Something You Should Know - Should You Work for Yourself? & The Science of Creativity

Starting point is 00:00:00 The search for truth never ends. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story. Connect with friends, explore the roaring 20s, and enjoy thrilling activities and challenges while supporting environmental causes. After seven years, the adventure continues with our immersive travels feature. Explore distant cultures and engage in exciting experiences. There's always something new to discover. Are you ready?

Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, some things I bet you never knew about kissing. Then, the dream of starting your own business, the hype, the misconceptions, and the truths. The largest group of companies in the country, by a factor of five or six, are companies that don't employ anybody. There's 20-something million people who have businesses but no employees.

Starting point is 00:00:55 So what that really means is that they're laboring, but they're not growing an institution. Also, if you have a portable space heater, there are some things you really need to be aware of. And how creativity works, and how the more humor and play, the better. Just telling people that this is play is a way of making people more creative. And the opposite, when you say this is very important, so much so that I'm paying you to do this thing, you can make somebody less creative. All this today on Something You Should Know.

Starting point is 00:01:30 This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy.

Starting point is 00:01:51 Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello. Welcome to Something You Should Know. I want to start today by talking about kissing. And telling you more things about kissing than you probably ever knew.

Starting point is 00:02:26 First of all, do you know how many calories a kiss burns? Anywhere from two to six per minute. If you kiss for a half an hour, you've burned up 180 calories. While you're kissing away the calories, you'll also be boosting your immune system, assuming that your kissing partner doesn't have some strange illness. If you need some more motivation to kiss someone, consider this. Men who kiss their wives goodbye are less likely to get in a car accident on the way

Starting point is 00:02:58 to work. Kissing also reduces stress, it improves your mood, and can actually help keep you looking younger. And that is something you should know. Having your own business, being your own boss, calling yourself an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, it is the goal and dream for many people. And certainly a lot of people do it. Some successfully, some not so successfully. But this idea that you are better off working for yourself than working for someone else has really taken hold over the last few decades.

Starting point is 00:03:36 The dream of not having a boss, of being in charge, of making the decisions is very appealing. But is it all it's cracked up to be? Is it right for everyone? Is it truly the path to success and riches? Well, that seems to depend. Here to discuss the reality of working for yourself is Benjamin Waterhouse. He is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Starting point is 00:04:03 And he is author of a book called One Day I'll Work for Myself, The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America. Hi, Benjamin. Welcome. Thanks for coming on Something You Should Know. Hi, it's great to be here. So depending on how old you are, you don't have to go back too far to remember that going out on your own, starting your own business was considered a little odd, pretty risky.

Starting point is 00:04:27 Hardly anybody did it. I mean, when I was a little kid, as I think about all the dads in my neighborhood, they all had jobs. They all went somewhere to work, and it wasn't for themselves. So this is a fairly new idea, this stick it to the man, to the man, you know, tell your boss to go to hell and strike out on your own. It seems to have really, it's really caught on and now become like the pinnacle. Like that's the dream. You're exactly right. It's a dream.

Starting point is 00:05:00 It's sort of a cultural idea. I think of it as something along the lines of the, there's the good for you scale. When someone asks you what you do for a living, and if you just tell them, well, I work in HR, they say, oh, that's interesting. If you tell them you work for yourself, they say, oh, good for you. And so it carries some value to people. It carries this notion, as you said, that you somehow stuck it to the man. You know, there's two answers to the question. One is that it's always been a fundamental part of the way Americans in particular, but maybe people all over the world think about independence and being on their own and really accountable to no one. But there's another, I think, much more kind of specific historical answer, which is that it starts in the 1970s,

Starting point is 00:05:45 that there's a moment after World War II when a very different attitude prevails throughout the kind of working world and what it means to be successful and what it means to be on the up and up in the world of work was very different between the 1940s and the 1970s. This is the age of big companies and the company man and the organization man and these kinds of ideas that, while sometimes they were criticized, they represented progress and upward mobility. And my conclusion after looking into this for many, many years is that it was really in the 1970s when the economy started to sputter, when inequality started to grow, when opportunities started to be foreclosed, particularly for people who weren't at the tippy

