| On This Page: |
|---|
| In the Trenches |
| Other Books |
| Elusive Proof |
| Garden Eels and 120 Feet Below Surface |
The first edition of AlwaysCreative was published in 1999, but the story goes further back starting circa 1985.
In the Trenches
With an accounting degree from a leading Boston business school, I never really thought of myself as creative per se but many of my professors did. After college, I opened my own business and for the next 10-plus years worked in the communication and printing industries where I enjoyed tremendous exposure to leading brands and the entire creative food chain.
I worked with, and was a vendor to, many leading metro-NY companies and their in-house creative professionals – from graphic designers, brand experts, CEO’s, marketing directors, PR executives, print buyers, toy designers and host of other marketing and communication pros. Hence at that time, I was constantly exposed to some of the best of the best – a kind of human osmosis one could say looking back.
During most of my client meetings back then, whether I was reviewing and quoting job specs, delivering mockups and proofs, or just kibitzing over lunch, inevitably I would find myself asking those customers about their creative process – e.g., how they approached their work, why the choose the type and colors they selected, what they thought constituted creative success, etc.
Some of their stories made it into this book and many were unknowingly at the time great creative mentors, and to this day, their wisdom shared remains as potent now as it was then.
But along those first 10-years out of college, I also enjoyed similar conversations with others outside of work – many of whom did not think of themselves as creative.
Often these self-proclaimed non-creatives would promptly state, “I’m not creative!” and state so with such certainty and conviction that it gave me pause. Later I would begin to challenge these discussions by proposing that everybody is creative on some level and that there are differing levels and forms of creativity – e.g., like how some people are creative with colors, other people are creative with music and sounds, others are creative with numbers and finance, etc.
Other Books
Then I began to explore professional books on the subject, but began to get restless and grew frustrated as many of the books seemed to portray creativity as the warm-fuzzies of brainstorming, which IMHO is only but one part of the creative process.
I also started to get objective feedback from other people along my professional path who also told me they thought I was very creative. In fact, one evening I even got a call from a client-CEO who called to tell me directly that he thought I was “one of the most creative people he had ever known and worked with” and just told his team the same thing earlier that afternoon when they were considering retaining my firm. And this was from a man who was a serial entrepreneur, marketing expert and at the time, a man who was running a $120 million ad agency that was owned by the mega-conglomerate that he had sold his previous business too the year before.
This conversation along with other forces and encounters propelled me to start to think of myself as not only creative, but perhaps as a professional creative consultant. Thus the growing idea of becoming a full-time creative consultant and sell services that come naturally to me, do what I love doing, help others do similar for themselves, and earn a decent living from et al., was an idea and business angle I just had to pursue.
Of course there are many avenues to starting a consulting career and starting one’s own consulting firm is one of them. And another method of jump starting a new consulting practice includes writing a book that proves the author’s expertise in a field or subject, thereby worthy of consulting retainers.
Given my aversion to the current crop of professional creativity materials, I started to reason that if I could prove creativity is a real force, akin to how Einstein proved his Theory of Relativity, then I might have a foundation to build a book around and thereby separate myself from the abundance of other creativity books and consultants in the field.
Elusive Proof
But to do so would require math – that is, a mathematical proof for creativity as a force akin to Einstein’s E=MC2 math that supported his Theory of Relativity.
The years marched on and around 1994 my career took a turn as I started to migrate into the digital communication industries (Note: I officially launched The Avanti Group, Inc. in 1995 but that is story for another day).
All along, I continued to noodle on possible unified creative field theories and how I could present the math that would stand the test of time and remove forever the right for anybody to denounce their creativity, as well as prove without a doubt that creativity, like electricity, is a real force – for more about this, read the 2nd edition’s preface.
Then one day, well technically one evening at an art-wine tasting networking event at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, I remember meeting a teacher at that event. Standing by one of the evening’s makeshift wine bars in the museum, tucked over by the rare-gems exhibits, a couple of us attendees got to rapping about teaching methods, styles and current trends when this teacher shared the Theory of Knowledge and attributed it to Einstein.
Turns out Einstein wasn’t responsible for said theory of knowledge, but the theory immediately impressed me that it might be relevant to my search for the math to prove the science of creativity.
Garden Eels and 120 Feet Below Surface
It finally came together for me in the late 90′s, in particular while on a scuba trip in Kona Hawaii.
While talking about my theory in-between dives, I heard myself blurt out 8th grade geometry for calculating the area of circles and boom. It was then that the proverbial eureka light bulb went off thus providing the mathematical formula and basis for the first edition of AlwaysCreative.
Now with math in hand and chapters in the works, the next step was to go about finding a publisher. I had some wonderful introductions and flirted with some of the top international book publishers in Manhattan. But this was also during the go-go dot-com days and the traditional publishers at that time wanted all worldwide intellectual property rights.
As a new author, I had little chance of preserving my digital and web rights with these standard book deals, so I made the decision to self-publish thus preserving my future options. Around the same time, I was also involved with many musicians and could see how traditional record label publishing deals were holding those artists back. So in hindsight, I was lucky.
Which brings us to 2010 when I re-edited the original book, created the new 2nd edition as an e.book and built this site.
And while I would love to continue to sell as many e.books as possible, the real goal of this site is to inspire ongoing discussion and exploration into the science of creativity and it’s day-to-day application, especially within entrepreneurial realms mixed with the digital context.
To be continued …
Cordially,
Chuck Scott
June 12th, 2010 – Ridgefield Connecticut