Scarcity the key to creativity? By Tom Vanlerberghe

Posted: March 1, 2009 at 10.03 pm
Posted by Tom Vanlerberghe in Guest, creativity

Guest Post by Tom Vanlerberghe
Follow Tom on Twitter - @KursaalTom

Scarcity the key to creativity?

Great post by @ahmednaguib on his blog, especially his second thought:

“#2 Stop spending too much money on stuff you don’t need.”

Luxury or having too much stuff is often called as the reason why people aren’t creative.  It makes people greedy… the results we’re seeing all over the world right now.  But it’s not that simple right?  Calling scarcity the key to creativity?  Everybody buys stuff he doesn’t actually need, what can lead to great things.

But there must be some truth in it.  Let me bore you with some things that had a profound influence on the way I look at things these days.
· Backpacking through Australia. It was something I wanted to do for a long time and finally one day, just did it.  Left everything I had to go backpacking through Australia.  And there’s an amount of freedom to be found when you have $20 to get through the week.
· Having no cable. As a result of my trip, I found I don’t really need television.  I like to watch movies, so I still have an old CTR thingie at home, but I have no cable.  I went from about 50 hours a week to maybe 10 hours.  But they’re the 10 hours I really want to watch, not the 40 extra hours I might’ve wanted to watch.
· Reading. I’m a magazine junkie, but found I kept buying magazines without actually reading them.  They were like comic books with pretty pictures.  When I started reading again I felt it more easy to be interested in new stuff, to find new ways to do stuff.
· Moleskine and me. I was just sick and tired of having ‘great ideas’ (or so I thought) and always forgetting them.  So I write everything down… literally everything.  So now I know some ideas weren’t that great. :)

These things all fall under a certain ‘act now, think later’ principle, that I still use today.  I love my job, I love what I do and I even love hearing customers complain about how they feel they got a lousy seat at one of our shows.  But it’s not the end of things.  Losing your job, losing clients, earning less money than the month before,… it won’t make the sky fall down and you won’t end up in a ditch.

I reckon there’s a big difference between having something or believing you need something.  Unless you lose something you grew accustomed to, cable for example, you assume you need it.  Knowing you don’t actually need something gives you heaps of freedom.  Most important, and this is something that could be used in every business, is it gives you the power to arrange your priorities like you want them.  Because a lot of times, it’s your client who decides and that can’t be right.  Even though he’s the one who pays you to do a job, that’s just what it is, a job, he doesn’t buy a person.

So in my humble opinion scarcity isn’t the key to creativity… it’s just one way to get to it.  To redefine your priorities, to find out what’s important and what’s not.  It seems basic, but lose something you had and counted on, and see how basic you thought it was.