We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP197: The Creative Curve by Allen Gannett - CEO of TrackMaven (Business Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's show, we talk about a subject that so many people want to master, but so few understand where to start. The topic of today's show is creativity. Now, you might be asking yourself, how can I develop the right idea at the right time? And today's guest is one of the leading experts in that field. Now, this might be hard to believe, but Alan Gannett is only 27 years old. But as soon as you hear this interview, you won't believe the amount of knowledge and insight he has into this topic. In fact, at age 24, Alan was selected onto the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

Starting point is 00:00:37 Additionally, he's created a highly successful business in the field of big data analytics. For the research of this book, he interviewed a billionaire, one of the wealthiest members of Congress that created three highly successful internet startup companies, the CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin, and many, many other people. So without further delay, I'm really excited to bring you this discussion with the highly intelligent and creative guru, Alan Gannett. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.

Starting point is 00:01:13 We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. All right, so here we are with Alan Gannett. And Alan, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be with us. I'm really pumped to talk to you about your new book here, The Creative curve. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. All right. So, Alan, the title of the book is the creative curve. And you go into quite a bit of detail describing what this curve is. And I find this quite fascinating. Can you give the audience just a quick overview of what the curve is that you're talking about? So the creative curve is my rebrand of a concept in psychology called the

Starting point is 00:02:01 inverted U-shaped relationship between familiarity and preference. which would be a terrible title for a book. And so I rebranded the creative curve. And basically what this is, it's a diagram that represents the relationship of what drives human taste and preference. So we think that human taste and preference is this very organic, nebulous thing that how the heck could we ever figure it out? But it actually turns out there's really good science on what drives us to be interested

Starting point is 00:02:30 in certain things and to like certain things but dislike other things. And it all comes down to these two sort of primal urges we have. On one side, we crave things that are novel. This is sort of intuitive. We like new sources of food, new sources of pleasure, reward, and this goes back to our hunter-gatherer days. We're trying to find that next berry to eat that next meal, whatever it was. That kind of makes sense.

Starting point is 00:02:54 So we like things that are novel and new. But we also have this other urge, which is seemingly contradictory. We also have this urge where we also pursue the familiar. And the reason why is that we're scared of things that are unfamiliar. Think about if you were a cave dweller and you saw a cave that you had never ever slept in before in a cave you've slept in multiple times. You wouldn't go into the cave that you've never slept in before. You would go into the cave you slept in before because it's safe.

Starting point is 00:03:25 You know you're not going to get harmed. And so this seems like a contradiction. We crave things that are novel for potential reward. We also seek out the familiar for safety. And so it turns out that this contradiction is our brain's really elegant way of balancing risk and reward. The things we like, the things we're interested in are actually a blend of the familiar and the novel. They're familiar enough to be safe, but novel enough to be interesting. And so this is why you find the most successful creative ideas actually aren't.

Starting point is 00:03:59 aren't the ideas that are radically new. Think about the first Star Wars was a Western in space. Harry Potter is literally like a very standard orphan rising story, but there's wizards. You know, the iPhone was an iPod with a phone, right? And so what you see when you look at actual creative achievement, while we have this notion that breakthrough ideas are radically new, the reality is we don't actually like those ideas. Think about the segue. That did not work, right?

Starting point is 00:04:26 We like ideas that are more incremental. And so the creative curve is this curve-shaped relationship is when you first experience something, you tend not to like it. But then when you start experiencing more and starts to feel safer, you start liking it more and more until it gets to a certain point where you start to get bored of it. It becomes cliche. And then the more you're exposed to it, the less you like it, every additional time you're exposed to it. So think about when you hear that like new Drake song, like the first time you're like, what is this? And then the third time, you're like, oh, this is pretty good. The 10th time, you're like, nice for what?

Starting point is 00:05:00 Can this stop? And then the 15th time you're like, this is got to stop. And so you see this sort of turtle shell, this sort of upside down you relationship, which again is the inverted U relationship between familiarity and preference, aka the creative curve. So I like this because you talk a lot about the Beatles in your book. And you also provide a great example of how the Beatles kind of rode this curve. and they went back and did a bunch of research.

