The Clever Creative, Languishing in the Genius Trap
July 15, 2008 | Posted by: Carl Alviani
photo: FatMandy
The single most effective way to improve your prospects as a creative professional is to improve your creative skills.
Despite the millions of words of advice and discussion that have been traded on the web over the years about how to market yourself, that sentence is almost certainly the truest, most useful advice you're going to find.
As creatives whose jobs are tightly intertwined with marketing, branding, and other forms of perceptional influence, it's often tempting to focus more on the sizzle than the steak, even (or especially) where our own skills are involved. To a degree, this is useful, as the problem of the talented professional who never scores the right job due to poor self-promotion is a very real one. It's my suspicion, though, that the opposite is more pervasive: the designer, illustrator, or creative director who believes an improvement in self-marketing will always yield greater rewards than simply getting better at what he does.
There are a couple of explanations for this. The first has to do with this tendency among creatives to hyper-focus on marketing; we are, after all, frequently asked to take a weak concept and make it as appealing as possible, through adjustments in its physical design, surface treatment, advertising, packaging, or some other touch point that generates work for us. A missive in the New York Times Business section last week, though, offers an additional reason that's probably even more fundamental.
The article (If You're Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow, July 6, 2008) concerns the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who has divided popular perceptions of talent into two camps: the "fixed mind-set" and the "growth mind-set." As the names imply, the first view assumes that talent and ability are innate, and need only to be realized; the second takes a more flexible view, less concerned with natural talent than with enthusiasm and perseverance. You can probably guess her findings yourself: those who believe in flexibility tend to exhibit it, and therefore succeed at learning new skills and solving new problems, while their more fixed colleagues remain mired in self-doubt.
Although written with an eye towards business success, I couldn't help but feel like the message was directly targeted at creative professionals. More than in most fields, our careers live and die by our ability demonstrate specific skills, and our employability is largely a function of convincing those in charge that we've got them. And this is exactly why one of Dr. Dweck's "fixed mind-sets" can be so very damaging.
Think of it this way. Two students enter, say, an illustration program at a prestigious art school. One is convinced of her innate talent and skill, the other unsure, but deeply excited about learning and doing illustration, even if it doesn't impress the way her fellow student's does. The first has been told all her life that she has natural talent, and she's there to develop and express it, the second merely enjoys the process, and the acquisition of new skills. Who will wow the teachers first semester? That's an easy one. But who will ultimately be the more successful, able to grow, keep things fresh, take advantage of new media and technologies, avoid getting pigeonholed? That's probably an easy one too.
Unfortunately, the obsession with genius, already strong in North American and Western European societies, is inflated to legendary levels among creative professionals. We look at a poster by Vignelli, a logo by Loewy, a new Apple product, and we say "that's brilliant," not "wow, they must have worked long and hard to get that good." Overhearing discussions between designers, in real life and online, we get phrases like "Well, the thing with sketching is, you either have it or you don't," or "Yeah, he picked up Maya in like two weeks. Never seen anything like it," often spoken with a bit of awe and envy.
There's no doubt that some people have greater natural talent in certain fields, but where we get it wrong is in assuming that this will inherently lead to greater success. Dig a little deeper, and you discover that many of the long-timers with mad skills busted their asses for months or years to acquire them, not out of a desire to hone some inborn ability, but simply out of diligence and joy. And, more importantly, the belief that they could acquire them, despite multiple influences suggesting it would be a futile pursuit without some pre-ordained competence.
When it comes to becoming more employable, then, the "genius fixation" is especially counterproductive. If you assume that your skills are what they are, you will tend to focus more on portraying them in the best light. If you assume they are endlessly improvable, you will focus on improving them. So to the young creative job-seeker, the piece of advice that trumps all the others that have come before (networking, portfolio building, business card design, etc) is that you will never go wrong by getting better at what you do...and you can always get better.
Edited by our resident creative employment guru, Carl Alviani, Editorial Director of Coroflot.
Well put.
Posted by: Jay | July 15, 2008 04:30 PM