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Posted by Carl Nordgren | Aug 10, 2022 | Columns, Exploring Your Creative Genius, Town Square
Why I champion the term ‘Creatively Entrepreneurial’ but won’t define it:
Twenty years ago, when I took first steps acting on what I understood was my calling — helping each of us and all of us be and become our most creative and entrepreneurial selves — I was brought up short by folks asking me to define creativity.
I couldn’t then. Now I won’t.
I hadn’t felt the need to define it. Now I know it’s important not to define it.
At first it did make me feel a bit like a fraud; the challenges came from professors at Duke when I started teaching courses helping undergrads grow their creative capacities and develop their entrepreneurial instincts and behaviors and it was clear many profs suspected I was a fraud.
But the classes were working from the start. When you remind yourself that we are all born with great creative and entrepreneurial qualities, that they are core to the human condition, it should be no surprise the classes were working considering that latent talent was ready to flourish, and it did, without a precise definition shaping their growth.
As I started to figure out how to be an effective teacher, I realized I wasn’t being intellectually lazy by failing to define my terms but rather I had intuitively plugged into creative wisdom. It’s been a long journey understanding that wisdom and I still get new insights into just how right this position is.
The first milestone was linking two words: ‘Each of us and all of us becoming Creatively Entrepreneurial’ is my call.
In my early days of professing the vital importance of being creative and entrepreneurial I often met folks who conflated being creative with being artistic and being entrepreneurial with starting new ventures. If they weren’t artistic, they concluded they weren’t creative. If they hadn’t started a company, they weren’t allowed to see themselves as entrepreneurial.
From now on we need more folks embracing that they are creative and entrepreneurial, we all benefit when more of us do, so I linked the two words hoping it offered us a chance to rethink who we are and what and how we can contribute. I urge folks to see it as an opportunity to reboot our understandings of what these labels could mean in our lives, believing their importance is of the first order.
And yes, saying Creatively Entrepreneurial is awkward the first few times you try, but I suggest that is a good thing — it reminds us to be intentional.
I found Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s quote “Thinking is more interesting than knowing” the same time I was starting to understand that you don’t learn by consuming new knowledge, you learn by actively producing new knowledge.
So my service to you is best accomplished by guiding your thinking as you construct your own understanding of what it means to be creatively entrepreneurial, one that factors in your interests, your situations, respects your goals, reflects your preferred behaviors.
Fairly recently my journey provided a new perspective: When everything in the world is in a continual state of flux, all your lived worlds always changing and often unpredictably, then it doesn’t make sense that a fixed, precise, and therefore limiting definition of what it means to be creative, or entrepreneurial, or creatively entrepreneurial, would serve you very well.
Instead, your understanding needs to be your understanding, one that is multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, to serve you in all your lived worlds. It needs to be ready to adapt, to be enhanced or extended, to become something new as needed.
Your goal, for it will support you daily and it will help you accomplish your success, should be a creatively entrepreneurial situational intelligence.
To help you as you build your dynamic understanding of being creatively entrepreneurial, I offer a collection of suggestions, indications, facets and aspects to prompt your thinking.
Seeing problems as opportunities to make things better by making better things, designing better services, developing better organizations.
Looking at what others have been looking at and seeing what no one else has seen + Intentionally stepping away from status quo perspectives or thinking, determined to break the chains of the familiar.
Being generative in the increment by being generous and delivering more in the inches and the minutes of daily life.
Being Ingenious….doing what you can with what you have where you are.
Adapting….Developing….Building….Initiating….Imagining
Discovering….Engineering….Narrating….Orchestrating
Growing….Nurturing….Inventing…Combining….Extending
Collaborating….Teaching….Learning….Appreciating….Refreshing
Painting….Leveraging….Experimenting….Designing….Storytelling
Synthesizing….Cultivating….Pollinating….Exploring….Serving
Leading….Risking….Empathizing….Aspiring….Playing….Fostering
Organizing….Celebrating….Thinking….Wondering….Wandering
Singing….Shaping….Constructing….Inquiring….Restoring….Failing
Attempting….Sustaining….Forging….Energizing….Investing
Researching….Fertilizing….Investigating….Helping….Questioning
A current favorite of mine is Appreciating. Can you appreciate a friend’s new idea causing it to appreciate in value?
This list isn’t complete. Where do you find yourself on it? What’s your sense of self as a creatively entrepreneurial person?
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
You can also find more ways to explore your creative genius in this column’s companion radio program, broadcasting on 97.9 The Hill WCHL and posted here on Chapelboro!
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