While creative talent and hard work play an obvious role, chance and randomness also influence problem solving and creative discovery. Countless inventions and discoveries are accidental. The difference between what happens to us, and what happens to those chance inventors, is that they notice things, stop, take a step back, and reflect on what they have just witnessed, ask why and how, and use their curiosity to wonder what else.

While we brush it off, grab our coffee and run to continue what we planned to do.

I read a recent post by Seth Godin on the invisibility paradox. We believe more in what we see, even if it’s a placebo effect, than what we don’t. We’re unsure what to do with things that are invisible.

At work, this translates into focusing more on what we can easily measure than what we cannot. Measuring our effectiveness with hours spent at work, following KPIs to their rabbit holes, calculating profit at the expense of human well-being, are all examples we experience daily. What’s harder to see, or measure, is the culture we work in, the level of trust we have with our colleagues and managers, time spent thinking of, and developing, new ideas, and even how the space we’re working in is helping us, or not, in being more creative or effective at work. When we don’t put the culture on our radar, we tend to forget it exists.  

In the 19^th century, people began the process of eradicating wolves from the Yellowstone park in the US. The main reason was ranchers worried about their grazing livestock. As soon as the last pack was wiped out in 1930, changes came quickly.

The elk populations began to increase steadily, and large areas of the park were stripped bare, especially the riverbanks. The grass as well as the saplings disappeared as elks munched away the resources, Beavers found themselves without their main supply of trees, Willows and Poplars, that grows near rivers. Even birds didn’t find enough food and immigrated away along with many other species.

Things were not looking good for grizzlies either. The sugar and carb-filled berries they eat before winter were being plundered. Riverbanks became wastelands, and because there was no longer any vegetation to protect the ground, seasonal flooding washed away the soil. Erosion advanced rapidly.

As a result, the rivers began to zigzag and follow increasingly winding routes through the landscape. The less protection there is for the underlying layers of soil, the stronger the serpentine effect, especially on flat ground. This continued for decades. Until 1995.

A decision was made and wolves caught in Canada were released back to restore the Yellowstone’s ecological balance. This single action created what could be described as trophic cascade.

With the wolf back at the top of the food chain, they did what wolves do when hungry. They found something to eat. A lot of easy-to-catch elk.

The wolves ate the elk, and the elk avoided open areas along the riverbank. This gave the willow and poplar sapling a chance to grow, and they grew faster than most. Once the riverbank became stable, it slowed the flow of the river, and it carried less soil. This invited the beavers to come back, and those industrious creatures built dams that slowed the flow of water even more, creating ponds that becme homes for amphibians, along with a diversity of bird species who came to check into this new oasis. Here’s an inspiring video that shows how wolves indeed affected the behavior of rivers.

Wolf-Woman,

Randah Taher

“Don’t want to be sweet and neat
Don’t want someone living my life for me
Want to be free.”

Said Toyah in her song “I want to be free”.

The 80s are so last century, but the feeling of wanting to shed our skin to bring our true selves out is always in present tense. We feel like pretending to smile for the picture, not for a moment or two, but for long months and years on end. Ooh that face muscle must hurt so bad.

I was only 4 years old when this song came out. So I can’t say I remember it. Yet I remember clearly the freedom I sought in my childhood to choose my own friends without my parent’s approval, to travel solo to destinations I know nothing about, to experience life without a pre-approved itinerary. I followed mostly my intuition and it served me really well, until I started bringing logic into the picture so that I can explain my creativity better. I ruined a big part of it because of that limited freedom I put myself in. 

We take this picture-perfect frame to work. We try to fit in with how we dress, act and even how we think. We don’t feel free to approach problems in new undiscovered ways.

Too risky. Or so we think.

But when someone suggests something radical and it gets approved, we moan and regret not sharing that same idea since we thought about it a week ago. We didn’t feel free enough to share it out loud and ruin that picture. Did you experience this lately?

I sometimes still do.

Here’s your permission to be, and act, free.

Start the day with a new routine. Experiment with your next meeting with a physical exercise. Write on the walls instead of typing on the computer. If it makes you alive and with a sense of freedom, why hold back? After all, the term “leisure time inventions” didn’t come out of nowhere. That’s when a new product or process occurs when the “inventor” is away from the workplace and in contact with people from outside his/her field of work.

Read: free.

And so Toyah continues ..

“We should live and let live
And all live our dreams

I’m going to turn this world inside out
I’m going to turn suburbia upside down
I’m going to walk the streets, scream and shout
I’m going to crawl through the alleyways, being very loud

I’m gonna be free
I’m gonna be free.”

~ 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.