Starting point is 00:06:32 top of the economic pyramid, that the kind of dream of going it alone really became the thing that we know today. And the idea of going it alone to most people means what? To go it alone means because you have a great idea or because you're some kind of maverick? What does it mean to go it alone? What's the vision anyway? Well, this is, I think, what's really fascinating. I think if you just sort of surveyed most people, you know, who are the people who are starting their own companies? Who are the people who are working for themselves, whether as sort

Starting point is 00:07:10 of freelancers or in some other way? A lot of times we have this image of the tech sector, right? We have the image of the garage entrepreneur and whether it's a coder or an app designer. And in reality, that's a pretty small percentage of the people who would consider themselves to be entrepreneurial today. And there are some surveys that have kind of looked around and said, all right, are you engaged in entrepreneurial activity? And if so, what field are you in? And only about 5% of people who identify as being entrepreneurs are in the information and communications technology sector. Far more people are in much more traditional industries. Retail

Starting point is 00:07:51 and wholesale is probably the biggest industry. It's about a quarter of all entrepreneurs are in that. Other big things include traditional sectors like manufacturing and transportation and even agriculture. So the notion that everybody's in tech is a function of how we tell the story, but it's not really the story itself. So what would you say to someone who wants to start their own business? Because it would seem that there are so many factors that go into whether or not starting a business for you and this business at this time is a good idea. I mean, what do you say to people?

Starting point is 00:08:28 You know, it has everything to do with who you are and what your particular circumstances are. And so I would never want to sort of give blanket advice to everyone. There are things that we know about who the more successful people are when it comes to starting companies. Broadly speaking, the older you are and the more experience you have in your field, the better off you are and the more likely it is that your company will be successful. So the notion that you just have to have a particular level of pluck or a particular kind of, you know, go get them attitude and you can do this at 22 is not usually the case. You know, obviously there is exceptions and you can always find the examples of the young people who came into the adult world and immediately went into it for themselves.

Starting point is 00:09:14 But for the most part, the most successful people are those who've built up some sort of an expertise in a particular niche and they know their industry, they know their clients, they know their markets, and they know exactly what it would take to actually build a business that can be profitable in that field. It's not just a question of, you know, busting in, disrupting everything and moving fast and breaking things, but it's actually, it's a question of really knowing what you're doing. Yeah. I mean, I remember hearing a lot of very successful entrepreneurs are not, as you say, not the tech people, but they're the guy with the muffler shop or the dry cleaner or the, and that many of these guys do quite well, but that it isn't this necessarily this special, you know, something no one else does. There's lots of break shops and lots of air conditioning companies and a lot of these guys make a lot of money right um but i think what's

Starting point is 00:10:10 interesting about that is that you know they're they're entrepreneurial in the sense that they are independent and working for themselves but they're not entrepreneurial in the sense that they're doing anything that's particularly different innovative or disruptive to the economy in general. What they are is they're particularly successful in a narrow sector of the economy that hasn't usually been taken over by very large companies. And there's a reason that they're the kind of industries that you just mentioned, right? They're muffler shops and pizzerias. But it's a lot harder to kind of jump into an entrepreneurial or a small business in a sector that has been thoroughly taken over by large companies. The best example is, you know, what happens to people who try to start, you know, bookstores or retail outlets.

Starting point is 00:10:54 Yeah, well, but so much of the talk of entrepreneurship of starting your own business is not about starting a bookstore or a retail outlet. It's people talking about changing the world or, you know, some great new idea, or they're going to get so rich on this because it is just so revolutionary. That's the, that's the romantic buzz about entrepreneurship, I think. What I'm fascinated by, and as a historian, I'm really interested in putting this into a longer timetable. What I'm fascinated about really is that dream, that thing that says, OK, but maybe I'll hit it big. Maybe I'll be the next, you know, Bezos or Jobs or Zuckerberg. Maybe I am not going to just be, you know, a person who, you know, works hard, does well, provides for my family, has a nice life, but instead I'm going to, you know, shoot the moon and really, uh, and really,

