Tactical Creativity: How to think like an artist.

I never thought I was a creative person because I didn't know what a creative person was.

Here is one of the easiest tells you lack self awareness: when you are given a piece of feedback that you don’t see in yourself. This happens to me… well all the time. So I guess I lack self awareness (working on it).

Recently, someone told me, “Eric you’re one of the most creative people I ever met.”

I laughed, you must not know many people. The more I thought about this though, I began to expand my idea of what a creative person is. I spent 10 years living in a New York loft - surrounded by creatives. Visual artists, musicians, dancers, singers, songwriters, photographers and sculptors. They were, in my mind, ‘artists’ in the purest sense of the word.

Some wore bohemian clothes, smoked cigarettes (and weed, lots of it), drank gin and were generally free spirits. One of my favorite neighbors, a trained Opera singer, would sit on the roof our building shirtless, sip espresso and smoke Marlboro Lights in the sun every morning. He and I would make small talk because I was also on the roof, also shirtless, fielding sales calls and blasting Slack messages. I didn’t need nicotine or espresso, I had cortisol and crippling anxiety.

Yet I realized, my view of an ‘artist’ was one dimensional. Being a creative is not being an anti-capitalist, tortured soul who sits in cafes waiting for inspiration to strike. On the contrary, any “successful artist” is incredibly disciplined, hard-working and business-savvy.

I thought about how have I become creative in my life, and I traced it back to my 13 year old self, skateboarding in the alleyway behind my parent’s house in Central Pennsylvania. Skateboarding was fringe in the 90s, there were no skateparks, no Tony Hawk Pro Skater, no skateboarding in the Olympics. My friends and I would take scrap wood and build ramps, including disassembling an old ping pong table with some of my dad’s 4x4s laying around the garage into a kicker to perform our tricks.

It’s about taking seemingly unrelated concepts, finding common threads and producing something unique. That is fundamentally… art. That is what makes a creative person, creative. They see things not as they are, but what they can become, when others don’t.

Creativity is about iteration - a willingness to try stuff, see what works, and correct as you go. There will be frustration, failure, mistakes, and setbacks but the ability to keep trying until you get it just right is what makes an artist, an artist.

Do you have questions about vocation, identity and calling that you’d like me to address on my podcast? If so, respond to this post.