Category / creativity

by Nathan Coumbe

Leadership as an experiment

The only way to become a leader, or to improve as a leader if you already are, is to treat everything like one giant science experiment.

Start with a hypothesis: “If I do/try/encourage _____, then ______ will happen/change/get better.”

What are you positing? What are you already presuming? Start with an observation you believe to be true.

Here’s an example:

“My employees feel disconnected from the company’s mission.”(Observation)

“If I meet regularly with them one-on-one to discuss what they believe is most important, then they will feel involved, supported, and I might get some really good ideas about how we can improve things around here.”(Hypothesis and potential solution)

At this point the experiment begins. Set parameters: what do “regular meetings” look like? What sort of questions will I ask? Am I prepared to listen empathically, to really understand how they feel and what they think matters?

You’ll gather data and attempt to put the ideas into practice (another experiment, perhaps). Test the ideas; observe what happens; use the information gathered to make changes as needed; repeat the experiment.

Think like a scientist.

If you think like a scientist, you don’t simply run the experiment and assume that it works. A scientist doesn’t hypothesize something, put on a blindfold, call the experiment a success, and move on to the next idea. The scientist tests, observes, measures, and solicits feedback. When you get that data, it will show either progress or regression – support for your idea or arguments against it. Use that data to adjust your hypothesis and experiment again, until it either works or becomes obvious that your hypothesis was wrong.

You are going to be wrong. Often.

There is only one way to avoid being wrong: don’t try to become a better leader. If you are willing to become a better leader, you must be willing to be wrong. Since you know you are going to be wrong, you need to become comfortable with honesty and transparency.

“This idea that I had, this new way of doing things, it didn’t work. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

Humility and Trust

A leader must be humble and emotionally mature enough to admit errors and missteps. If you attempt to hide your failure, if you put the blame on anyone or anything other than yourself, if you pretend it all worked out when it’s obvious it didn’t, you will lose the trust and respect of those who serve under you. It will be very hard to get that back.

Think like a scientist. Test, observe, measure, and get feedback on your ideas. Experiment.

Most importantly, don’t ignore the data, and apologize when you’re wrong.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Be bad in public

Yesterday’s post talked about perfection getting in the way of your art. Today, I wanted to give a special thanks to John Cochran, Joey Panella, and Rebecca Smith for letting me get out of my own way.

When I was in my early twenties, I majored in Jazz Studies at the University of Southern Mississippi. My weapon of choice was the drum set, and I was pretty average.

I was learning from books, playing in jazz band rehearsals 3 days per week, and shedding in the practice room. Still, I was not great.

I wasn’t great because I had almost no experience.

For whatever reason, John, a guitarist, came to me and asked if I would be willing to play drums with him and the others in a weekly gig at a pub in Hattiesburg. I accepted.

It was not until I started playing 3 hours a day – not very well – every single Tuesday from 10pm-1am, in front of a live audience, that my skills as a musician truly started to develop. That was the experience I needed to truly begin developing as a musician. It was at that point that I began learning on what I needed to focus and develop, so that I would improve. And improve I did.

I say all of that to encourage you to do a few things:

  1. Be brave enough to practice, and suck, in public.
  2. Find a mentor or sponsor that will allow you to suck in public.
  3. Show up day after day whether you suck or not.

I’m not encouraging you to be bad at something for which you’ll never put in the effort to become excellent. I’m saying that you’ll have to be bad at something you want to do before you become good; it helps if you do it in public, and it really helps if someone supports you while you do it in public.

It’s the only way you will start learning what you need to learn.

Thanks John, Joey, and Rebecca.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Perfection is the problem

If you are an artist – a person who seeks to create beneficial change in the world – you are probably a perfectionist.

This is why you never hit “publish” on your blog, why you don’t post your photos on Instagram, or why your songs aren’t on YouTube and SoundCloud. It isn’t because the work you did is bad: it’s because you think if you do just a little bit more to it, it will be perfect.

You’ll never get there.

“An artist’s job is not to be perfect, but to [always] be creating.” – Jeff Goins

The more you create, the more practice you get. You’ll hit that 10,000 hour mark we’ve all heard about. The more practice you get, the better your work will be.

Create something today.

Ship it – today.

Repeat tomorrow.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Separate the chaff from the wheat

Wheat doesn’t grow out of the ground, ready to grind into meal for the creation of bread. It comes with a bunch of extra stuff you don’t want in your loaf. You must first separate the chaff from the wheat. 

The same is true with ideas: good ideas don’t just happen. If you wait to have a good idea, you will never have any ideas at all. 

You won’t know the difference between a good idea and a bad idea if you have no ideas.

Ideas are simply ideas; let them flow through you, without judgement. Afterwards, you can determine the ones that might work from the ones that definitely won’t. 

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by Nathan Coumbe

What is the art that is yours to do?

How do you identify it?

Seth Godin asked the question, “Where are the spots [in your personal/professional/creative life] in which you are most afraid?” 