Starting point is 00:11:50 you know, do so much better than I ever possibly could in the, in the traditional world of work. And for me, that's a, that's an ideology that is really a product of the economy that we've been living in for the last, uh, 30, 40 years. Yeah. Well, see, I've always wondered, is it that people have great ideas to start a company or is it just they want to start a company? They want to have their own business, which may not be a great reason to go into business for yourself just because you want to be in business for yourself. I mean, I think it's fair to say that there are a whole lot more companies than there are great ideas. There are a whole lot more people who are driven by that desire for independence or for not having to report to anybody else. So it's a really complicated sort of scene and a scenario where there's lots of different motivations for why people do it. And again, it depends on who you are. If you are particularly sophisticated in a very narrow thing and there's a thing that you know how to profit from or monetize that nobody else does,

Starting point is 00:12:51 then yeah, you may have a really good shot at becoming something huge. Most people who start their own companies aren't actually looking to get huge. And there's also a distinction between starting a company that kind of looks like a company and working for yourself in a way that looks much more like independent freelance kind of work. In fact, the largest group of companies in the country by a factor of five or six are companies that don't employ anybody. There's something like 20 something million people who have businesses but no employees. So what that really means is that they're doing work.

Starting point is 00:13:32 They're laboring and making money and keeping the books and paying their taxes and doing all the stuff that they do as a business owner. But they're not growing an institution. They're not creating an entity as much as they're simply trading their labor on a market that's not regulated by the traditional workforce. We're talking about working for yourself, starting your own business, the good and the bad. And my guest is Benjamin Waterhouse. He is a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the book, One Day I'll Work for Myself, The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're

Starting point is 00:14:05 building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets. And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress.

Starting point is 00:14:42 Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. So Benjamin, I would assume you include in this idea of working for yourself the gig economy, people who are freelancers, who are available for hire. What about those people? Well, I mean, there are a lot of people for a long time who thought that was the direction things were heading in. My take at the moment is that we're really in a moment of flux. We're in a moment of flux. We're in a moment of uncertainty. But before the pandemic started, you know, 2017, 18, 19, people were having this conversation all along is, you know, how great

Starting point is 00:15:30 is it that people can make their own decisions and set their own hours and do all these things? And whether they're driving for Uber or performing work with TaskRabbit or anything like that. But there's a big pushback to that because, you know, the huge debate has been, what's the cost? You know, who and who's paying the cost of the fact that Uber rides are so cheap or that these DoorDash delivery services are so cheap? And in reality, it was mostly the people doing the work who were paying the cost because it turns out that not very many people were making particularly good livings doing it. And unlike the owners of business, they're not accruing any equity or any value either.

Starting point is 00:16:09 They're simply exchanging their time and energy and labor for money. Can you make a career out of it? Some people can, but I think there's also a lot of exploitation that has gone into the gig economy over the last couple of years. And that's something that I think people are starting

Starting point is 00:16:23 to face up to and reconsider in this sort of post-pandemic period. If you have looked at this or anyone has looked at this, the idea that there is a certain type of person, a personality traits of the person who's more likely to be successful versus the person who is better suited to be an employee? There are some studies by psychologists that try to figure out not only who is more likely to go into business ownership or self-employment, but who is more likely to succeed. And I'm not sure there's any consensus around it, but there's a couple of things that people have observed. Certainly some of the ones that you would expect, you know, people who don't like to report to somebody else, people who don't like being told what to do.

