Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 148
Two ideas that were least popular with my students over the 14 years I taught creativity and entrepreneurship to Duke undergrads were Humility and Making your Way vs Finding your Path.
In the case of humility on a couple of occasions a student—always male—would raise his hand during the class that followed my introduction of that behavior and tell me and the class he called a frat brother working on Wall Street to tell him that I was pitching the importance of humility. The frat brother would reply something like “Tell him he’s crazy, if you come work here as a humble person you’ll be eaten alive.” My response was some version of being humble doesn’t mean thinking less of yourself, but more like thinking about yourself less often.
And when I would explain that going forward, they should keep in mind the lesson that what you call something makes a big difference in how you see it, how you apply it. So when considering their future careers they are better served by saying to themselves that from now on they will be ‘making their way’ rather than ‘finding their path’. It surprised me this ruffled so many feathers and then it hit me that this population had been very well served by following the path, the well-defined path of academic accomplishment.
I would share my sense that this precisely defined path ends when they leave school. That going forward there will be times as they are making their way that a section of a traditional path might still be there to serve them, but that by adopting a mindset that from now on they construct their way forward will be increasingly true as each year passes, and more and more the traditional paths vanish.
This week’s show with Vivek Munshi is a great capture of that making your way dynamic.
An apology: I don’t know what happened that caused my audio track on this show to be so lousy, I hope you can ignore me and focus on Vivek.
And one thing you will hear him talk about is the super cool non-profit he and his family have started in support of the Central and Eastern Food Bank.
That non-profit is named Sweet Doughnations—visit their website at sweetdoughnations.com and have some fun and serve the hungry by ordering some personalized sugar cookies for your next event. Check out their Instagram page at https://www.instagram.com/sweetdoughnations/
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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