The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 268: Allen Gannett - How To Create "Aha" Moments And Spark Creativity

Episode Date: July 29, 2018

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Episode #268: Allen Gannett - How To Create "Aha" Moments And Spark Creativity Allen is the founder and CEO of TrackMaven, a marketing analytics platform that enables creativity.  Marketers use TrackMaven to measure and improve performance across every channel  Some clients are: The NBA, Microsoft, Saks Fifth Avenue, and many more modern marketers.  His book, The Creative Curve, was published in June 2018 from Currency, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It is all about how anyone can learn to have moments of creative genius.  We are hosting a workshop on developing YOUR personal excellence as a leader.  For details and availability, go to RyanHawk.me  "Learn how to learn. View the world as being a less fixed place.  Anyone is capable of making it happen." Show Notes: Sustaining excellence: Surround self with others who are great at what they do.  A very social phenomenon Collaborate with those who support their weaknesses Be aligned with an executive sponsor Live at the creative center -- Move to corporate headquarters if you work for a big company Need to build relationships outside of 9:00-5:00 The importance of building generational friends (friends from all age groups) What makes a hit? -- "Familiar but also novel." "As humans we're fearful of unfamiliar.  It's the brains' elegant way of risk and reward." A balance of the novel and the new The truth about Mozart He didn't create his first music until he was 17 He had a helicopter Dad. He practiced music for three hours a day from a very early age He became great because of deliberate practice JK Rowling spent five years writing the first Harry Potter She was extremely deliberate in her process.  It wasn't just a light bulb moment on a train. Paul McCartney spent years to write the song, Yesterday How to create "Aha" moments for self? -- Go for a run, drive, take a shower, lay down.  Need to calm the brain. Writing a "descriptive" and "prescriptive" book: Consume a lot about your topic of choice Need to build prior knowledge Not just "what," but "how much" Ben Franklin -- He outlined previously written articles Andrew Ross Sorkin consumed mass amount of literature and worked to "copy" the style in which other greats wrote Confidence building - "Learn how to learn."  View the world as being a less fixed place.  Anyone is capable of making it happen. Creativity is something you can learn. How to get cast of "Wheel Of Fortune" TrackMaven is a marketing analytics platform Making the shift from individual contributor to manager -- A "communicator and coach" to others Mistakes new managers make: Need open lines of communication. "I was conflict averse initially and that's not good." Remember when hiring.  It's hard to fire people. "It's brutal." Not everyone has all the answers.  Get advice from people with different perspectives and incentives "You need to hire slow AND fire slow.  Give people a chance." Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea Use the "Get To Know You Document" "A great manager must be a great communicator and coach for others."

It is our brain's really elegant way of balancing risk and reward. We like things that are familiar enough to be safe, but novel enough to be interesting and intriguing. This is why we like ideas that actually have one foot in the familiar and one foot in the novel. The first Star Wars was a Western in space. Harry Potter is just a normal orphan rags or riches story, but there's wizards. The first iPhone, right? It was just an iPod with a phone. We don't actually like ideas that are wrong.

radically new. We like ideas that are a balance of the familiar and the new. This episode is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is making payroll benefits in HR easy for small businesses. Modern technology does the heavy lifting, so it's easy to get things right. PCMag and fit small business have called Gusto the best payroll for small businesses. Gusto saves you time. 72% of customers spend less than five minutes to run pay. Don't believe it, just Google them.

People love Gusto. How often do you actually love your payroll provider? Most small businesses don't have an HR expert, but you don't need one to use Gusto with great software and great service. You can focus on your business, not payroll and paperwork. And to help support the Learning Leader Show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. Sign up today and you'll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com slash leader. That's g-us-t-o.com slash leader. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here. It is

Mindful Monday. Text learners to 44222 in order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world. Text Learners to 44222. Now on tonight's featured leader, it's with Alan Gannett. Alan is the author of an incredible book titled The Creative Curve, How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time. He also happens to be the CEO of Track Maven and Marketing Insights platform whose clients have included Microsoft, Marriott, Home Depot, Honda, and GE. He's been on all the 30 under 30 list, including Inc. and Forbes.

Really thoughtful guy. A few of the topics we got into. The myths of creativity, including stories about Paul McCartney, J.K. Rowling, and Mozart. Then the biggest mistakes a new manager makes and how to avoid making them. This was a really interesting part towards the end that Alan talked about, some of the mistakes he made. And then how you can utilize the Benjamin Franklin method to increase your creativity, regardless of how creative you think you are right now. Ladies and gentlemen, this one is very thought-provoking with Alan Gannett.

All right, Alan, thanks so much for being here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Thanks for having me, man. So every once in a while, there's a text that comes out that catches my attention. And I really, I get in my mind and I say, I need to speak with the person who put that together. And so your book, The Creative Curve, is one of those pieces. So first, I know how hard it is to put it together. So thank you for doing it. And I'm excited to talk about it with you.

What a flattering way to start my day. Thanks, dude. Of course. But I'm curious, based on everything I read and the incredible historical stories that you've put throughout and seeing some of your speeches as well, if you think about those people, leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time, what have you found to be some of the things that they have in common? Yeah.

So for the book, what I did in the back half of the book is I interviewed about 20, five living creative greats. So what I wanted to do is find creative achievers who've consistently been successful across multiple hits, multiple industries even. And this is everyone from like, you know, Pasek and Paul, the songwaring duo behind Deervin Hanson, Lala Land and the Greatest Showman, billionaires like David Rubinstein, you're Nina Jacobson the legendary producer, like this really eclectic set of creative achievers.