Find the places and things you are afraid of, and determine why you are afraid of them. Then you can identify what you need to go work on.

“Begin with the thing that scares you.”

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by Nathan Coumbe

The instrument is a means to an end

Instrument – noun 

  1. A tool or instrument; 
  2. a thing used in pursuing an aim; 
  3. an object or device used to produce musical sounds.

The purpose of an instrument is to accomplish a goal. Play a song; perform surgery; type a book; draw a sketch.

Why, then, do we spend so much time focused on learning the tool, the means to the end, rather than pursuing the end itself?

How ridiculous would it be for a surgeon to spend four years of her education learning how to use a scalpel? His end goal is to perform surgery, and the scalpel is simply a tool to help her achieve that goal. So she focuses on what he is trying to accomplish, rather than on the scalpel, and learns to use the scalpel to achieve the goal – helping the patient lying in front of her.

A drum set, trumpet, guitar, or violin is a tool used to create music. And yet, in conversations I’ve had with other musicians and from my own personal experience, an inordinate amount of time in the education of a musician is spent on technical exercises or non-musical experiences. 

I am not diminishing the importance of mastering every facet of one’s tool – a surgeon must be a master with a scalpel; a musician must be in total control of her instrument. But to focus on technique, on the instrument only, while ignoring the purpose for which it was created, is to learn only half of a craft. 

How different would an artist’s life be if every exercise or technical study was drawn from a major work in her field? What if, in learning a song, one created one’s own technical exercises that enabled mastery of the music being played, rather than technique for technique’s sake? 

Learn medicine, not scalpel technique.

Learn to create art, not how to use a pencil.

Lean to play music, not an instrument.

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by Nathan Coumbe

What is failure to you?

If you try something new, you might fail.

Why is that such a debilitating statement? Unless you are attempting to leap between two buildings or run past a speeding car on the interstate, our failures are rarely fatal.

Yet we are paralyzed by the thought of failing at a new side hustle, of being rejected when asking for a date, or of failing at the new hobby we have never before tried.

If being proactive means choosing how one respond’s to a situation, then we can fail proactively. You can look at failure as a reason to never again attempt something, or you can look at it as simply one way the new thing won’t work.

Thomas Edison tried 10,000 ways to make a lightbulb before he found the way that worked. He saw each failure, not as a discouragement to trying again, but as a stepping stone to success.

Choose to see failure as a learning experience and you will only ever improve the next time.

by Nathan Coumbe

The one book I wish I had read before college…

I have decided that this blog will be dedicated to helping others live a more effective, curious, and creative life. To that end, I believe we should start with basic and universal principles of living a good life. There is one book I wish I had read before I began college: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr. Stephen R. Covey.

I first read the book when I was a junior at the University of Southern Mississippi, but I did not take it seriously. I simply believed I had more important obligations. Little did I know that had I practiced the fundamental principles contained within the book, I would have achieved more than I could have dreamed at 24 years old.

These are the seven habits:

  1. Be proactive.
  2. Begin with the end in mind.
  3. Put first things first.
  4. Think win-win.
  5. Seek first to understand, then be understood.
  6. Synergize.
  7. Sharpen the saw.

I will be exploring these in-depth in future posts. I hope that you will be inspired to live a more effective life as you follow along.

by Nathan Coumbe

What if we all just stopped?

Is every single person born with the potential to be creative?

Yes.

So if we are all creative in some unique way (and we are), what would happen if we all stopped working in areas or jobs in which we felt obligated, and we all started working in our own areas of creative genius?

Does each of us have the potential to succeed in our unique creative gift? Is it that many of us never get the chance because of environmental factors or fear?

Could the marketplace support 100% engagement by all creatives? I think so; creativity doesn’t have to be writing, art, or music. Some people are creative in areas of building, business, leadership, plumbing, carpentry, or any other area that a modern society needs in order to thrive.

Food for thought.

by Nathan Coumbe

What are you afraid of?

Why haven’t you started yet? Why have you not launched your side-hustle? Or started tackling that new skill you need to get a new career?

Is it really the fear of failure? If you start a side-hustle and it fails, who cares? You didn’t lose your job. You aren’t out on the streets.

If you try to learn a new skill and find that you are completely uninterested or you don’t have a knack for it, why does that matter? What has it cost you? Absolutely nothing.

So is it failure that scares us, or something else?

Maybe the reality is we don’t feel like we are good enough. We feel like phonies, that if we put something out there, people will see us as such – that we are not experts. We are simply amateurs, and they might scoff at us.

Or maybe it’s the actual shipping of your idea or work that scares you. Because in order to make it work, in order to get it started, you have to tell someone about it. You have to try and get someone to bite.

And they might say no.

Why does this terrify us? It’s just one person, or two, or ten. But you only need one person to say yes in order to get the ball rolling.

And if no one says yes, then make better work, make different work, until someone says yes.

Ask yourself today what you are really afraid of, then see it for what it is and act.