Starting point is 00:05:28 Tell our audience about this research. So there's this really cool field in academia of empirical musicology, which is literally the math behind music. And this one professor did this study that I thought was so fascinating. And his basic question was, when you think of the Beatles, they were popular. I mean, they've been popular for everybody. They had 10 years of productivity.

Starting point is 00:05:52 And throughout those 10 years, they were popular almost the entire time. and they shifted styles and they had all this stuff. And it was so interesting as he mapped out on a chart, the number of experimental song features they used across time. And what he found is it followed this U-shaped relationship. They did these gradual shifts. They started very mainstream pop. And then they started adding on new experimental song features.

Starting point is 00:06:17 And then as their audience started to get used to those, that's when they started to change again. So really when we talk about creative genius, What we're really talking about is this ability to consistently, not just wants, not be a one-hand wonder, but consistently create ideas that are that right tension of the familiar in the novel. And so the second half of the book is really breaking down, well, how the heck do you do that? Because I think when we talk about creativity, we really obsess over the technical skills component of creativity.

Starting point is 00:06:45 Like, how do you create something technically competent? But actually, the more impressive feat is, well, how do you get the timing right? how you develop that right idea at the right time. That's the thing that really is the domain of the so-called creative geniuses, but that's also learnable. Alan, if you don't mind sharing this story about Paul McCartney and how he wrote the song yesterday, I think a lot of people are familiar with this epic song

Starting point is 00:07:10 and he talked about how it came to him in a dream, and perhaps a lot of people are just cursed and saying, well, if I don't have the same dream as Paul McCartney, how can I write the same song? So I think you have a really interesting take on this, in your book. I would love if you share that with the audience. So the Paul McCartney story is one of the ones that really, I just think, is hilarious in this sort of creativity mythology. So the first half of the book is sort of like a myth busters

Starting point is 00:07:37 around some of the stories and histories and creativity. And one of the stories I start the book with is a story of Paul McCartney and the creation of the song yesterday. So yesterday is the most recorded song of all time. Paul McCartney is the number one songwriter of number one singles. He beat out John Lennon. And what's interesting is there's this famous story that Paul McCartney one morning, he woke up and he realized he had dreamed this melody that went on to become the song yesterday. And sort of the shorthand version is Paul McCartney dreamed up yesterday. Wow. Aha moment, creative genius. Brilliant. But what's so funny about the Paul McCartney story is that we have this takeaway from it of, wow, you know, inspiration strikes certain

Starting point is 00:08:20 people. You know, they're just divine. He literally just does this in his sleep. Look how easy it is for him. But the truth is so far from that. The truth is he dreamed up six notes, and we can talk more about where those six notes came from. He dreamed of six notes. And then he proceeded to spend 20 months perfecting the song. He was so obsessed with getting this song right. They literally all of the other Beatles, his managers, they would like be doing tours and he'd be working on the song and make stage and be like, please stop, Paul. Like, you've got to stop. And in fact, the other thing I think is funny is that, you know, yesterday is known very much for these sort of haunting, brooding lyrics. But the 20 months that he took to actually write this song, the lyrics were all the way at the end.

Starting point is 00:09:02 For a long time, he had no idea what the lyrics should be. It's just this idea that this was some magical epiphany moment that, you know, led to, you know, this boom, this blockbuster success. It's just wrong. Yeah, I find it really fascinating. and when you were when I was listening to this because I listened to the audio book on my runs and when classic podcast host and whenever I heard that I was like wow this just makes so much sense and it's so easy for people to just buy into the idea that creativity just hit you in a storm and then that's the end of it but when you're describing all these other steps that took place on the song it was

Starting point is 00:09:43 it was kind of like wow yeah I see where he's coming at with with this this really makes a lot of sense. There's another interesting person character that you talk about in your book. His name is Jared Paulus. And he's a member of Congress, one of the wealthiest people in Congress. Tell us the story of Jared. And then more importantly, how did you decide that you wanted to interview him? Like, why did he come about in creativity for you? So, Jared is this really interesting character. He is depending on the year, the first, second, or third, richest member of Congress. He's actually right now the frontrunner to be governor of Colorado this year. And so his primary is the day we're recording this. So we'll see what happens. Listeners, you will know more.