And what I thought was so interesting from these people was there's these recurring patterns. So the back half of the book, I spent time talking about the four patterns I found across these creatives. But one of the ones I think is particularly interesting when it comes to leadership is that all of these people surround themselves with other people. So we have this notion of creative geniuses as these solo operators. You know, it's Steve Jobs sort of, you know, conquering electronics all by himself. And the reality is that when you actually look at the stories of creative achievers, you actually find something very different. You find it's a very social phenomenon. You have Steve Jobs, for example, had Steve Wozniak very early in his process.

He even had a team of people. He wasn't even in that garage by himself. And you find this over and over again. And one of the concepts I thought was really interesting about these creative achievers was that they tend to surround themselves with collaborators who supported their weaknesses. I think a lot of times when we find co-founders, we look for people who are very similar to us that we quote unquote gel with. but the best creative achievers actually are very comfortable and self-aware with their weaknesses. They're willing to take those weaknesses and find other people to actually support those. So I think about, you know, Passick and Paul, the songwriting duo and, you know, Benj Passick is this big ideas guy.

He's a big thinker. He's constantly bubbly and energetic. And Justin Paul's is very, very, very sort of quiet, introspective, systematic person. And independently, they might not be as successful as they are together, but together, this magic happens. So I think one big mistake that any leader has is that they think that they either have to do it all or they're a failure, right? They think they have this Steve Jobs, Elon Musk notion that, wow, I have to be this, you know, all in one person. But the reality is every creative achiever has lots and lots of people in their support system. You know, even Elon Musk, you know, when he started SpaceX, he had lots of money.

and day one hired lots of the world's best rocket scientists. This is not the story of Elon Musk as a one-man ban creating these companies. And so I think that's a really essential part of leadership is being comfortable and self-aware of your weaknesses and bringing in other people to actually help with those. So search for people to help your weaknesses, not for people who simply complement your strengths. And you talk about creating creative communities and that that's one of the commonalities, which dovetails, I think, nicely from what you're talking about. If really there, there aren't any stories, even if the historical stories are of that lone genius, if you really dig deeper, it's almost never the case where somebody was doing it by themselves.

Oh, 100%. And you see this, I call it the frontman effect where you think about with a book, for example, and I've obviously experienced this, you know, with, you know, one person's name is on the cover. But the reality with a book is you have an agent, an editor, copy editors, proofreaders, marketing team. publicity team, multiple rounds of feedback editors, research assistants. I mean, you have just like an army of people whose work goes into creating an actual book, but yet how we market creative products is we need there to be a creator. And so I think sometimes as a consumer, we get confused between these sort of marketing and promotion of creative products and how they're actually made. And those are inherently different. But there is a value, there's a value if you're a company or you're an artist,

or your creator to pitching whatever you're doing as sort of coming from the brain of one. Because it's a simpler message. It's easier to understand. It is exciting for people. But the reality is far from it. I mean, you know, J.K. Rowling wouldn't it be J.K. Rowling without the original publishing team and marketing team that he had that helped guide her to success. You know, Steve Jobs wouldn't be where he is without Steve Wozniak. You see this a lot, I think, in music is particularly interesting with the idea of a promoter, someone who lends you their reputation or credibility.

So you see this with like people have opening acts on their tours. They take younger artists, you know, less famous artists and actually raise their awareness to their own audience. There's a really fascinating study that was done where they looked at Nobel Prize winning scientists. And the whole idea was, well, what causes someone to become a Nobel Prize winning scientist? And so they took a bunch of people who won the Nobel Prize. And then they took people who had similar pedigrees but didn't win the Nobel Prize. Prize and they compared them. And what they found seems like it makes sense, but there's actually something more at work.

So what they found was that the future Nobel Prize winners in their 20s had their names on twice the number of papers the non-Nobel prize winning scientists had. And so you go, yeah, of course, they were more productive, they were smarter, whatever. But no, no, no. That's actually not what it was. What it was was that future Nobel Prize winning scientists worked with senior researchers who are more likely to share credit on their projects. They were more likely to work with a mentor who said,

okay, you can put your name on the paper too. And that has a huge effect on your career. Because by the time you're 30, you're on double the number of papers, you have double the number of citations, you have this compounding advantage, which is unstoppable. And so oftentimes we view as the result of luck or hard work or genius, really is the result of some sort of social phenomenon.

That, I think, is such an important, untold aspect of creativity. What about the person thinking? I love this. But what about the person thinking right now? They're in the early stages of their career. The reason I often point to this segment of the population is because I got a lot of emails from people in this part of their career, Alan. And I think they say, okay, I want to grow within my company.

Or maybe I have a side hustle that I want to start that. and in there they read the creative curve and they're watching your speeches or listening this episode and say okay i get this whether it comes to the Nobel Prize or it comes to starting apple but what about for me what about for me the person who is in i i am basically in a very big pond and i'm currently a small fish but i want to be a big fish and how can i put my career on a on a bigger quicker trajectory what are some things i can do that is similar to someone maybe who wins a Nobel Prize or creates a company like Apple. What are some things, basically, how can we relate this to the average person listening?

Totally. So very similar social phenomenon going on. So one is that you've seen big companies. You need the idea of an executive sponsor, right? You need that person who's a senior leader who takes you under their wing, promotes you, advocates for you, brings them along with you. And so you need to be aligned with that person. This is what you've seen big companies.