Starting point is 00:17:13 That certainly tends to be a dominant trait. Now, that doesn't necessarily predict success, but it definitely helps indicate who's willing to put up with it, who's willing to put up with the uncertainty of owning your own business, of not knowing necessarily where your income is going to come from. I mean, in my own personal experience, that embodied my father, who quit his job at the age of 46 and for the next 20 years or so worked for himself with varying degrees of success and failure. But in his mind, it wasn't about striking it rich it was not even essentially about providing for the family it was about you know sticking it to these people who had been telling him what to do ever since he got out of the army and his his attitude was I don't want to I don't want to report to anybody anymore so that's that's like I think a character trait that you often

Starting point is 00:17:59 see there are other kinds of traits that aren't really personality but they're more circumstantial having a partner or a spouse who is gainfully employed in a steady job is a real good predictor of factors. And again, I try very hard not to be in the business of like consulting people about what they should or shouldn't do. But those are some of the trends we see. Well, I remember hearing, you would know the numbers better than me, but I remember hearing that generally people who go into business don't make any more money than they would have if they had stayed in their job. And in fact, they may make less. And certainly there are other benefits to being out on your own, but that it is not the road to riches, generally speaking. No, I mean, it's, it's not the road to riches for the vast majority of people. But one of the ways that our society and

Starting point is 00:19:06 our culture work is that we don't always, we're never good at statistics. We focus on the unusual success stories, which is the same reason we play the lottery, right? You're not going to win, but you might. And if you did, it would be life-changing. And I think a lot of people do make decisions about going into business with that mentality. They say, well, I probably statistically won't do any better at this than I would if I stayed at my own job. But maybe I'll be that one in a million who sells out to this big company and I get bought out or the company explodes. I have an IPO and suddenly I'm a millionaire. And I think that dream is particularly potent. I do think it also becomes more potent, um, and maybe more devastating and potentially exploitative. Uh, the, the, the further down the economic, uh, spectrum you look and the more desperate people are, the more, um, they feel

Starting point is 00:20:02 like they need to kind of throw in their lot with what ultimately ends up being a pretty big gamble. I wonder if, I don't know if this is a statistic anyone has tracked, but are you, it seems common sense that you are more likely to be successful when you go out on your own doing something that's pretty much what you've been doing as opposed to leaving the business world and opening up a bed and breakfast or something? Generally speaking, yes. And I think that is one of the things that we can trace about women. When are people successful in the sphere of entrepreneurship? And it's when they know what they're doing and they have something very particular to offer if you can find yourself in an industry where uh or in a niche market

Starting point is 00:20:49 where you don't need to be particularly different or skilled but you just have to do the work um you may be able to succeed and if you had the money to go out and buy a nice bed and breakfast somewhere out in the country then you could perfectly well run a bed and breakfast. But based on just how the market works, that bed and breakfast is going to be more or less as successful as any other bed and breakfast would. So if you're the only game in town and you can sort of get in on that, then you may do just fine. But you're not going to open up a bed and breakfast and suddenly turn it into a multimillion dollar operation. There's a lot of talk now about side hustles where it's not like you give up your job, but you do something else on the side. Is that something that's a force or is that a part-time job? Well, I think it is, you know, and it comes out of multiple places in our society.

Starting point is 00:21:39 It comes out of a sense of I'm either unsatisfied or underpaid in my traditional work. And that's certainly something that a lot of people experience. There's also a cultural attitude around it that says, you know, your time is best spent when you monetize it. That sitting around with your friends or hanging out in a coffee shop or playing video games is a waste of your time and potential. And what you really should be doing is getting paid and making money and hustling. Well, what you said at the beginning, there is this aura of, you know, that good for you that you have your own business thing that mystifies, well, it doesn't mystify me, but it is interesting because just because you have your own business doesn't mean you don't have to work. You don't have to answer to people.

Starting point is 00:22:30 You've got clients and customers and the bank and whoever else you have to answer to. And yet people just think that they have this view of entrepreneurs as being so, oh, I wish I could do that. I think you're right. It is, as I said, it's that sort of, that good for you phenomenon where we ascribe a certain moral value to it. And that's often because, you know, you don't hear about the dark side. You don't hear about, well,

Starting point is 00:22:57 I was up until two in the morning last night, you know, trying to reconcile all my books or I, you know, I didn't have enough money to make payroll this month. And so somebody is really mad at me or I'm really know, I didn't have enough money to make payroll this month. And so somebody is really mad at me or I'm really hurting this other person who works for me. You don't hear the dark side of the dream as much as you hear, oh, well, I don't have a boss. And someone says, oh, you don't have a boss. You must, you must, you know, roll out of bed at 11 o'clock and, you know, everything's great. No, of course not. People who run their own companies, whether