Starting point is 00:10:31 But what's interesting to me about Jared, and one of the things, so in the book, I interviewed 25 living creative geniuses. And these are trying to be really eclectic. So these are folks like Passick and Paul, the songwiring duo who did, Dear Evan Hanson, The Greatest Showman in the lyrics of La La Land. Alexis O'Hanning, the founder of Reddit, Jose Andres, the Michelin-Star Chef, Nina Jacobson, the producer of The Hunger Games. And I tried to go for people who showed they were able to have success multiple times over. So I wanted to avoid the sort of luck factor.

Starting point is 00:11:02 And so Jared's really interesting because Jared, when he was an undergrad, started a company sold for like $25 million. dollars. Then in the first dot-com bubble, he started blue mountain greeting cards, the first sort of viral online product, like people would send these greeting cards to each other. He sold it for $900 million in stock and cash. And then he started pro flowers, which we all know. So these are like wildly different businesses. His first business was an ISP. And so it was so interesting to me. And then he successfully started a charter school system and he successfully ran for Congress and maybe he's going to be the governor of Colorado. And so what was interesting to me about him and all the people I interviewed

Starting point is 00:11:44 was how did he do this over and over and over again? And what I thought was really interesting is that when you look at what these great creatives do, so much of it is about pattern matching. And it's not as much about the fact that, you know, they learned something in school once and this, you know, had this big impact and they were, you know, doing this thing, is that they were really, really good at recognizing patterns and recognizing when there were metaphors. So for Jared, for example, he was seeing that, wow, a lot of businesses on the internet were becoming successful by disintermediating, taking out the middleman. And when you look at flowers, you saw, oh, wow, there's this entire crazy supply chain. Could you build a better business?

Starting point is 00:12:31 And turns out the answer is yes. The result was pro flowers. I sold for $400 million after it went public. So this to me is really interesting. This to me is really interesting that there's these people who are able to do this again and again. And that tells us something. That tells us there's more than luck involved. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord. And every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is.

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Starting point is 00:17:21 that myth, let's call it that as a goal standard for being successful in any field. And it's especially interesting because you even interviewed the research behind the study. So please first explain what the rule is and then what you realized after interviewing the researcher. So lovely listeners, your host is doing a great job of trying to get me in trouble, which is okay. It's okay. I'm here. We're here for here for it. So basically, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Outliers of this 10,000 hours rule, this idea that with 10,000 hours of practice,

Starting point is 00:17:57 You can become world class than anything. And this is literally one of the most well-known business mantras of all time. You know, I literally last night did a book talk and I asked the audience how people have heard of it. And every single hand in the room went up. Like, it is well-popularized. And here's the issue. It's based on research by a professor named Kay Anders Erickson. He wrote the book, Peek.

Starting point is 00:18:17 He's a really well-known researcher and talent development. Well, let me just tell you the quote he gave me that I put in my book, which is that, quote, Gladwell misread our paper, period, unquote. And here's the problem. There's two major problems. One is what the research said was that it wasn't 10,000 hours. You know, there isn't some magic selling your brain, some switch that when 10,000 hours goes on,

Starting point is 00:18:43 it goes, oh, world class. 10,000 hours was the average across skills. The average. So, like, becoming a world class piano player these days these days, It takes about 25,000 hours because so many people try to do it. People started so young. They've been doing it for hundreds of years. So there's just a higher bar versus there's now these people who do like competitive digit

Starting point is 00:19:07 memorization, which is like a thing. Like how many digits a pie can you memorize? And that takes only about 400 hours from world class at. It used to only take 80 hours because so few people do it. And so the skill and the amount of people, the sort of social construct around the skill, has a huge determinant on what it takes you come world class because that's a relative subject line, right? And so this is just like a very, very big problem with it. But then the second issue is actually bigger.