People talk about, you know, are you under the right person? Are you sort of attached to the right person? Are is your boss's boss the one who's eventually going to be CEO or not? So you have to be aligned to that right person. The second thing I think is important with big companies is if you're at a big company, so one of the things I talk about in the book is that creative achievers almost always tend to live in the main center of whatever their creative industry is. And that's because so much of creativity is a social phenomenon that you need to be able to literally bump into someone at coffee. schedule face-to-face meetings, be friends on weekends. You need that social dynamic to be

really successful. So if you work at a big company, you better be at HQ. And if you're not, you better transfer there. Because the reality is that is where the magic happens. Like there's something special to if you're a big company bumping into the CEO in the hallway because you're in the same building that does build a real impact on your career. And so I think we can pretend and tell ourselves, well, there's Skype and there's video channel, there's all stuff. But it is still different, right? When you talk to these creative achievers, so much of the relationship building you see goes on outside of a nine to five or goes outside of these sort of normal places that people meet. But there's an aspect to if the people who you vacation with, the people you

drink with on Fridays are the people who are the decision makers that is going to make a difference, right? There's this old adage or this old joke that if you want to, you know, date a model, you should hang out at the restaurant across the street from the modeling agency. And I think that idea is really, really important of where where you put yourself is going to impact the social interactions you have. And so you have to make those changes. And I think oftentimes we sort of tell ourselves, well, how can I, you know, be super successful and, you know, stay in the same house I'm at and stay in the same city and all these things. And the reality is that those two things are in conflict, right? Sometimes you do have to make changes. You do have to make sacrifice. If you

also want to achieve these things. And so one of the themes of my book, I think is important is I'm not saying that success or creativity or any of these things are easy, right? I'm actually saying they're incredibly hard. They take sacrifice. They take hard work. It's just that we actually know a lot about how to achieve them. I, uh, that's interesting.

I wasn't sure what you're going to say. And I think, I think it makes a lot of sense because there's a, there's actually a great Tim Urban post about this. Um, not sure if you read Tim's work, but it's, he writes a, wait but why.com and it's about why it's so hard to develop friendships as you get older. And what he says is because when you're in high school and college, you spend a lot of time around others with not much of an agenda. Meaning that's how you really build relationships.

Because now as you get older, you have to, especially if you have kids, you have to find the babysitter and you plan the night out. And because it's so hard, there's so much friction between. meeting up with somebody else, it rarely happens. And so it's harder to develop friendships. And there's not much of that kind of lounge around time where we can just be ourselves for hours on end with no agenda. That doesn't happen anymore.

And I think what you're saying when it comes to proximity is it's really impossible to or not impossible. It is very difficult to find that executive sponsor or to develop a real relationship with those types of people. if you're not in their physical presence on a regular basis. 100%. And I think one of the things that I always struggle with when you talk about relationship dynamics when it comes to career, creativity, or any of these things, is that, you know, the thing

I sort of always struggle with is that, you know, we're sort of applying structure to something, which inherently has to be somewhat unstructured. Yep. Right. To build a real relationship, you can't go into being like, can you be my mentor, right? Like, that's like the most, like the biggest turnoff I've ever heard. What you need is to actually build authentic relationships, which inherently are somewhat unstructured. So there's a bit of a conundrum here when you're trying to explain social dynamics and social phenomenon is that I think we talk about them in a very structured way because that's how you explain concepts.

But in practice, you can't actually approach them like that. And so that's why you need to have that space for more organic interactions, you know, interactions that don't have an agenda is because you don't actually build relationships. like that. You don't actually build a relationship saying, can you be my executive sponsor? Can you be my promoter? That's just terrifying. I think of the greatest mentors I've had in my life and we've never had that conversation. Yeah, of course not. We have a lot of conversations, but there's never been one that says, will you be my mentor? Or even thanking them for being my mentor, I'll thank them for their knowledge, for their wisdom and certainly follow up in that regard. But it's never, I've never uttered to them, you're my mentor. The end word. Yeah, I guess never. We've never.

I just say the M word out loud. The M word is a thing we talk about in business books. It's not something we practice in real life. If anything, they just become your friend. Yeah. I talk about this all the time with the people who I'm giving advice to, which is that you just need to build intergenerational friends. And I have this sort of eclectic friend group where like one of my best friends is 68. And he's actually like a best friend.

Like we go on vacation together. Like I go over their house just to hang out. And, you know, he's someone who's really successful. And it's been interesting. He's known him for about four years now. It's like he very much, I've noticed, sort of brings new people into his life because it's part of what's made him successful. He has he likes the energy of new ideas, fresh perspectives.

