10 Bright Ideas to Build Your Career: Reject Convention, Work With Friends, and More
Image c/o Steven Cordes
During the course of a successful project, there’s often a moment where “the creative factor” of an individual takes the work from good to great. Our stories sit in the intersection of craft, career, and culture, highlighting smart solutions and innovative thinking that help remind us all: Creativity is a skill we can hone, and it is not only reserved for artists.
We believe you can cultivate more creativity through practice and exposure. But any creator knows we also need to constantly learn—new skills, ways of working, and career steps we never considered taking, such as the entrepreneurial path. Come to The Creative Factor to read and learn. Then go and do. On that note, here are 10 of our brightest ideas to help you build your career so you can develop unique and memorable work.
1. Even If You Lose Your Sight, You Can Still Create
Former LEGO Senior Art Director Morten Bonde is going blind. (When Bonde looks at someone’s face all he can see is one of their eyes—it’s like looking through a cardboard tube.) Still, he hasn’t let that stop him from making great stuff. Over the past few years, he has transformed himself and how he creates, such as focusing more on storytelling than art direction. “My conceptual way of thinking helps my writing,” he says. “I have my mind, my creativity, my ideas. I can do my job because I can imagine.”
Full interview here: Morten Bonde Lost His Sight But Sees New Possibilities
2. Remember, Creative People are the Best Possible Entrepreneurs
Don’t just take our word for it; listen to Working Not Working co-founder Adam Tompkins. “We get paid to come up with 100 ideas for any company, every week. Then 98% to 100% die every week,” he says. “Then the following week, you do the same thing for a completely different category. We’re used to figuring out ways to solve problems, and then quickly discard them.” Truth!
Full interview here: How Two Guys Who "Know Photoshop" Built Working Not Working
3. To Shake Up the Traditional, Hire the Non-Traditional
It’s always funny to see someone loudly proclaim they want to shake something up…then they hire the same-old types of people to do it. What outcome do they expect? Alex Daly, founder of her namesake, 20-person consultancy, knew she had to take a completely different approach to redefine modern comms. “Our team members have a diverse professional backgrounds and we apply that diversity to storytelling,” she says. “My background is in documentary film. I was a writer and a fundraiser. We have somebody on the team that has worked in film production. We have somebody that worked as a journalist and writer, another a graphic designer, another a corporate strategist.” Together they bring non-traditional experience to the comms table and that shows up in their work for their clients, including Art Blocks, Freitag, Pentagram, and Penguin Random House.
Full interview here: Alex Daly: From Solo Founder to Thriving Team
4. Hire Folks Who Have Exhausted Their Home Industries
Brooklyn-based HUSH tends to hire people who have timed out of some of the other industries. “We’ll get someone who worked in motion graphics for 10 years doing amazing animations and work for TV,” says founding partner David Schwarz. “They have all this knowledge about timing, pacing, graphic design, and motion as expression, but they no longer want to deliver everything in a 16x9 frame.” At HUSH, they can apply their knowledge to something else, like animating lighting effects that are 40-feet wide. “Now it’s no longer a rectangle, but multidimensional, and speed, timing, perspective are all new territories to explore at scale,” says Schwarz, who adds, “We love the uncharted territory of what's possible.”
Full interview here: How We Frame Our Work Through a Sustainable Lens
5. Always Be Ready to Play Madison Square Garden at a Moment’s Notice
Brooklyn saxophone player Ben Golder-Novick had just gotten his Covid booster shot when Dave Matthews unexpectedly texted him. The ask? Could Ben play in the band’s two sold out shows over the weekend at Madison Square Garden (the regular saxophone player had gotten Covid). Ben immediately replied yes, and the next 24 hours were crazy. For one, he didn’t even have all the instruments needed for the band: tenor sax, soprano sax, baritone sax, and flute. And there was also the need to learn 50 song horn arrangements in no time. Ben practiced right up until the last minute and pulled off two stellar, life-changing sets. “One quote that got me through this gig comes from filmmaker Robert Rodriguez who told a group of filmmakers, ‘Everyone who is here has a gift. You’re already creative. Now learn to be technical. Because if you're creative, and you're technical, you're unstoppable.’ That comes to mind here because there were so many technical things I had to figure out during these shows, from using instrument mics I’d never used before to using a new wireless in-ear mic system to the instrument switches to all of the other tricky logistics of playing in Madison Square Garden. When I was in my early 20s, I would just show up and play. And I realized I needed to work on the technical side of performing. So I learned to be both creative and technical and that helped me here when I got to play on one of the biggest stages of my life.”
Full interview here: Living the Dream
6. By All Means, Go From Biomedical Engineering to Pop Culture Photographer
Early in his career, photographer Ahmen Klink displayed two sides: By day, he studied cardiovascular disease in New York City. At night, he photographed area concerts. Small show gigs led to assignments from Pitchfork and bigger festivals starring Jay-Z, Coldplay, and Metallica. That showed him he could do this work as a career and he went all in as a professional photographer. “It wasn’t a whim,” says Klink.” It had been a pretty steady build of five, six, seven years of honing the craft of photography.”
Full interview here: From Bioengineer to Music Photographer
7. Work With Your Friends
You’ve heard it before: Don’t work with your friends. BUCK co-founder Ryan Honey takes a different approach for their 600-person team. “We have some people at BUCK who have never worked anywhere else,” he says. “There are a lot of people at work who I consider my best friends, including my business partners. That’s what makes us strong and able to scale.” And the results speak for themselves–BUCK’s employee retention rate is 96%, well ahead of the 82% workforce average.
Full interview here: How to Build a Sustainable Creative Culture
8. Take Skin the Game
Having an ownership stake in your or your client’s companies can completely rewire the chemistry of how you work in a positive way. “From a culture perspective, being invested in something sharpens our focus as designers and increases the trust with our clients or partners,” says Ammunition founder Robert Brunner. “When we have skin in the game, it makes us look even more deeply at the company's business, and we can better push people to make decisions and drive products out the door.” Not to mention that it motivates everyone involved and aligns incentives: The product succeeds–everyone wins.
Full interview here: Skin in the Game
9. Reject the Conventional Narrative
If you are launching a company, there is this narrative out there that you should drop out of school, live in your parent’s basement, and build something into a unicorn. Have fun with that!
SheFly founders Charlotte Massey and Georgia Grace Edwards knew there was another way. They graduated, took full-time jobs, made some money, and used their nights and weekends to design SheFly’s apparel and develop their IP portfolio. “We were also young and wanted to build our skills and network, so we could bring those to the company,” says Massey. “I want people to know that it's okay to have something be a side hustle for a long time. Then you can pick the right moment when you have the momentum and when you know that you putting your time in now is going to make the difference to quit and go all in.”
Full interview here: How We Redesigned Women's Outdoor Rec Pants
10. Just Chill With the Follow Up Emails
Ueno founder and Twitter director Halli Thorleifsson says what many of us are thinking, but might not always say out loud. Here is but one gem: “We used to send letters. They took weeks or months to arrive. It could be a year before we got a reply. So, just chill on the follow up emails. I’ll reply when I feel like it.”
Full interview here: 10 Design Principles, Musings, and Contrarian Takes We Can Get Behind
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