions, seeing for yourself rather than trusting the received texts, and refusing to build a wall between art and science.

That last habit became my real edge, and I did not plan it. Mechanical engineering at RIT. Naval aviation. Shore duty at Carnegie Mellon, where I learned the language of markets. Then decades of building technology companies. For a long time that looked scattered. Now I see four lenses on every hard problem. Cross-disciplinary thinking is not a lack of focus. It is a richer form of orientation.

Conviction Belongs to the Destination

Steve Jobs' reality distortion field moved teams past limits they had set for themselves. When Apple needed a tough glass screen for the first iPhone, Jobs told Corning they could make it at scale and on time, and they did. The same field also bent reality for Jobs himself. In 1985 he was forced out of the company he founded.

Two tests separate conviction from delusion.

Conviction is about the destination

Humility is about the route. A founder in the shadow has it backward: rigid about the plan and vague about where it goes.

Healthy conviction survives contact with data

It gets sharper when you test it. If you are avoiding the experiment because of what it might show, you have crossed the line.

Hold the vision firmly. Hold the variants loosely.

Learning Is a Spiritual Discipline

In 1970 Shunryu Suzuki published Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few. Expertise is valuable as long as it remains a set of tools. It is dangerous when it becomes a set of walls. In a world of constant platform shifts, that is fatal.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking about yourself less. Curiosity has a price, and humility is the price. You cannot learn something new while you are busy defending what you already know.

Honest Selection Starts With Your Own Losses

Curiosity that stops at your failures is not curiosity. It is self-protection.

This page is an overview of the chapter. The full chapter is in The Creator's Journey.

The Practice

Curiosity and vision can both be trained. Use your journal.

1. Keep a Da Vinci notebook for thirty daysWrite down every question that occurs to you. Each week, circle three and spend twenty minutes on one. The patterns are clues to your domain.
2. Generate ten variants before you chooseChange the customer, the price, the form, the channel, the promise. Pick three and look for features to recombine. Often your original does not win.
3. Spend one hour a week outside your fieldBiology, music, architecture, a craft. Each month, write down one idea that might apply to your work. This is your deliberate mutation.
4. Ask what would have to be trueTake one firm belief. List everything else that would have to be true. Mark each item known, assumed or hoped. Your next experiments live in the assumptions.
5. Run the conviction testWrite your vision in one paragraph and your route in another. If you defend the route harder than the destination, loosen your grip there.