He has a lot of intergenerational friends himself. And I think that concept of building friends across generations, across sort of career levels, across sort of success levels is one of the most important things because that's how you really learn. In the book, I also talk about the fact that this is not just a lot of the fact that this is not just a an imperative for people early on in their creative careers, but it's also imperative for people late in their creative careers because one of the fundamental things they talk about in the book is that when scientists study human preference and trends and what's, you know, the results and hits,

they find that the balance of the familiar in the novel is very essential to creating ideas that take off. And so what you find in creative careers is that if you're far in your career and you've been very successful, if you don't have young friends, if you don't have friends who are fresh in their ideas, fresh in their thinking, you end up creating ideas that are stale, that are overly familiar. You keep making the same movie over and over again. And so they've done these studies, for example, there's a study done at NYU that found that the most successful movie-making teams

are teams that consist of someone who is in the establishment and working hand-in-hand with someone on the fringe. Because that combination is where that magic happens, where you create an idea that's familiar, but it's novel. You create an idea that has enough credibility to be brought out to society, but also has some fresh thinking that captures the intrigue and attention of people. And so I think that's actually really important too. This idea of sort of mentorship or building relationships isn't just looking up,

but it's actually also looking, quote, unquote, down. You talk about why a song becomes a hit and then it gets all the way up to the point where it gets old. And there's a lot of science behind that. I think that makes that that makes a lot of sense in regards to this same, the same topic you're talking about. Oh, yeah. So this is one of the things that I think is so interesting to me about creativity. So we've been sending creativity for the last 40 years in the social sciences.

So psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology. I mean, there's just a ton of work that's been done in creativity. We actually know a lot about how it works. And so, you know, when we look at creativity and the sort of the public image of, of creativity is this magical semi-divine thing that a few people are lucky enough to be able to figure out. It's just not true. I mean, the best example of this is trends and preferences. And, you know, why do certain people like certain things and other things people don't like?

And this is one of those things where people are like, well, that's, there you go. Look, you can't. You know, that's magic. But the reality is we actually have really, really good science on this. And so it all comes down to these two sort of primal urges we have. on one side, well, as humans, we're fearful of the unfamiliar. We're scared of things we've never experienced before because we think they may harm us. Think about when you were a cave dweller.

If you saw a cave, you've never slept in before, you're like, oh, that might harm me. I don't want to die. I don't have life insurance. But then if you saw a cave that you've been in before, you've slept in before, you're like, okay, it's probably safe. There's not going to be some random snake that's going to pop in and kill me. And so we're fearfully of unfamiliar. And this drives us to seek out things that are familiar.

This is why when you come home from vacation, even if you say it at a really nice hotel, there's something comforting about coming back home. There's something that makes you feel sort of warm and fuzzy. And this pursuit of the familiar is actually very biological. But then we also have this other urge, which seems very contradictory. We also have this other urge where we're also. wired to seek out things that are novel, that are new, that are new potential sources of reward, of food, of pleasure.

This is where, you know, when you were a hunter-gatherer, you would be in a field and you would be looking for that next berry, that next fruit, that next meal that could feed and nourish you. And so this seems like a contradiction, right? This seems like a contradiction that we seek out the familiar for safety, but we also seek out the novel and the new for potential reward. So how does this make sense? How do these contradictory things sit beside themselves?

Well, it turns out that what this is, it is our brain's really elegant way of balancing risk and reward. We like things that are familiar enough to be safe, but novel enough to be interesting and intriguing. This is why we like ideas that actually have one foot in the familiar and one foot in the novel. The first Star Wars was a Western in space. Harry Potter is just a normal orphaned.

racks the richest story, but there's wizards. The first iPhone, right? It was just an iPod with a phone. We don't actually like ideas that are radically new. We like ideas that are a balance of the familiar and the new. And so when they do studies, what they find is there's actually this really interesting recurring relationship where when we're first exposed to things, we tend not to like them. They're too new. They're too weird. And then the more we see them, the more we like them, up until they reach a point that I call the point of cliche where our novelty seeking wins out. And then we like them less and less with each additional exposure. And so it forms this upside down you.

And scientists call this the inverted you relationship between familiarity and preference, which is not a good title for a book. So I've rebranded it at the creative curve. And what you find is that this relationship, this upside down you occurs at an individual level, a group level and a population level. And so it's actually a really important thing for any creative to understand no matter of the industry is that your job as a creator is to create ideas that are in that sweet spot of that creative curve where they are familiar enough to be safe for people to actually

want to pay attention in them, but also novel enough to be interesting and intriguing. And that's the whole game. That's your job as a creative. It's not to, you know, just wait there for a big epiphany. It's to really nail that tension between the familiar and the novel. This stuff's fascinating, Alan. I want to dig into some of my notes from your book. We've already been touched on some of the areas, but some of the parts that really stuck out to me.

There's a lot of myths when it comes to creativity, as you know. And one of those myths is that there are some people who are either born, very creative and almost genius-like. And then they have these random moments throughout life for no particular reason where they have some sort of an aha moment or the light ball literally pops in their mind. And a few of the people you talked about that there are myths that are out there about them. There's a lot, but I'll just name a couple to get us started because I think their stories are interesting. Whether it's Mozart and how he composed his pieces or Paul McCartney and how he wrote the song yesterday.

There's so many, I guess, false stories out about them that if you dig deeper into how these things got made, they're different than what you may have originally heard. Oh, so you just opened a huge can of worms. So, I mean, this is one of the things in a culture is just crazy, is that I think we so often don't look critically at the stories that were told without realizing that there's a lot of economic incentives to people and how we talk about creators and creative geniuses. So, for example, when you look at, you know, Mozart, Mozart is the image we have of him, he was a child prodigy, he would dream up these, you know, songs in his head. And these notions

come from a few different places. You know, one, there's this letter that was published in 1815 from Mozart describing his composition process where he describes how he would, you just write the music in his head without touching paper. this letter literally was hashtag fake news. It was forged by music magazine publisher who wanted to sell more copies. The idea that Mozart was his child prodigy really comes from the movie Amadeus, which came on 1985, where the opening scene is like him at a piano blindfolded playing piano for the Pope.