Starting point is 00:19:37 The second issue is that all of Erickson's research is all about something called deliberate practice, which is totally different than just pure practice. See, the difference is practice is about getting something into your rote muscle memory and making it unconscious. Like if I don't like speak sports that well, so like, you know, let's see how I do. But like if you wanted to practice basketball, you'd play a game and, you know, you'd get better and you know, your muscle memory and you'd sort of you'd be able to be less conscious as you do it, blah, blah, blah. But that's not actually going to make you better. What makes you better is deliberate practice, which is taking a macro skill and breaking down to these tiny little micro skills and doing those skills over and over.

Starting point is 00:20:23 and over again so that you can get that down. If you ever take golf lessons, they might focus entire week on just your grip. In basketball, it might be, let's do mid-court, left-handed dribbling. It's these little microskills that allow your brain to actually avoid automaticity and stay conscious. It's the complete opposite of practice. And this is why, for example, you know,

Starting point is 00:20:47 if the 10,000 hours rule made any sense, we'd all be NASCAR drivers because we'd driven our car for 10,000 hours. But that's clearly not true. If we wanted to become NASCAR drivers, we would focus on very small skills in that skill set like sharp, high speed, left-handed terms. So, Alan, you talk about genius in your book and people that are labeled geniuses. And I also find kind of a contrarian point of view for this.

Starting point is 00:21:15 And I think it might surprise people kind of how you view this. So talk to us about geniuses and how, um, and, um, and how you, it relates back to creativity as well. So this capital G idea of genius is very, very popularized these days. I mean, you see this with, you know, cover a fast company. There's these people. They're, you know, they're geniuses. There's these creative geniuses.

Starting point is 00:21:39 Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, you know, blah, blah, blah. But the problem is that when you actually look at these stories, which you really find are really stories of significant amounts of efforts. It's significant amounts of talent development. Going back to this idea of purposeful practice, I mean, Mozart, I think, is the best example. Mozart, if you watch the movie Amadeus, which won eight Academy Awards, Mozart in the movie is portrayed as blindfolded playing the piano for the Pope at the age of three. And he wrote his first concerto at the age of four.

Starting point is 00:22:13 That's what the narrator says. And the whole movie, you know, the whole idea is that him and Sally Erie are these arch nemesis. and Salieri eventually kills him, spoiler. And Salieri is talking about, he sort of opens a movie with, you know, Mozart wrote his first concerto four, opera at six. He never had second drafts. He never had mistakes. Oh, my God. Where do we start?

Starting point is 00:22:37 So this is like completely, completely nuts. The real story of Mozart is based in the story of helicopter parenting. So when he was three, his dad said, oh, Mozart? I love you, but you need to become a great musician. Little Mozart was like, whatever you say, Dad, please love me. And Mozart's dad, it was kind of rich, hired for him the best music teachers in all of Europe and made this little kid practice three hours every single day, seven days a week. He then wrote his truly first original piece of music when he was 17, not four,

Starting point is 00:23:11 which, first of all, it's not very good. Second of all, this is after 14 years of practicing three hours every single day with the best music teachers in all of Europe under the conditional love of a helicopter. after that. So, like, yeah, like, you'd write a half-decent concerto, too. And the story of Mozart is even crazier, because, you know, this idea, for example, the him and Salieri thing is funny because Salieri was actually friends with Mozart. He, like, was the music teacher for Mozart's kids. This idea that Mozart would never have second drafts, and he would always compose in his head, that comes from a letter that was published in 1815 in a music magazine,

Starting point is 00:23:45 supposedly from Mozart. Like, the music magazine publisher forged it to sell copies. So like we have these sort of notions of these mystical qualities like Mozart popped out of the womb playing the piano and it's just wrong. The reality is when you look at the stories of creative genius with even a mildly skeptical look, it's really the story of lots of hard, thoughtful, intentional work, not just hard work, but thoughtful hard work. Yeah, it's awesome. I really, really enjoyed this section in your book. Another thing I really like about this book is whenever you target. about aha moments, you know, moments that I think we all have had, but we don't necessarily know why it's happening right there and at that time. And you have this very interesting

Starting point is 00:24:32 explanation of what is happening in your brain as you're experiencing that. So could you please elaborate on aha moments? So, you know, this is usually the part where if I was talking someone about the book and I was talking about Paul McCartney, they'd go, yeah, but like Paul still dreamed up at least part of the song. Like, that's impressive. And here's the thing. It's actually pretty normal. So basically, when we talk about aha moments, what we're talking about is a certain

Starting point is 00:25:02 type of mental processing called sudden insight. And sudden insight is what happens in the right hemisphere of your brain. And basically how it works is your right hemisphere is where you store sort of the more distant and metaphorical associations with words or concepts. Think about it as like definition two in the dictionary. And it's also where you connect sort of disparate ideas together. So here's the thing. This sort of processing, it all happens subconsciously.

