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.

Did you know that there is a guy in Washington that can tell whether you and your significant other are going to make it with 95% accuracy? What if I told you he only needed to listen to you talk for three minutes?

What if I said that how safe you felt in a car or truck is directly proportional to the number of cup holders it has and that the plushest of SUV’s would not feel safe without them?

What if I said that reducing the amount of information makes people better decision makers? (See video.)

The New York Times calls it “The Gladwell Effect”. Gladwell says that “in a culture with too much information and not enough time, he offers “organizing structures” for people’s lives.” We say that we read two incredible books that changed the way we think about almost everything from the bidnes, to buying jam, to the way we think about the decisions we make.

This post was not intended to be a Reading Rainbow book report, but if you like books written by a guy with the craziest hair you will see today, try The Tipping Point or Blink. Your prefrontal cortex will never be the same.