And Salieri, the narrator, who's like his arch nemesis in the movie, you know, is saying how he composed his first contrarious. hereto at four, first opera at six. And like, that is complete garbage, right? First of all, Salieri, by the way, was not his arch nemesis. Salieri was actually like sort of like a friend.

You know, they may be at times at friendly competition, but Salieri was actually Mozart's son's music teacher. And the reality is Mozart, when he was three years old, had a helicopter dad who told Mozart that he had to become a great musician. And his helicopter dad hired for him the best music teachers in all of Europe and then made this kid practice three hours a day. Is it not the story of him like popping out of the womb playing the piano? So he's practicing three hours a day, seven days a week.

He did not write a concerto at four. He did not run an opera at six. He wrote his first truly original piece of music at 17. And first of all, it's not very good. Second of all, this is after 14 years of practicing literally every day, three hours a day. Like you two could write a half decent concerto. And so this idea that Mozart was like, you know, at three years old, playing the piano. piano and writing music at four is just literally a farce.

J.K. Rolling, you know, the story is she was on a train. She had the idea for Harry Potter. She started writing it on a napkin. No, she didn't have a napkin. She didn't start, you know, writing the story immediately. She had the idea for the characters while on a train. And then she spent five years, five years writing the first book and what really was backbreaking work.

I mean, she once showed an interviewer, the box of all 15. variations of chapter one she had written. So we have this idea that she just, the idea of Harry Potter just came to her. And then later, she's this billionaire. And it's almost insulting, right? Because this was five years of work. I mean, at times she was on welfare during this. Like, it was a really big struggle for her. And it was really a story of perseverance. And so when we say this things, I think it's almost, it's almost comical. You know, Paul McCartney, there's this famous story that he dreamed up the melody, the song yesterday. And the realities he dreamed up. six notes of the melody. And these six notes are very similar to the baseline of one of his

favorite musician songs, Ray Charles's version of George on my mind. And when you study how aha moments and inspiration work, we actually know a lot about the biology of them. See, basically, aha moments inspiration all happen in the right hemisphere of our brain. And it's just a different type of processing. Our left hemisphere, we do very logical processing, very step-by-step processing. So like when you're solving a math problem, and that type of processing is all very conscious. You're aware of each step of a math problem as you're solving it. On the other side, this subconscious processing your right hemisphere does, it only pops into consciousness once an idea comes together. So the analogy I like to give is that of like a loud lab partner

versus a quiet lab partner. Your left hemisphere is that like loud lab partner who like talks way too much and is like, okay, we're going to do this and then this and then this. And look, we got the answer. And your right hemisphere is that quiet lab partner who's like really dorky and is sort of mumbling to him or herself. And only once they get the answer do they go, hey, I got the answer. And if your left hemisphere is too loud, if too much stuff is going on, you can't actually hear what your right hemisphere has been working on.

And so this is why you experience aha moments when you're half asleep or when you're in the shower or when you're running or this is why people talk about how substances form make them more creative it's that these things all quiet down your left hemisphere so you can actually experience what's going on your right hemisphere so it's not that you have to like do drugs to be creative you just have to go on a run you just have to find moments where your left hemisphere sort of you know just calm down so all these things that we've talked about jk k rolling paul mcc martney um what you see is that in all these stories,

we've been sold this sort of idea, this mystical notion of creators that is great for selling movies and magazines and for getting interviews with your author, but they're just not the reality. And I think they're not only disheartening, but I think they really do a disservice to people because they make it seem like you can't be creative

and you can. That's what I think is the natural, follow-up thought is you hear of the famous ones. Again, I've mentioned this early in our talk, Alan, because I'm always trying to relate these great stories and these well-known people who have created masterpieces and how they've done it. And I think pulling back the curtain on how they've done it makes us all feel better because it makes us all feel like it's possible for all of us. It really is. But how? How? is the question. So I know there's, there's, it gets very simple. Let's say you want to be a great writer.

What, what are two ways to become a great writer? Read a lot and write a lot. And you talk about mass consumption and how that, that seemed to be in common with Paul McCartney, with J.K. Rowling, with so many others who you've talked about is this, this idea of mass consumption. And there are other parts to this formula. It's not just reading a lot. But I'm curious if you're going to relate this to an answer the how question for the. a normal person who doesn't, maybe they don't feel like they're creative because you've heard people say that, oh, I'm not very creative. Right.

And that's obviously false. But, but I want to answer it for them to say, well, how can I be more creative in whatever it is my work is? Totally. So in the book, I break down these four things that are all how, so how you can do it. So one of my goals in writing the book was not just to write a descriptive book, but also prescriptive book. So you can sort of think about the first half of the book is descriptive and the second half

is prescriptive. And, you know, a couple of things I think are really interesting and really telling. So one of them is that you find this theme of huge, vast amounts of niche content consumption. So it's not that these great creatives, like there's this idea of the Renaissance Man or Woman where they're, you know, they know everything about everything. No, no, no. These great creative achievers, the reality is they learn a lot about a little. They watch every single movie. They read every single science fiction book.

They, you know, consume every single possible recipe ingredient thing they possibly could. And so you see this idea of consumption is really, really important. There's a few different reasons why. One is that how our right hemisphere works is, you know, when it's connecting these ideas together subconsciously, it only can connect the ideas it has. So when scientists look at this stuff, one of the biggest things that drives aha moments is prior knowledge. You're going to have aha moments about things you know about, right? When I was writing the book and I was reading thousands of pages of peer-reviewed research

on creativity, all of a sudden, I was having these aha moments at the gym around these like really dorky creativity concepts. But this makes sense, right? J.K. Rowling would, in her childhood, just close her door and read books and books and books. Her parents were fighting. It was a way to get away. In college, she had library finds. She had so many books out.

