The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

October 14Creative Genius

I have come prepared to see all this, to dislike it, but not with stupid narrowness to distrust or defame. On the contrary, while I will not be so obliging as to confound ugliness with beauty, discord with harmony, and laud and be contented with all I meet, when it conflicts with my best desires and tastes, I trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos.

Margaret Fuller—At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe (1856)

Creative genius is often seen as something that comes to the chosen few who pick up a brush or sit at a piano and craft something so original that duplication is unthinkable.

That's the storybook version anyway. The reality is likely closer to something like this.

You search high and low for something you want, but when you can't find it, you decide to make it. You wrestle with a creative way to package your offerings, and then one day, while reading a work of fiction you brought to the beach, you stumble on the perfect solution in some quirky piece of dialogue between characters. A client asks you why you've always done something a certain way, and you can't find a meaningful answer. So you build a new way.

That's creative genius; that's “the law by which a new order, a new poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos.”

Question everything, tear apart best practices, create unusual pairings—take nothing ...