Starting point is 00:23:22 they're on their own or have employees, they work extremely hard. I would imagine that part of the appeal of having your own business, of working for yourself, is the idea of you can then work from home. You don't have to go to the office and that that's very desirable for a lot of people. This idea of working from home as a sort of goal in and of itself as a way to break free of the strictures of corporate life really blossomed for the first time in the 1980s, which I think was kind of surprising to me. And the idea of telecommuting really kind of took over people's imaginations. The origins went back to the oil crisis in the 70s and the price of gasoline being super high and companies trying to figure out ways to control costs and cities worrying about pollution. But by the 1980s, when you get the widespread use of the fax machine

Starting point is 00:24:15 and the personal computer, even before we had the internet, you had this real boom in people arguing that everybody ought to work from home. Even if you stayed and worked for a large employer, you should work from home. And there were predictions that companies were making in the late 80s and early 90s that, well, by the year 2000, 50%, 75%, 90% of workers will work from home. And they didn't. That didn't pan out. And even by the by the early part of the 21st century, it was pretty common to have large companies. Google is probably the biggest example of this that went to great lengths to convince people to enjoy being at work. Right. They set up these campuses and they had pinball machines and, you know, foosball and snacks and cafeterias all to make people enjoy actually being at work. So then when the pandemic hit and everybody started to say, well, the wave of the future is clearly that everyone is going to work remote from now on, I had to take a little

Starting point is 00:25:13 step back and say, you know, I'm not so sure. I think this still has to play out. But the first time we went through this wave, there seemed to be a pretty strong pull back to the office. Well, I would imagine everybody listening has thought about, wondered about, fantasized about what it would be like to work for themselves. And I think it's really important

Starting point is 00:25:32 to get the inside story on what it actually means. I've been speaking with Benjamin Waterhouse. He is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And the name of his book is One Day I'll Work for Myself, The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:25:52 Thanks, Benjamin. Well, thanks very much. I appreciate it. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running's all about. Run your way at NewBalance.com slash running. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines.

Starting point is 00:26:37 Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. If someone says to you they think you're creative, that's typically a compliment. Creativity is revered. Creative people are given a special status. But what is creativity? Sometimes, if something is new or different, it's thought to be creative.

Starting point is 00:27:19 But is it? Or is it just new and different? And what's the difference between creativity and innovation? Is it better to be more creative? Can you be more creative? Well, these questions are why Barry Kudrowitz is here. Barry is a professor of product design and department head in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. He has taught toy design for over a decade, and he in fact co-designed a Nerf toy, as well as an elevator simulator and a ketchup dispensing robot. He's author of a book called Sparking Creativity, How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and Design. Hey Barry, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, thanks for having me. So my sense is that that

Starting point is 00:28:06 word creativity is really kind of slippery, like it means different things to different people. But real creativity, like, so if a kindergartner goes to school and comes home with this finger painting, and mom and dad say, ooh, that's so creative. Well, is it, is it really creative or is it just a mess that he made with finger paints? And yeah, it's great. It's your kid, but, but is that creativity? I think we're, you're blurring, we're sort of blurring three things that get called creativity together. One is art. And sometimes people say, oh, they're an artist and they're making paintings and so they're creative. But that's not the same thing. There's artists that copy work or craftsmen who are very good at

Starting point is 00:29:00 wood turning, but they might make the same exact thing that has always existed and all their work is the same. It's very nice craft and they've mastered that art, but it's not creative. And people tend to kind of like blur art and creativity. The other thing that you're kind of blurring there is like messiness. And we say, oh, we're, you're just doodling around and doing whatever you want. And, you know, that must be creative too. And that's, that also is not necessarily creative either. So when you look at people who are creative and what they do, is there like a general model, a general recipe for creativity I do have a recipe actually in my classes I put it on a recipe card so that's it's funny that you compare it that way but

Starting point is 00:29:54 the ingredients for creativity are having domain knowledge of something having the creative personality to want to play with stuff and think differently about stuff motivation and then the environmental factors so time money resources encouragement If you have those things, then things are ready to invent or innovate or create. And if you're missing some of those things, you're less likely to have a creative output. Something I found interesting, and it's the subtitle of your book, you say that play, humor and play are very important to creativity. So let's talk about that. Talk about play first.

