The Perfect Habitat of Unstoppable Creativity: How to Build an Empire with Ideas
Updated on February 29, 2020
What is entrepreneurship synonymous with?
Innovation.
Innovation is the process of thinking creatively and transforming the way people once did things. It takes a very creative mind to see how an existing way of life can be improved to provide a better experience by implementing an idea that has not yet been imagined.
The world has advanced tremendously in recent times. Creative minds in the 20th century produced: the airplane, air conditioning, banking, the television, and the internet, to name only a few.
Arguably, however, the comfort provided by certain innovations has made people content with the relative ease of life and uninterested in complex intellectual work.
Most are too lazy to strain their brains when they are not forced to do so.
As innovation seems to be slowing down, there is now a call for people to turn on their creative minds, so that society can advance even further.
Who are the people most inclined to step up to the challenge of thinking creatively?
Entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs & Creativity
Entrepreneurs are meant to be industry disruptors.
They envision a product or service and think strategically, planning how they will challenge the existing solution. Entrepreneurs will study the ins and outs of the process being used, work to implement their own twist to the existing formula, and vigorously push their transformation into the marketplace.
Is an entrepreneur’s creative process fueled purely by competition, or is there a desire to improve the way people experience life?
At heart, an entrepreneur is extremely competitive, they have to be the best at what they do. When you add creativity to that mindset, you have an individual who is hell bent on being known for not only creating a more successful business, but also for possessing the most innovative mind.
Take Steve Jobs. Jobs was an entrepreneur who was determined to change the way people interacted with technology.
If a design did not meet his standards, he would be furious, because his creative mind functioned with the need to exceed previously established expectations. He pushed his team to design his vision for innovative technology, and what came was: the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and many iPrograms. These products disrupted not only the computer and phone industries, but also the entertainment and programming industries.
That is what you call innovation!
Can Creativity be Taught?
You may not be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg, producing an innovative idea that affects the lives of billions of people — but you can learn how to be creative enough to turn your ideas into reality, building an entrepreneurial empire you control.
The reason most people don’t unleash their creativity is because they are afraid of pursuing their ideas. Many entrepreneurs are guilty of doing this as well. They play it small because they are afraid to take a risk that they think is too great for them to achieve.
They kill their creative ideas in favor of just getting by, avoiding any chance of failure.
When it comes to creativity, you have to understand that failure may be a result, and you can’t be afraid of that.
Sure, no one wants to fail. Failure feels like an insult, it says that you didn’t know what you were doing. But failure also helps you learn how to improve your process — to increase your chances for successful results the next time you pursue your goal.
Steve Jobs failed many times. Richard Branson failed many times. These are innovative people who possess creative minds. Failure didn’t halt their ambition to build great companies, it only made them rethink their process and think even bigger.
As an entrepreneur, your mind is your greatest weapon.
You can develop your mind to learn and produce great things, but this only occurs when you force it to grow and operate on a level beyond your average thinking.
When your mind is fully opened, ideas that can change your life will begin pouring out of you. Business pioneers have built great empires based on their creative ideas — Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and Bill Gates are just a few.
Once you choose to open your creative mind, and explore your big ideas, you can build your own entrepreneurial empire too.
What are the Habits to Improve Creativity as an Entrepreneur?
There are habits that you can implement into your life that will help you improve your creative thinking.
Train Your Mind to Only See Opportunities
Pessimism is an idea killer.
You don’t have to be delusional in your optimism, in fact, being unrealistic is a terrible mindset for an entrepreneur. However, you must believe that any problem can be solved and that you have that solution.
This trains your mind to find alternative methods when faced with problems.
Example: Your job as a content media specialist abruptly ends. As the content editor for a company that focused on placing corporate executives and highly successful entrepreneurs in magazines and websites, you had access to top publications. For reasons unknown to you, your company decides to go a new direction and releases you from your duties. This was your most lucrative source of income, and now you have to replace it immediately, or just do without it. Instead of accepting your loss, you decide to come up with an alternative method to replace your lost income.
Successful business people reached out to you, and opened the emails you sent for request to interview because of your ability to get them placement in top publications. You aren’t able to place them so easily anymore, publications worked with your company and not you, but you are able to provide education on how the process works.
Now you are teaching how to handle the process via your blog, podcast and webinars. You go from one-on-one coaching, to having workshops, to having a best-selling book dedicated to the subject, to creating monthly packages to manage client placements under your own internet shingle. You’ve started a service-as-a-service business, and you may not have even realized it.
Having a good source of income was good, but more was possible. Once your income was taken away from you, you took your existing skill-set and amplified it. Choosing to find a solution to your problem made you more money than when you had no major issues to overcome.
Problems are usually opportunities to improve yourself and accomplish more, but it will take creative thinking to find your solution.
Create Challenges to Overcome
Being content is just a step away from failure.