I mean, Paul McCartney literally played in a cover band for years. And so you see this theme of consumption is very prevalent when it comes to creators. But the other thing I thought was interesting is that it's not just how much they consume, but it's also how they consume. See, it turns out that when creators consume creative products, they're not just sort of taking it all in. They're not passive consumers. They actually engage in a form of consumption. that I think is most like imitation.

What they do is they sort of touch and feel the work and they're studying the structure of it. I talk in the book about the story of Ben Franklin as a young man who decided he wanted to become a great writer. And what he did is he actually took magazine articles that he found and he actually outlined them. Well, how did they start? Was it a quote?

Was it a thesis? Was it a story? How did they build the argument? That outlining process is what gave them this ability to, understand what is this meta structure? What is that familiar baseline with which he could then create his own novel twist? Again, balancing familiarity and novelty. More recently, I interviewed Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, you know, is the co-creator of Billions. He wrote Too Big to Fail. He's an anchor on Squawk Box. He's the editor of Deal Book in New York Times. And he told me that how he

learns all these new things is literally the same thing. He actually goes and studies and sees how do other people do it, right? How do books start? How do movies start? How do these things get structured? And they study these structures. It's almost like they turn great creative products into Madlibs so they can again focus on their own novel twist. They're not starting from scratch. They're starting on the shoulders of those who've come before them. The Andrew Ross Sorkin part was an interesting one that I wrote down. I actually reached out to him after reading your book and have created an email dialogue with them because I love that aspect of, especially when it comes to book writing, he talked about how some of the

good books that he loves in his life begin with movement or propulsion or creating momentum at the beginning. And I thought, that's true. Like, that's how I think when it comes to getting something started and it makes me want to continue to turn the page. 100%. Did that, how, what type of impact that have on you as you're going through this process to research and put this, put this, uh, this work of art together.

So one of the things I thought was so interesting for me was obviously like writing a book on, uh, creativity or like creating a book on writing hits even is like, it's like a high pressure situation. Yeah. And um, it's pretty meta. Yeah, it's pretty meta. And so one of the things I thought was interesting for me was just, you know, the whole experience is my first book.

It was like the whole experience was actually very confidence building from perspective of, I really felt like I was learning how to learn. and obviously that was also the subject material I was covering, but it really has changed the world from sort of three-dimensional, from two-dimensional or three-dimensional. Where I think in the past, I viewed the world much more fixed than I do now, where now I sort of look out in the world and I see,

oh, like these skills, these things I see other people doing, like I feel like I understand better how they've gotten there and how if I want to get there to what I would need to do to get there. And that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to go and chase a million things, but it does make the world feel more hopeful. I think there's sort of this notion that when you think the world is just, here's your fixed assets and here's all you can do or all you can be, I think there's a sense of over time of sort of disengagement with life that can creep in.

We sort of go, this is me, this is who I am, this is all I'm ever going to be. And I think learning how to learn is a really powerful experience because it gives you that confidence of saying, oh no actually I can reinvent myself I could do something completely different in the next decade if I wanted to like I have that ability as a human our brains are set up to do that and so that's been a very sort of internally calming and motivating result of the book what made you want to write this book I'm a very frustratable guy from New Jersey and my heart and I just got sick and tired of hearing people tell me so I run a 60 person six-year-old marketing analytics company. So we work with a lot of marketers, and they're very creative. But I would hear these marketers tell me things like, oh, I'm just not that creative. And I was like, what do you mean?

Because I always had this notion that creativity was at least somewhat learnable. I didn't realize quite how learnable it was, but always has a notion it was at least somewhat learnable. And so I kept hearing this over and over again. And I was like, I just got frustrated. I just got kind of sick of it. And so I started giving a talk that was around this idea of creativity and the myths around creativity. It was a much more superficial of the version of the book, kind of like a little bit

of chapter two, basically. And the talk was really well received and sort of organically spiraled into a book. Like someone saw it and suggested it. Someone else said, I should talk to their agent. And all of a sudden, it was happening. And prior to that, odd fact, is you have a pension for going on game shows. What's that about? Oh, my God. All the embarrassing, fun fact. So yeah, I've always been someone to reverse engineer things. It's always been sort of a thing I've enjoyed. I think it comes from being a very only child in terms of my parents got divorced when I was like one. They were always working.

And so I had a lot of time by myself. And so I've always enjoyed just reverse engineering things and sort of figuring them out. And so when I was 18, I had this phase where I thought it would be amusing to get on game shows. And I literally applied to like all of them. and I got a call back to audition for Wheel of Fortune, and I never watched the show before. And so I decided I would watch, like, lots and lots of episodes and read all these blog articles about the audition experience.

And I only really watched the first, like, 10 minutes of each episode. And so I went in there sort of realizing that they did not care at all about how good or bad you were at solving the puzzles. And so I just focused on, I found that, like, all of the people who they would cast, A, tend to dress pretty conservatively. They talked with a really strong sort of, they really just pronounced every syllable really emphatically, and they would make fun of themselves and sort of be willing to be foolish. And so I was like, okay, I can do all those things.