Starting point is 00:30:49 This is actually really interesting. So I do these tests of creativity where one of them is the alternative uses test where you ask people to come up with different uses for things. And I would do this test with different audiences when I would go give talks or conferences. I was at a medical device company for a patent award ceremony. So there was 100 patent awardees in the room. And I did this game test. And I collected all the responses. So I had 100 responses from engineers on alternative uses for paperclips. And one of the ways of scoring this is quantity of ideas. So we looked at how many ideas each person came up with. But I also had people rate how playful they thought that activity was on a scale of one to five.

Starting point is 00:31:47 One is, this is work, this is not playful at all. Five, this is the most fun. And what I found was that the people who said this was play, so they wrote four or five on the index card, had twice as many ideas as the people who viewed this as work. And I was able to replicate that again with products and not with alternative uses, with product ideas. And there's something about viewing an activity as play and creativity and it seems like when you view something as play you are more creative in that activity I think there's a few reasons behind this if you look at what makes something play and

Starting point is 00:32:36 what makes someone creative in an activity they have significant overlap. They both involve flow and captivation. They both involve motivation. They both involve a sense of fantasy or pretense, pretend. They both involve an environment that allows for play and creativity. And so it seemed to make sense that if you viewed something as play, you might also be creative in that same domain. Well, it just seems natural that if you're going to play at something, your inhibitions are gone. You're more likely to come up with better ideas because you're playing it almost like it doesn't count. So anything goes so we can be more creative with it. Yeah. Just telling people that this is play is, is a way of making people more creative. And the opposite, when you say this is very important, so much so that I'm paying you to do this thing, you can make somebody less creative. Using your recipe analogy, you can give the same recipe to different people and get very different results.

Starting point is 00:33:53 So there's got to be something. There's got to be some magic something that makes a good cook, that makes a creative person, that brings all those elements together better than other people. Yeah, what's the glue? Well, I do think motivation is, it's one of those four elements, but it is, it's sort of also the glue between the things. You're not, you're more likely to learn more about a subject matter if you're interested in it. For example, you're more likely to experiment within an area if you're interested in it. And you're more likely to be in that environment and have encouragement if it's an area that you're interested in.

Starting point is 00:34:52 So it's not like I prioritize the four elements of creativity, but interest and motivation seems to be kind of a glue between all of these pieces. Well, you start your book out with some examples of like puzzles, you know know the candle and the thumbtack puzzle what's the connection what why is being able to solve puzzles important to creativity well so creativity is about making non-obvious connections between seemingly unrelated things and that's what you're doing with these puzzles. With word games, visual puzzles, you're making an interesting connection that, well, it's not obvious. It's something that other people don't automatically think of.

Starting point is 00:35:38 It's hidden. And it requires you to dig deeper and make interesting connections that other people wouldn't normally make. When you have a certain mindset, when you're interested in it, when you're playful with stuff, then you're more likely to solve some of these riddles than maybe somebody who is not interested in that or thinks they can't. But does creativity, when you look at some of the great creative people, does it happen because they sit down and say, I'm going to find connections between non-obvious things and come up with a creative idea?

Starting point is 00:36:20 Or is it much more likely to be a thought in the shower that's like, oh, wow, what if we did it this way? That's the thing. Creativity can come from different inspiration points. Like you can, designers and artists are often, that's their job. They're trying to solve problems that come to them. And they're given prompts to work with. And engineers too, sorry.