Starting point is 00:25:31 And it's only once the idea becomes clear that it sort of pops into consciousness. It goes, aha. And this is the same effect that when maybe you're looking at a crossword puzzle and you suddenly get the answer without doing quote unquote work. This is the same thing that's going on from a biological perspective. as what's going on when Paul McCartney has an aha moment. And the analogy I like to give is your left hemisphere, your left hemisphere is where you do logical processing. And this is all very conscious.

Starting point is 00:26:01 It's very, you know, you know, you know, if you're doing a math problem, you're aware that you're doing long division. It's not just happening. And so I like to think about it as like your left hemisphere is like in college, you had that smart but loud lab partner. who was like, okay, guys, we're going to do this, then this, then this, and we solved the puzzle, good job team. And then your right hemisphere is like the quiet lab partner who's like kind of dorky, but like clearly smart,

Starting point is 00:26:32 and, you know, one day we'll all work for. And, you know, he's sitting there and he's like working on the problem. And only once he gets the answer is he like, hey, guys, I got it. And if your left hemisphere, if, you know, if that guy, is being too loud, you actually can't actually even hear your quiet lap partner. So this is why you experience aha moments like in the shower or on a run or when you're taking a long walk. It's not that the shower or your commute is like inspiring.

Starting point is 00:27:01 It's that literally your left hemisphere, your loud lap partner has like shut up. Like that's why you experience them then. So what you see when you look at aha moments is they're not magical or mystical. They're actually a pretty basic biological phenomenon. And so then the question is, well, like, if their basic biology, how do we have more of them? How do we actually, you know, can we cause them to happen more often because that would be pretty useful? And this is where it gets really interesting. See, the thing that scientists have found is that the thing that's tied to aha moments, well, it's prior knowledge.

Starting point is 00:27:40 You know, if you want to connect the dots, you have to have dots to connect. And so what you find I thought was really surprising is when you look at these stories of, you know, creative genius, we often talk about these great creators and almost opposition to consumers. There's that really annoying social media meme that's like 90% of people consume, 9% engage, 1% create, hashtag hustle. And it's like, oh. And not only is it like stupid, but it's also wrong because one of the things I found, one of the four laws I talk about in the book, is that these great creative attention. achievers are actually massive consumers of the creative products in their niche. And they get obsessed. They learn a lot about a little.

Starting point is 00:28:23 It's not like social media. It's not a little about a lot. It's a lot about a little. And the reason why is that this sort of deep consumption is what allows them to fill the right hemisphere with all the stuff they need to actually be able to come up with these new ideas. So like Paul McCarney, for example, like grew up in a musical household. His dad was always playing music.

Starting point is 00:28:44 He literally played in a cover band for years, right? And so he was constantly ingesting music. And that eventually, yeah, so yeah, he dreams about music and you don't. But that's logical. J.K. Rowling spent her entire childhood in her bedroom in a book. Her parents were always fighting and squabbling in college. She had library finds. She had so many books out.

Starting point is 00:29:08 So, yeah, when she daydreams, she dreams about characters and you don't. but that's pretty logical. She also doesn't, you know, dayduring about a new podcast concept ideas, like you probably do. And so one of the big mistakes we have when it comes to aha moments is we sort of forget. We're like, where do they come from? Well, they come from the things you've already experienced, you've already consumed. And so one of the things you can do if you want to be more creative is actually consume more. That's so important.