So I put on a button up. I drank a whole bunch of espresso. I went in there. I talked really, really emphatically. And I did an Elmo impression, which I will never ever do. do again. And I got cast on Wheel of Fortune. Now, that being said, I did not study the puzzles. And so I did lose terribly to Joan from Alexandria, Virginia, who won $60,000. And hashtag, you know, we'll never forget that. And then a few months later, I was, I thought that I was wondering,

I was wondering if this could be repeated. And so I got cast on another game show, which was a sort of early version of Shark Tank that was on MTV. And I also, again, lost on that. So thank you for bringing up my experience as a loser. Well, that's interesting. A part of your story. One point that you mentioned, you kind of glossed over, but it's a big deal. Track Maven, the company where you are the CEO, has 60 people working there, which is

incredible. I mean, that's a, you lead a sizable company where we haven't really. even talked about it. Can you, I guess briefly, I'd love to hear about Track Maven and why you started it and how it's going and how you've been able to grow so quickly to so many people. Yes. I mean, I always think we're not as big as I want to be, right? So it's all relative. So the company started, I was the CMO of a venture back startup. And I was basically, this was about seven years ago. And, you know, at the time, there was, you know, obviously digital marketing was here,

it was here to stay. Social media was here, it was here to stay. But, you know, 2008 was the first election that included Twitter, right? So, like, some of this stuff was still sort of more new. And there also was a lot less technology. And so I was sort of seeing this world where marketers were getting all this pressure to be data-driven. But most marketers didn't get into marketing to be stats people. They got into marketing to tell stories.

to create brands, do all the stuff. And I happened to really like a lot of the data side of marketing. And I found that it was very, very hard to be effective at that stuff easily. Like, the tools were inaccessible. They were expensive. They weren't very usable. Like, there was just a lot of hangups and a lot of problems there. And so the idea for Track Maven really came from this, this need that I saw that

marketers wanted to be data driven, but they needed help. And so the whole idea was to be sort of like an outsourced left brain. for marketers. And so our business is we have a marketing analytics platform that sucks in data from about 25 different marketing channels. And then we have like reports, visualizations, analysis tools, all that sort of stuff. And we also have a consulting team where if you don't have the capacity to actually use a software yourself, we can actually run your sort of analytics and insights function for you. And so we work with a lot of big consumer brands like MBA, Saks with Avenue, Marriott.

And you're really helping them apply some pattern matching and data to their marketing practice in a way that doesn't force them to have to completely reinvent who they're hiring. So your role now you are the, I assume, correct me if I'm wrong, the visionary CEO of your company, you are a manager of people, a leader of a business, is all this accurate? You got it. What's been the biggest transition for you as you went from someone who started a business who you saw a need. And now you are a boss or a manager, a leader within that business. I mean, that's a dramatic shift and what your day to day looks like. Oh, it's so weird. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing is just you're solving less problems directly. You're more helping other people solve problems. And so you're much more of a communicator and a coach. There's a very different set of skills. And so for me, that's been a really interesting experience just because I've also been learning this is my first real company.

I mean, like my first company I started before, you know, it was about 10 years ago. We got like five people. It was like a thing, but it wasn't a thing. And so this is the first thing I've done sort of at scale. And so it's interesting when you're doing a company like this because you're constantly being forced to learn and grow as the company is growing, right? And so there's sort of always this tension between, you know, am I keeping up with what I need to be keeping up with? And so I've had to surround myself with a lot of really, really good, again, we're not going to use the M word, but a lot of really good mentors and advisors and people who I can lean on and get advice from and sort of become more comfortable at the fact that I don't have all the answers.

And that's been a really good experience for me and just like, again, sort of helped me learn how to learn and help me realize. Like one of the things I've noticed looking back that I now tell people is like a lot of times I've gotten really good advice from people. And in the past, I would almost always ignore it. So I'd get the advice, but I wasn't actually good about taking the advice. And now I'm good at both getting it and taking it. But I think I've had to learn that the sort of limits on my own knowledge and abilities and all this kind of stuff. And I think that's very humbling on one level. But the other level, it's actually very empowering because one.

once you realize that, okay, even for things you don't know, there's a lot of ways to get the answer and solution, then that actually becomes really exciting because it makes the world seem not limited by your own sort of knowledge, but rather limited by your second order knowledge, which is much more expansive. What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes lesser experienced managers make? Oh my God. Do you have, how long is this episode again? So, there's so many I've made. I mean, there's conflict diversions, the big one. I mean, organizations thrive on open communication. And whenever they do studies, like they've done these studies, for example,

my friend Shane Snow talks about his new book Dream Teams, which is really good about how cognitive diversity is important. But cognitive diversity doesn't mean anything if you don't have open communication. And you find when they ever do these big organizational studies, like open communication is like the key thing because people thrive. on feedback, both positive and negative. People thrive on clarity and all these things are driven around communication. So I think just our inherent conflict aversion as humans, which is wired into us, I think as a

manager you have to get over that and have healthy conflict, not unhealthy conflict, but healthy conflict. That's one. I mean, the other obvious one is just, you know, remember when you're hiring, it's so much harder to let someone go than it is to hire someone. And, you know, just in terms of the impact on the business. business, all stuff. So like just the amount of time you should invest in hiring right is whatever you think it is, it's at least three X that. If you're doing three reference calls, you

really should be doing nine. And, you know, most of them should be back channel references that aren't given by the person. I mean, you should just be very, very, very thorough on hiring. And that's really important. Other mistakes, I mean, this is sort of, it is this to what I was saying previously, but you just remember that, you know, not everyone has all the answers. So in the same way that you need to listen to other people's advice and you also need to know when not to listen. And so balancing those two things, I think is a skill that you develop over time. And I think the key to me at least is getting advice from people with very different perspectives and very different incentives. Right.