Starting point is 00:36:49 And scientists and a lot of other fields where there's problems to be solved. But there's other cases of creativity where it comes to you. This is the eureka moment or the aha moment or the moment of insight in the shower or taking a stroll. And you come up with this non-obvious connection. That's how invention happens too and innovation. So you don't always have to be going looking for a solution or even starting with a problem. The light bulb example, one of Edison's light bulb patents for the incandescent light bulb that you've probably seen this patent drawing

Starting point is 00:37:34 before. It looks a lot like the light bulbs of today, but the patent is very old, over 100 years old. And the innovation there, or the invention there, was using carbon filament in a light bulb instead of a metal wire. Incandescent light bulbs existed before Edison. He changed the material that the filament was composed of. And where that idea came from was he saw bamboo fishing rods and he remembered back using this rod and he said, Oh,

Starting point is 00:38:19 maybe I can use carbon from the bamboo in place of the metal. And he was actively experimenting and trying to find solutions. But sometimes these ideas jump up out of nowhere from making a non-obvious connection from some other domain. So you were talking about playfulness and humor, and we covered playfulness. So talk about the connection and the importance of humor to creativity. So humor and creativity are both about making non-obvious connections between seemingly unrelated things. That's how joke theory works. And that's also behind the aha moment of making an interesting connection between two things and solving a problem. And in my research, I found that improv comedians are better than professional product

Starting point is 00:39:15 designers at coming up with creative product ideas. That's amazing. Yeah. When I got the results of this study, I was saying, oh my gosh, we should be hiring improv comedians to brainstorm ideas with engineers and designers at the table. If you think about that show Whose Line Is It Anyway, there's all these games. There's a game of props where they're given this object and they come up with these non-obvious uses for that object. That's the alternative uses test, a creativity test in the form of a comedy game show. But there's all these other elements of improv training, like listening and building on ideas, deferring judgment, coming up with lots of ideas that are all the same skills that are part of good team-based idea generation, like brainstorming. And so it makes sense that they happen to be

Starting point is 00:40:15 really good at brainstorming. So why don't companies hire improv comics to develop products? There might be taboo here, but it also goes back to this concept that I talk about where the things that we think are silly at first might actually be innovative in the future. And when you think improv games, you think, oh, we're just going to be silly. They're going to come up with ridiculous stuff. But I think Einstein is the one who said, if an idea isn't absurd at first, there's no hope for it or something like that. We want those absurd ideas. We want the ridiculous ideas that are seemingly absurd at first.

Starting point is 00:40:59 That's where innovation lies. When you laugh at something, when you laugh at the idea, it means there was a non-obvious connection that was made between two things that people don't often connect. And improv comedians are really good at making those non-obvious connections between domains. So what are some examples of things that were first considered ridiculous, weird things that turned out to be not so ridiculous now? So the Mechanical Reaper, for example, was this new way of harvesting grain. Before the Mechanical Reaper, there were people with a scythe, a large blade, hitting the wheat and knocking it over and somebody else was bailing it. And the mechanical reaper came along. This was a horse drawn giant pair of scissors.

Starting point is 00:41:53 And it was able to harvest large amounts of grain in a short amount of time. Going back to making non-obvious connections between seemingly unrelated things. The connection was comparing cutting wheat to cutting hair and saying, can we make giant scissors to cut the wheat like we do hair? And if you can imagine back in the time, back in the day, all we knew were, you know, whacking the fields. And then along comes this horse-drawn machine that was flying through the field and bailing all of the hay. And people thought it was a joke. And there's newspaper articles saying how this is a humorous contraption. And I think in the first year, I think you only

Starting point is 00:42:39 sold a few units, but then it caught on and it revolutionized the way we harvest a grain and it allowed us to have cities and everyone didn't need to be a farmer um and that that was a essentially a joke so to bring this to modern times a more recent example would be Roomba. When iRobot released the Roomba, when this came out, I remember saying, who would buy this thing? I could use my own vacuum. I don't need a robot vacuuming the floor. Now I have two Roombas in my house, and it's a serious industry, and it's expanding. This is the same with Wallace and Gromit. This is the 20 something years ago.