Your creative mind becomes dormant when it is not constantly being used. When you can perform your tasks without much thought, it has just become memorized repetition, probably from months or years of following standard operating procedures.
You need new challenges to refresh your creative mind.
Example: You have a successful ecommerce business. You have dealt with every problem that can possibly exist when it comes to selling products online. In your mind, everything is the same now, nothing challenges your skills.
You need something new to pursue, so you start to learn about cars. Cars have always been a passion of yours, but you never knew how to repair them. As you learn about the mechanics of cars, your creative mind reawakens.
Being challenged by learning about cars has fueled your passion to innovate in your business. By gaining a better understanding of how each part within the car works together to make the car run smoothly, you now clearly see how each process in your business’s operations works together to produce a well functioning business. Since you know so much about selling online, you develop a full service marketing firm to handle all of your clients marketing needs. Your tagline: “We go under the hood to improve your marketing performance!”
Going under a car’s hood to fix its problems made you look at your business differently. Instead of only focusing on the sales, you now are passionate about understanding a business’s entire marketing process so that you can implement a complete strategy for growth.
Make Your Comfort Zone Uncomfortable
Comfort is what stifles creativity.
When you are comfortable, you really have no reason to change. You have an easy routine. Life can change at any given moment, and if you are not prepared for a change, you can get blindsided, making it hard to recover. Ask anyone who has ever survived a Google penalty update.
Creative people thrive because they choose to live as uncomfortably as possible. When you are never truly comfortable, you force your mind to focus on constant improvement.
Example: Sell everything you don’t need and live minimally. Only take care of your basic needs and cut all distractions.
You will find that your mind becomes focused on self-improvement. Things that once weighed on you now have no control over you. Instead of your mind being restrained by meaningless crap, your creative mind is now free to operate.
You don’t have to live on the side of the street in order to be uncomfortable, but creating a little discomfort will teach you how to be resourceful and think strategically to produce the outcome you truly desire.
Leonardo da Vinci disappeared for years, only to remerge and enjoy the most creative years of his life. When you shut yourself off from the world, the only thing you have to entertain you is your mind. Those are usually the moments you experience your most creative bursts of thoughts.
Study the Interaction of People
Watching to learn how people interact with other people will show you what type of products and services you should develop.
People are living, breathing case studies, who give you real-time information that you can analyze and experiment with.
Example: You notice that people come out to entrepreneur networking events always talking about their business ideas, but they never actually start a business. Talking about being an entrepreneur excites them, but when they are away from the motivating crowd, entrepreneurship becomes too intimidating for them to deal with on their own.
You decide to start an entrepreneur boot camp. The program is called, Turning Wantrepreneurs Into Entrepreneurs. It is a business focused on making people take entrepreneurship seriously instead of just continuously talking about being an entrepreneur.
Your business develops their entrepreneurial mindset, teaches people how to turn their idea into a business, and gives them the option to finally become an entrepreneur.
Studying the behavior of people teaches you how to design a business that performs well amongst a particular group of people. As you learn how people think and act, you become better at anticipating their needs and wants, developing the products and services that they will pay for.
Surround Yourself with Risk Takers
Based on the law of averages , you are the average of the 6-10 people you surround yourself with.
Surround yourself with average people, you think and act as an average person. When you surround yourself with risk takers, you are more inclined to take risks. Risks takers tend to be creative thinkers, so they need creative outlets to feed their restless minds.
Example: Your life follows a safe routine and your business operates in the same way. Neither your life nor your business grows at all, they just remain stagnant. You notice that other entrepreneurs are having great success and living life on their own terms. They seem to be fearless.
You reach out to a successful entrepreneur and ask him his secret. His answer, “I surround myself with the best people, and they are all risks takers.”
You begin to do the same and notice that over time you become more outgoing, forcing yourself to seek out bigger opportunities. You have dealt with some rejection and a few failures, but you keep grinding away because the success of your peers motivates you to keep thinking bigger.
After two years of consistently thinking and working, opportunity finally knocks on your door. All your hustling and learning from your risk taking peers has finally paid off.
Your creativity can be ignited when you witness the creative spark of successful people.
Watching how they learn and how they operate teaches you how to take your own creativity and act on your thoughts. Sometimes it isn’t the big idea that is holding us back, it is just not knowing how to execute our ideas. We almost need to be shown how it works.
Are You Ready to Embrace Your Creativity and Build Your Empire?
The most successful entrepreneurs, the game changers, are creative thinkers. Their minds are always exploring new ideas, thinking of ways to shift life as it currently exists.
Most of us are blessed with the ability to imagine. Only a few of us see our imaginations as bursting with possibilities. If you want to thrive as an entrepreneur, you must possess the ability to tap into your creative mind, and turn your big ideas into lucrative businesses. It pays to be creative!