There are times when I confuse myself so much I could bust. I’ve concluded over the years, with some systematic observation, that the eternal and infinite state of confusion I often find myself in might be the reason, in general, that so many men need sex as a sport instead of intimacy and/or procreation and/or an excuse to like someone. I know… big can of worms there. But go with me here. Let me try to provide an example.
Got into a discussion recently regarding the idear of creativity and business. Someone say that in business management and economics ”creativity” is the key to success. I was drinking a cup of coffee with too much foamed milk and upon hearing this immediately belched foam from the back of my throat onto the suit pants of a colleague. And then I laughed.
Creativity is something sacred. It’s the stuff I call upon to worst-write. Yes, even to worst-write worser than worse. I have given up on God, religion and most of the (in)human attempts at ideology and governing. So in a way, the only thing I believe in is creativity. To equate it with something that proves itself time and time again as silly and idiotic and anti-human is too much for even my stark nerves. Belch.
”I’m sorry,” I said, wiping the rest of the foam that had started to drip out of my left nostril.
”Tommi, what’s the matter? You’re turning pale with every breadth,” my colleague said wiping white and somewhat (now) greenish suds from her pants.
”Business has nothing, ever!, to do with creativity,” I said.
”Oh Tom, looks like we hit a nerve again,” my colleague said.
I proceeded to say, quite forcefully and with fervor, that business has no creativity. If it had creativity it would not be business. Period. At the most there is innovation and I might go as far as saying there is a bit of imagination. I can find no cause to use that word ”creative” regarding business — at least as I’ve come to understand the word. The only thing that comes to mind when thinking about business in the context of how it evolves, changes and/or moves is inertia.
Then my colleague said, ”What about the iPod?”
”There’s not an ounce of creativity in that thing, nor in anything else that company makes. All they do is regurgitated. They ride on the laurels of something or someone else. Again, you could use the word innovative or at the least imaginative. Think of the WalkMan. The uncomplicated reality is the iPod was all already been done a long time ago. Copied. Status Quo. Sorry. No creativity there.”
I hate being right most of the time. The biggest problem with being right is that I’m usually only right inside my own mind. Unless drinking coffee with “colleagues” that I have to be with in order to earn a living. Still. You can talk till you are blue in the face but there is, if you’re rational and are capable of thought, not one example of creativity in business.
Please someone send me an email with an example that proves me wrong.
For the sake of not getting completely lost in my own mind I turned to a dictionary for help. Here’s what I found.
Creativity:
1. The quality of being creative
2. The ability to create
Creative:
1. marked by the ability or power to create; given to creating
2. having the quality of something created rather than imitated
3. managed so as to get around legal or conventional limits, as in creative financing; also deceptively arranged so as to conceal or defraud, as in creative accounting
Create:
1. to bring into existence, as in God created the heaven and the earth
2. a: to invest with a new form, office, or rank, as in was created a lieutenant; b: to produce or bring about by a course of action or behavior, as in her arrival created a terrible fuss, c: create new jobs
3. cause, occasion
4. a: to produce through imaginative skill, as in create a painting; b: Design, as in creates dresses
The best definition and that which gives me the strength to hold on to (my) outrageous idears is this:
Create (cont.):
5. Intransitive senses: to make or bring into existence something new
So do I now have to start thinking about what the word ”new” means? I know, post Clinton, it’s now good that we start (re)defining words based on subjectivity. It just gets my gander that people have lost touch with what things mean.
Of course, it doesn’t stop there.
Goethe said something interesting: ”creativity is a child of solitude”.
Try to find that in ”business”!
Source for definitions: Merriam-Webster-10thEdition online.
Rant on.
-tgs-
worstwriter 