Starting point is 00:43:27 Wallace invented the mechanical trousers and the pants walk you. And that's the joke. It's a ha ha joke. But now we have mechanical trousers for healthcare providers to lift patients. We have mechanical trousers for troops in the field so they can carry large loads long distance by foot. Serious industry. That was first a joke in a cartoon. it isn't just to come up with that one big great idea. You need to generate lots of ideas. And from one of those many ideas will come a great idea.

Starting point is 00:44:12 Is that true? I've written a number of papers on that exact topic. So quantity leads to creativity. And I can give you one very good reason right now. It is because the first ideas you think of are the same ideas everyone else thinks of. I did this study where we collected responses from the alternative uses test from thousands of people and we looked at the the percent occurrence of every response so anything that you that anyone thought of in the entire study was recorded on how many people

Starting point is 00:44:56 in the study came up with that idea and what we found is that the first thing everyone writes down, 50% of the population also thought of that same thing at some point in time. And it's not until you get to around nine or 10 ideas where you start getting to the ideas that very few people think of. So that is where quantity comes in. You have to get out all of the common ideas first, which forces you into this novel tale of less common responses, which is where creativity lies. But when you get to that ninth idea or that tenth idea that no one else has gotten, so it's different, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's good, it's just different.

Starting point is 00:45:52 And so it makes me wonder, in your view, is part of the creative process to evaluate the ideas, or is creativity just coming up with the ideas and somebody else evaluates whether it's any good or not? I think you're getting into the distinction between creativity and innovation. Creativity, it's important that it's novel and new. And I think everyone agrees with that being a component of creativity. And it's somewhat relevant to whatever the task or prompt is. But when you start saying, well, it has to be valuable or it has to have use or it has to be feasible, then we start getting into the domain of innovation. And that's where something could be creative, but it might not

Starting point is 00:46:44 actually be innovative. You might not be able to make it, or it might not actually be innovative. You might not be able to make it, or you might not be able to create a company around it, or it might not be profitable, for example. And that's another distinction that people sort of confuse or blur together, creativity and innovation. Well, I always like talking about this topic because it's a tough topic to talk about. It's a slippery term, creativity, and it's interesting to get different points of view on it. Barry Kudrowitz has been my guest. He is a professor of product design and department head in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota,

Starting point is 00:47:23 and he is author of a book called Sparking Creativity, How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and Design. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. I appreciate you coming on, Barry. Thank you. Thank you for having me on the show. It's been great. When it's cold outside, a portable space heater can come in real handy. But what you may not know is that portable heaters are the cause of one-third of all home fires. What often happens is people put them on the floor near the bed, and during the night, the blankets or the sheets get tossed around, and they land up on top of the heater, and then they ignite.

Starting point is 00:48:04 January and February are the months when of the heater and then they ignite. January and February are the months when most space heater related fires happen. So here are some suggestions. Plug a space heater directly into an outlet, not a power strip or an extension cord. Only use one that has a thermostat and has an automatic shut off and tip over safety switch. Make sure nothing combustible is within three feet of the heater. Never leave a space heater on when you leave the room or go to sleep, and unplug the heater when you leave the house. And that is something you should know. With so many podcasts out there, it is sometimes hard to stand out from the crowd and be heard. And

Starting point is 00:48:45 one way that we find the best way actually to be heard and to grow our audience is word of mouth. People like you telling their friends. So please, nothing would make me happier than if you would tell somebody you know about this podcast and suggest they give a listen, something you should know is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, CastBox, pretty much any platform you can think of. It's one very concrete thing you can do to help support this podcast. We have a small, dedicated staff of people who help get this show out three times a week.

Starting point is 00:49:21 They are Jennifer Brennan, Jeffrey Havison, and our executive producer, Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless

Starting point is 00:50:02 questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched and hotter temperatures and lower pitched and cooler temperatures. You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true. Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada.

Starting point is 00:50:19 I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural.

Starting point is 00:50:39 It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers.

Starting point is 00:51:07 It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe

Starting point is 00:51:25 to Supernatural then and now.

Something You Should Know - Should You Work for Yourself? & The Science of Creativity

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.