No matter what stage in your career life you’re in, finding other people who think like you is a great way to build your community at work.

People who are interested in similar challenges, have some wild ideas do bounce off, or don’t mind working tirelessly for hours digging through material to find the right piece of the puzzle to your mutual challenge.

Those people can come from other departments or from other organizations entirely. They share a similar cause or are driven by the sense of “we’re all in this together”.

A wise man once said to his son, “Build yourself a house in every country”.
Where am I to get such money? Asked his son.
Find a friend in every country, and you will have yourself all those homes.

Find the others. Build your houses.

Your ex-architect,
Randah Taher

Consider these examples of creative people who’s talents were not recognized by their teachers, parents or friends:

1. Thomas Edison was told by his teachers that he was too stupid to learn anything.
2. Abraham Lincoln entered the Black Hawk War as a Captain and came out as a much lower private.
3. Winston Churchill failed sixth grade. He was at the bottom of his class in one school and twice failed the entrance exams for another.
4. Louis Pasteur was rated mediocre in chemistry at the Royal College.
5. Albert Einstein was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read.
6. Charles Darwin did poorly in the early grades and failed a university medical course.
7. Fred Waring once was rejected from high school chorus
8. Enrico Caruso’s music teacher told him he can’t sing and doesn’t have a voice.
9. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because he “lacked imagination”.
10. Pablo Picasso could barely read and write by age 10. His tutor gave up and quit.
11. Madonna got fired form her early-career job at Dunkin Donuts when she squirted jelly filling all over a customer.
12. Oprah Winfrey was fired from WJZ-TV as being “unfit for television news”. She showed too much emotions.
13. Steve Jobs was fired from his own company.
14. Marilyn Monroe was told by modeling agencies that she should consider becoming a secretary.
15. Stephen King’s renown and first book, Carrie, was rejected 30 times. His wife rescued the book from the trash and convinced him to re-submit it.
16. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
17. J.K. Rowling was a divorced single mother on welfare with 12 rejections from publishers on the Harry Potter books.
18. Sidney Poitier was told to become a dishwasher.
19. The Beetles were rejected by a recording company saying they have no future in show business. They didn’t like their “sound”.
20. Socrates was labeled as “immoral corruptor of youth” which lead him to his death sentence.

What more proof do you need to bring out the creative power in you? It doesn’t matter if others recognized it or not, especially at work. It requires you to recognize it.

Surrealists are on to something. They can put aside their rational mind temporarily to create something imaginative and powerful. The canvas would be just a mirror for what emerged out of that process.

We experience similar surreal moments that sometimes stretch into a process, like doodling during a boring meeting or looking out the window and imagining building the “Death Star” with Vader.

We keep forgetting that daydreaming gives us a direct access to our creative mind. We conclude that we must have drifted apart or we don’t feel like working. While in fact we’re in the middle of working and about to arrive to an epiphany that solves a problem for us. If we just continue this daydream for a few more minutes.

I had the pleasure of speaking with my friend Ismet (Izzy) Mamnoon who is a successful teacher coach and an amazing organization facilitator with projects around the globe. Her unique point of view is letting daydream be part of her process to feed into her creative thoughts. I talked with her and a bunch of other intrapreneurs on what makes their process unique and created The Creative Senses Challenge. Join the others and get inspired on finding ways to engage your full senses at work.  

Here’s a snippet of our conversation on my linkedin page.

A simple mind hack that to help you start flowing with ideas is to switch things upside down (or inside out) and ask the question again with that new “negative” perspective.

Rather than asking yourself “How can I finish all what I need to do this week on time?”, simply say “How can I make sure that I get nothing done this week?”.

List all the ways that answers this flip question. From sleeping all night and taking multiple naps, to making sure you don’t delegate a single things to not prioritizing any task.

Then, one by one, convert those ideas into your current situation and see how you can figure things out with this new perspective in the background. How can you really finish everything on time? Do you have to finish them all?

we default to negative thinking by nature. We immediately find faults in others’ ideas and we can see why things will not work out, because, we tell ourselves, we are experts and we have tried something similar before, and it didn’t work out. So this is how we use this negative thinking to our advantage. You’ll see that your brain will have no problem whatsoever thinking of ways that things will not work. Let it do its magic.

Here’s another example with the new question in place:  

How can you make sure you offer the worst customer service ever possible? What are all the ways you need to do in order to drive customers away?

Go.

Sometimes, that’s all what’s needed: the adjusting part.

We easily fall into inertia and don’t feel the need to be provocative. To question the status quo and re-create it when necessary. If we don’t do this often, we risk using outdated assumptions and flawed conclusions. 

Provocation has had a bad reputation for the longest time. A highly versatile, yet misunderstood, expression. We’ve always assumed that it needs to be big, loud or confronting. We never consider it when it translates into small regular changes to move up status.

Former Stanford professor and educator Henry B. Eyring explains, “My experience has taught me this about how people and organizations improve: the best place to look is for small changes we could make in the things we do often. There is power in steadiness and repetition.”

Small changes.

Like the 15 minutes that kickstarts your day or the few breather moments you need before a call to align your thoughts with your actions. Think Small. What else do you do almost every single day that you never thought about before?

Trace your everyday work life and see where you spend the majority of your thinking time. Where?  with who? and doing what? Design a routine that enshrines what is important, making execution almost effortless.

Make “imagination at work” the default position.

It won’t be easy at first. But once you’ve considered it, you’ll wonder why haven’t you don this ages ago?  

You’re welcome 😊

Randah