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Starting point is 00:33:20 Like I interviewed multiple novelists who told me some variation of like, I lived near the library and I read every book. And I was like, I got it. I've heard this before. But then what was really interesting, was that this consumption didn't actually stop. So going into their careers, these people are successful, they're busy,

Starting point is 00:33:40 but over and over again, when I talked to them about how they consume, how they learn, I found that the average spent about three to four hours every day consuming, consuming three to four hours, which is about 20% of your waking hours. So I call us the 20% principles, this idea that these great creative,

Starting point is 00:34:00 in order to stay relevant, actually spend 20% their time consuming information in their narrow niche to have sort of raw materials for their creativity. That's a lot of time. And so I think that's one of the big mistakes we have when it comes to creativity and creative process. We think it's all about the grind. It's all about doing. But so much of it is about laying the groundwork.

Starting point is 00:34:25 So, Alan, you interviewed just a ton of people and really quite fascinating. people for this book. I'm curious, who do you remember the most and what was it that you learned from them that really kind of stuck in your memory? So this is, by the way, I'm not, I'm not pandering to you. It actually was the one billionaire I interviewed. It was David Rubenstein, who, you know, co-founder Carlyle group. He's on the board of 25 nonprofits. I think right now he's the chair of Masonian and the Kennedy Center. Like, he's been the chair of Duke before. Like, just like crazy guy. He was the guy who when there was an earthquake in D.C.

Starting point is 00:35:04 And the Washington Monument got cracked. He paid to fix it. Yeah. And so just like a cool guy. Top of his career, you know, late 60s. And we went and got tea. And what was so interesting to me about David was that he is like one of the nicest, but also most curious people.

Starting point is 00:35:23 So he's like a recognizable face. And people would come up and like start talking to him. And he was super nice. But he also was always asking question. Like he constantly was like this vacuum of information. And then even like I was trying to interview him for my book, he started asking me all these questions. I was like, no, no, no, we're talking about you.

Starting point is 00:35:41 And he's like, but let's talk about data and analytics. And I was like, oh my God, this is so stressful. I have a billionaire asking me about analytics. And so that was a theme that I found throughout the book, which was that these really successful creatives are often very, very curious. And the other thing I'd do, I thought was really interesting. and David does this. A lot of them have a lot of young people around them, right?

Starting point is 00:36:05 They have this sort of like this need, this understanding that they want to stay relevant. They can't do it all themselves. They're not going to have access to the freshest ideas. Inherently just because of their sort of power structure, you know, how successful they are, the sort of information they get. And so a lot of them engage in what I call and a lot of people have called before, reverse mentorship, which is this idea of learning from young people to get these new ideas. There's actually some really cool studies that show the most successful teams are the teams that are combination of the establishment and the fringe for this exact reason.

Starting point is 00:36:39 You get the credibility, the familiarity, and the reputation of those who are already successful. And you get the fresh ideas and the novelty of those who are new. And so David was this like really cool example of that all bundled up into a billionaire. So I'm not even making this up. This is literally my next question, okay? I'm just going to read it here to you. Alan, you're a big data entrepreneur. Tell us a little bit about your business and how you went about founding it.

Starting point is 00:37:06 So the company is called Track Maven. It's about six years old. Basin, Washington, D.C., it's about 60 people. We work with about 350 big consumer brands, everyone from the MBA to Saksworth Avenue and sort of everything in between. And basically what we do is we suck in all of their marketing data from about 25 different digital sources. and we have like dashboards and reporting and all that sort of stuff.

Starting point is 00:37:31 But then we also actually give them on top of that, what they should do better, how they can actually improve, how can they better tell their story? And so it's that sort of intersection of the left brain and the right brain. And I started it out of, you know, sort of tying you with the book, I started it because I was a marketer. That was what I was consuming. And this was back in 2011.

Starting point is 00:37:51 And I saw that, you know, you were seeing all this pressure for marketers to be data driven to, you know, use data, but data was inaccessible and affordable and not actionable. So the whole idea for Track Maven was if you could solve all three of those problems, you know, there was obviously, you know, a market there. And so, you know, we did it and it worked. And, you know, it's fun when you're doing a business that's scaling, it's so much of it is about the journey. But you had how many employees, 60, 80 employees, did you say? Yeah, wow. So, and you're, and for people that can't see you, you're very young.

