Sweetpea Bicycles

There are a lot of interesting questions around creativity.  There are also a lot of interesting questions around business.  And sometimes, the two questions mix.  I had, of course, heard of Twyla Tharp and seen some of her work, but had never thought of her in a business context until I read a remarkable conversation with her in the Harvard Business Review.  Copying.  Failure.  Mentoring.  Pain.  This woman covered it all, so we are adding her to our list of infrequently updated Business Heroes.

Maybe its just me, but there is so much deep wisdom and tough effort, it is hard not to be impressed.  In one section she notes that to get creative, you need to start copying.  Not because copying is right, but because “real learning comes not from taking someone else’s solutions, but by taking someone else’s problems.”  She talked about the need for movement and how it changes the mind, and also about her mentor of 20 years, who she met only three times.  “I recognized that he was the person who knew the most about what he was doing. . . so I tried to learn as much as I could from him.  I mentally parked him in the corner of my studio and the insistence on thoroughness that I saw in him became my standard.”  When you start talking about bodies and creativity, you invariably see a lot of parallels to designing and building custom bikes.

But one of her main points is this: creativity takes discipline, and that you have to prepare for it with routine.  (More on that here.)  But at the same time you have to take risks and you have to fail.  Otherwise you stagnate and your work gets less interesting.  Good lessons for all of us no matter what we do.