The Most Important Creative Trait (According to Creative People)
The most important creative trait isn’t hard work. It’s not passion or perseverance.
Empathy? No.
Desire? No.
The ability to put up with people dumbing down your electric ideas? Kind of, but no.
We’ve interviewed more than 100 designers, writers, architects, musicians, artists, photographers, entrepreneurs, even a self-described “creative civil servant,” and one trait keeps popping up: relentless curiosity. Or, as writer Wright Thompson puts it, the need to know everything about everything.
“The people I know who are really good at this don’t turn it on and off for work,” he says. “They don’t ever turn it off because it can’t be turned off. The stories are the accidental byproduct of them living their lives.”
Fellow author Elizabeth Gilbert has traveled the world far and wide to eat, pray, and love. And she, too, has come to the same conclusion about this trait. “The creators who most inspire me are not necessarily the most passionate, but the most curious,” she says. “Curiosity is what keeps you working steadily, while hotter emotions come and go.”
Bosses can halt projects, but they can’t hold back your desire to look at the world around you and want to know more. Of course, you don’t just tell someone to be curious. You need to cultivate and create the conditions for it.
“It takes trust that you can actually experiment and take risks to ask a question that is silly or question why something has always been done that way,” says Jessie McGuire, Managing Director at Thought Matter. “We bring people in who want to share their stories, and we strive to create a ‘brave space’ for people to tell their stories. And it’s not just for our capital-C creatives. The person who leads our finances has to feel curious as well.”
Here’s another learning we can share — there is no such thing as a linear career path. You have a stint here and a stretch there, and likely a wild detour that took you in a completely new direction. And that’s all while new technologies significantly impact your skill set and job prospects. “No matter what comes along, if you're adaptable and curious, you’re going to be able to survive,” says Justin Gignac, CEO at Working Not Working.
One of Working Not Working’s core values is fight the robots. “When the machines rule our humanity and creativity will be the only weapon we have, wield it ferociously,” says Gignac. If you’re worried about a robot taking your job, remember that they don’t know what it’s like to be human, to be insecure, to feel confident. They’re programmed, while you have the ability to learn more and expand your thinking, as long as you let your curiosity take you there.
Sometimes it takes you to the most unexpected places. Ali Marmaduke, an Oregon native, began his career as a journalist in Yemen, then moved to conflict zones in South Sudan and Sri Lanka to work for an NGO. Now, as the Strategy Director at Bulletproof in Amsterdam, he works with clients such as Heineken and Booking. (He was also named a spy at one point, but that’s for another story.)
These career chapters don’t fit into the conventional box, and yet looking back, Marmaduke sees a clear thread that connects them. “Curiosity and storytelling bring it all together,” he says. “I know that’s the biggest cliché: that strategists need to be curious. But I love to write, and even more than writing, I love to report. I love to learn new things about new subjects and have hypotheses to investigate, to prove or disprove, and then write compelling narratives that inform people or change their opinions about something.”
One of our favorite quotes on the subject brings us back to Wright Thompson who says he finds the brainstorm meeting absurd. Amen! “Everybody is looking for ideas all the time, like breathing, or they are not doing it at all,” he says. “If you have to come in at a set time to come up with ideas, I don’t want to be anywhere near you.”
(Quick side note, Thompson’s curiosity once drove him to go down the rabbit hotel on the physics of catching a Marlin grander fish, or Marlin that weighs 1,000 pounds.“It’s the craziest sh*t you’ve ever seen in your life,” he says. “When you hear the line go out, it’s like a submarine. Like what’s going to come out of the water? Red October? I am fascinated by the human urge to catch them. I mean, why?”)
Good ideas rarely materialize in a conference room. They happen out and about in the world. So strive to be a curious citizen of the world. “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious,” Walt Disney once said. “And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
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