Starting point is 00:38:27 Are you still under 30 years old? Yeah, no, I'm young. I'm under, I'm 27. So I started the company when I was 21 or 22. And so it was definitely interesting because like now I feel like I'm more age appropriate. But when I started the company, I definitely like had sort of mild panic and imposter syndrome all the time. Because I was like, oh my God, like everyone's going to realize I'm like 22 and this is all going to fall apart. And what I realized at the end of the day was that, you know, people sort of respect and understand the fact that, like, you know, you're the CEO and like, you know, you've built this thing.

Starting point is 00:39:05 And, you know, investors seem, you know, luckily tech has sort of a bit of a cliche around young CEOs. And so investors don't really mind that much. So that's good. Now it's very, very impressive. Oh, love it. So, Alan, this is the last question I have for you. reading about the interviews you had with these successful people and your own extremely successful story and journey just so far, one of the key takeaways or perhaps rather the different

Starting point is 00:39:36 steps the audience could take to become more creative themselves. So in the book I talk about these four laws of the creative curve. So one of them is consumption. I talk a lot about not just how much you can consume, but also how to consume. The other one I talk a lot about is imitation, which is this idea that since familiarity is such a big part of creativity, you know, what you find is that great artists, great creative achievers are actually very comfortable imitating those who have come before them. The third one is around creative communities. And the fourth one is around iterations. And so the creative community stuff, I think there's some really actionable and sort of straightforward things in there.

Starting point is 00:40:18 So one of the mistakes we make when we talk about creativity is we talk about it as this individual phenomenon. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, you know, these individual people. But the issue is that, well, creativity is a social phenomenon. There's entire human dynamic to it. What we deem creative as society is what we all agree is creative. And so since there's a social aspect to it, you have to engage other people. And what I found is that these creative achievers, unlike people who aspire to be creative, these creative achievers all build a community of people around them to actually help them with their creative process.

Starting point is 00:41:01 And, you know, I experienced this obviously with the book where, you know, my name's on the cover, but I had an agent, an editor, a research assistant, 15 feedback readers, two copy editors and a proof reader, and a marketing team, a publicist who emailed you about the book, right? And so, you know, my name's on the cover, but the creative process is really not just me. I was sort of more of a, you know, composer in this process or, you know, a conductor. And you see this when you started looking back at these stories of creatives, you know, Steve Jobs. Well, day one, he had Steve Wozniak. He had a team of people in that garage working with him.

Starting point is 00:41:43 It wasn't him alone in a garage in Palo Alto doing this. He had a team. And one of the things I think these great creatives do that I think is very actionable is that they're self-aware about their weaknesses. And they use other people to fill those gaps. I think oftentimes aspiring creatives think, well, I have to do this all myself. And if there's a skill I don't have, well, I just shouldn't do it. I'm not going to be that successful. But the really great creative achievers, they learn what their gaps are and they fill those

Starting point is 00:42:17 with other people in their creative community. And that's what helps them become successful. They're not scared of their weaknesses. They're aware of their weaknesses. And so that's something I think anyone can immediately do and immediately get better at. Well, I can honestly say, Alan, this book was absolutely fabulous. I'm not just saying that because you're here with us. I mean, I read this before even knowing you, and then I reached out afterwards because it was so good that we just had to bring you on the show.

Starting point is 00:42:46 For anybody listening, the name of the book is The Creative Curve, how to develop the right idea at the right time. And, Alan, thank you so much for coming on the show. Please tell people where they can learn more about you or maybe follow you on Twitter or whatever. Yeah. So the book's website is TheCreativeCurb.com. and you can see, you know, read the preface. You can watch the book trailer, which my very silly four-year-old Corgi appears in. So definitely worth a watch.

Starting point is 00:43:13 And you can check me out online, Alan.xy-Z. And I'm at Alan, A-L-L-E-N on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day, Alan. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right, guys. That was all the Prest and I had for this week's episode of The Investors podcast.

Starting point is 00:43:31 We see each other again next week. Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses or forums, go to The Investorspodcast.com. To get your questions played on the show, go to Asktheinvestors.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP network.

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