2/18/2019 1 Powerful Way to Boost Your Creativity.

– The Post-Grad Survival Guide – Medium

1 Powerful Way to Boost Your

Creativity.
Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly
unconnected.

Ravi Shankar Rajan Follow

Jan 20 · 6 min read

Image Credits: unsplash.com Raw Pixel

What is common between Pablo Picasso, Johannes Kepler, and

Elon Musk?

· They are Powerful Innovators.

· They are all “Expert-Generalists”.

And Being an Expert-Generalist is one of the most powerful ways to

boost your creativity. Let us explore a bit further.

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Orit Gadiesh, chairman of Bain & Co, who coined the term, describes
the expert-generalist as:

“Someone who has the ability and curiosity to master and collect expertise
in many di erent disciplines, industries, skills, capabilities, countries, and
topics., etc. He or she can then, without necessarily even realizing it, but
often by design:

(1) Draw on that palette of diverse knowledge to recognize patterns and

connect the dots across multiple areas and

(2) Drill deep to focus and perfect the thinking.”

So What Orit means here is that the one thing that separates the great
innovators from everyone else is that they seem to know a lot about a
wide variety of topics. And their wide knowledge base supports
their creativity.

Albert Einstein was trained in physics, but to formulate his law of

general relativity, he taught himself an area of mathematics far
removed from his expertise, Riemannian geometry.

James Watson and Francis Crick combined discoveries in X-ray

di raction technology, chemistry, evolutionary theory, and
computation to solve the puzzle of the double helix.

Steve Jobs, of course, drew on insights from his study of calligraphy

and a rich understanding of design to create a new breed of computing
devices.

And so on……………

Sounds Hard?

But being an expert-generalist is not hard at all. All this requires is

devoting a concentrated block of time on your personal development
every day.

As you go further, you broaden your knowledge horizons and you start
connecting the seemingly unconnected dots from various disciplines.
And that is when you see a surge in your creativity and your analytical
abilities to being able to compare analogies between disciplines.

And here are some simple ways to be an expert-generalist.

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Learn a Completely New Skill.

Noted psychologist Vygotsky argued in 1978 argues that learning is
most e ective within the “zone of proximal development.” I know this
sounds like a psychology lecture so, in simple terms, it is the space slightly
beyond a learner’s current knowledge base and skills level, but a place
where learning is still within a person’s reach.”

In simple words, we are talking about discomfort here. Constructive

discomfort. And this is one of the prerequisites to be creative. After all,
being creative requires doing something that has not been done before.
If you are not willing to do something new, then it’s hard to be creative.

However, creativity also requires knowledge. In order to do something

that has not been done before in some area, you have to know a lot
about that discipline. Creative painters need to know a lot about art
and painting. Creative scientists need to be skilled in their science.

Creativity often requires drawing analogies between one body of

knowledge and another. Pablo Picasso merged Western art techniques
with elements of African art. He was struck by the way African artists
combined multiple perspectives into a single work, and that helped
lead to the development of cubism.

Similarly, Johannes Kepler struggled to understand how the planets

could move around the sun and drew on his knowledge of light and
magnetism to try to understand the force that moved the planets.

So, in short, learn something new and learn it deep so that its analogies
can be mined later in a completely di erent eld. This new perspective
of looking at things is what leads to creativity.

The more that you broaden and deepen your base of knowledge,
the more opportunities you will have to be creative.

Be an Open Networker
Ron Burt, Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of
Chicago Booth School of Business conducted several studies to
understand the commonalities between extraordinary innovators in
multiple disciplines.

Here’s the amazing insight he discovered: the one variable that

explains 65% of the variance in someone’s career success is having an
open network.

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And the most successful people tend to be what Ron Burt calls Brokers.

Brokers tend to belong to multiple networks and are able to speak the
insider lingo and translate to help move information or make
introductions of people across those network lines. And this dissipation
and assimilation of knowledge in social circles is what makes them
insanely creative in their respective elds.

let’s say you attend a road engineering conference, which is outside

your area. It’s going to take a little while, going to be uncomfortable to
meet people that you don’t know, to learn a new language.

The bene ts aren’t going to be as clear up front, because it’s just a

whole new area. But then over the long term of doing that, you’re going
to be much more innovative, and be able to make connections that
other people wouldn’t. And this will give you that edge later when you
start drawing analogies between road engineering and your respective
eld and come up with a brand new way of thinking.

Always remember if you want to be a successful broker, you must

decide to be open to di erent experiences, however uncomfortable
they can be.

And Lastly, be a Voracious Reader.

To be an expert-generalist, people at least need 3 skills and the value
lies at the intersection of those. One must combine a hard skill, a soft
skill, and a perspective to become an expert-generalist.

For example, Elon Musk combines programming, reading, and

existential philosophy. Warren Bu ett combines value investing,
consumer psychology, and humanities. Marissa Mayer combines
computer science, management, and linguistics.

And one of the ways this can be done is to be a voracious reader.

Warren Bu et reads 500 pages a day. Elon Musk completes 2 books a
week. Charles Munger never goes to sleep without reading 50 pages.
The list is endless.

Bain & Company chairman Orit Gadiesh, attests to the value of being a
voracious reader across many domains in her own career, saying:

“I bring into my work everything I do; all of my past consulting projects, all
of my readings [100+ books a year]. I read novels. I read about physics,
mathematics, history, biographies, art. I’ve read Japanese literature,

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Korean literature, English literature, American literature, Israeli

literature, and on and on. I bring all of that somehow into my work. And I
think that makes me better at what I do. It also makes life more
interesting.”

Not only does regular reading help make you smarter, but it can
actually increase your brain power. Just like going for a jog exercises
your cardiovascular system, reading regularly improves memory
function by giving your brain a good work out.

With age comes a decline in memory and brain function, but regular
reading may help slow the process, keeping minds sharper longer,
according to research published in Neurology. Frequent brain exercise
was able to lower mental decline by 32 percent,

What’s more, you increase your value as a professional. Those who can
bridge the gap between silos of knowledge are far more in demand than
others who have specialized knowledge in one eld.

And knowledge happens to be the only resource which grows by

sharing. The more you share, you more you break the glass ceiling of
your capacity and conquer new frontiers. Simple as that!

As Michel Eyquem de Montaigne has rightly said.

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that

of others.

About the author-:

Ravi Rajan is a global IT program manager based out of Mumbai,

India. He is also an avid blogger, Haiku poetry writer, archaeology
enthusiast, and history maniac. Connect with Ravi on LinkedIn,
Medium and Twitter.

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