So like you may want to get advice from people on your board, but also advice people are not on your board because they have different both perspectives and incentives. And so I think those two things, perspective and incentives, is really. really important when you're couching advice and understanding where people are coming from. And the best sort of decisions I've made have been when I've gotten advice from a wide variety of those two things. And then I'm able to sort of pattern match and I can sort of see all the different perspectives and why people have those and that helps me make better decisions. So those are some of them.

I mean, I literally could go on all day in terms of mistakes, but those are some of the ones I think are probably most prevalent for most sort of new managers. What is a common piece of advice that you've heard that you think is dangerous, meaning it's not accurate, but it's widely, widely spread? Oh, my God. I mean, widely spread advice is a dozen these days. I mean, one thing I think is, br-b-b-bur-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-r. No, that's not really an easy question. I was thinking of my answer in the middle of asking it, and I thought, this one might take some time to think about.

I mean, one is that people say hire slow, fire fast. And I think the problem is in reality when you're running an organization that doesn't work. I think it's higher slow. And you have to fire slow because you have to get people chances. You have to coach. And that's because one is the right thing to do. Two, people change. And three, everyone else your organization sees that.

So when you hear people say shit like, you know, fire fast, I'm always like, wow, I would not want to work for someone who like says that as a mantra. Like what a terrifying mantra. So I think sometimes there's this like, we hear these ideas around management that are sound cute on paper. And maybe people who've never actually run an organization can say as a third party observer. But when you actually get into it, like no one wants to work for the boss who says things like that, right? That's not a good management style. And so I think that's probably the piece of advice. that I hear the most often relative to how wrong it is.

That's a really great point. The more you think about it, because everything you do, right, like for, I think I thought about, I mentioned you before we started recording, how has this book impacted you at Track Maven? And obviously there's a lot of positive

that have come from it. And people look to you for your thoughts on topics now because you've put it out there. But another aspect of it that I think could be interesting and you're probably already feeling it, is from a recruiting perspective, when you see the company is led by somebody who's really thoughtful, has a lot of depth, that is attractive, an attractive place to work, in my opinion, it is. I don't see how it couldn't be.

And so I think when a CEO puts out a quality piece of text with his or her name behind it, that can have either a positive or a negative impact on there. business. And so I think that's got to be another, I would imagine, positive for your team at Trackmaven is that you're going to attract the type of people that you want to work there. Oh, yeah. And it's also helpful just gets customers excited and you create a lot more of a pull impact where, you know, people are sort of brought or come to you instead of you having to go to them, whether it's employees or customers or any of that kind of stuff. I was going to say, has it been a good form of inbound marketing for you? Oh, yeah. And it's also

been cool for our existing customers where now, like, a lot of them invite us to come speak at our at their like kickoffs. Like we have a bunch of people who have fiscal June 30th. And so I'm going and speaking at a bunch of July kickoffs for our customers and stuff.

And that's great. Like we would, we'd love to like speak in front of our customers entire marketing team. Like this is, that's great. Right. And that wouldn't have happened if we weren't viewed as some sort of expert in something. And so that's been really cool. Or it's you know, I'm doing book events and a lot of the book events I'm doing are geared towards people who are marketers by trade. And then they come up

afterward. They're like, hey, can we talk about track maybe? I'm like, yeah, that'd be great. And so I think there's that general sort of rising tide lifts all boats. Awesome. Well, Alan, I appreciate everything you share. This is really good, helpful stuff. And I'd love to, I know we've already talked a few times. And I'm appreciative of that too. I'd love to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? So I would just check out the creative curve.com and you can watch the book trailer, which features my very adorable Corgi, read some reviews. And my website is Allen, a-L-A-L-L-E-N dot XYZ.

How did you get at Allen on all the social media? How did you do that? Is your connection breaking up? Do I have to go? I'm just kidding. It's a story for over drinks. How's that? I was going to say I saw on Instagram and Twitter. All right, next time I'm in DC, I'll shoot you text. I need to do that story, bad.

This is good. No, the creative curve.com, yeah. The creative curve, how to develop the right idea at the right time. It's really good. Full of stories and written in the manner of which I love, which is the story science, story science process because the stories bring you in and the science reinforces and backs it up, make sure you know that it's all built upon facts. And that's how it could be implementable to your life.

And that's what I hope we got into some of that how during this conversation. So, Alan, thanks again for being here, man. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Ryan. Bye. Bye. All right. That was a really interesting talk with Alan.

I appreciate the depth he's able to go to when it comes to creativity and just how much research went into putting that book together, as well as him sharing the message on this episode is really thought-provoking, that's for sure. If you enjoyed it, I would love it. If you would write to review, subscribe and rate the show in iTunes Apple Podcasts. That is write a review, subscribe and rate the show in iTunes Apple Podcasts. It really helps spread the message worldwide. Thank you so much again for giving me the opportunity to continue to do this work

and have these incredible conversations with thought-provoking people like Alan every single week. I absolutely love it, and I'm so grateful that you give me an opportunity of this. Thank you so much. See you next week. Can't wait.