Safe and Secure

So I went to go see this movie recently, and it completely rocked my world. Here is a brief synopsis:
ART & COPY is a powerful new film about advertising and inspiration. Directed by Doug Pray (SURFWISE, SCRATCH, HYPE!), it reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time — people who’ve profoundly impacted our culture, yet are virtually unknown outside their industry

Basically, the film chronicles the several advertisers who came up with the Campaigns of our time, including Just Do It, I Love New York, Where’s the Beef and tried to explore how the idea was created and the stories around bringing it to market and then the impact of it. What I found so compelling was how they explained that in order to be creative you need to feel safe, and supported, and that the heads of these amazing firms main goal was to make sure their staff feel this way.

I found this to be one of those perfect Duh moments. In order to feel safe to be creative or innovative, or solve problems you have to be feel safe that you will not be ridiculed, punished, laughed at etc, because creativity and innovation while amazing as end products, often have long lives of incubation that change are challenged etc. For example they described that a few days before the Where’s the Beef Campaign, Wendy’s wanted to pull the advertisement. This campaign had taken 18 months of so to finally get here, and in the end the client was still very nervous about this direction. Now we all know how it turned out it was great, but for that whole 18 months those creative people needed to feel like they had the support of their company to keep the vision alive.

I think this is incredibly relevant because as many of us are thankful to have the jobs that we have, most of us probably don’t feel that those jobs are safe and secure, and therefore are actions and the actions of those around us come from this place, and consequently creativity is taking a big back seat.

Back to my Finding my Duh theory, now that I realize this, I am aware that I alone can not change this, but I am also more in tuned to the behaviors of others and at least feel a little bit more in control of my own behavior, and feel committed to finding other ways to feel safe and secure enough to be creative and innovative. In fact, in another really stupid Duh moment, I realize I have found it, and I am doing it right now. I know that probably sounds stupid, but its true I just realized that this second, I bet if I asked anyone close to me they could have told me this immediately, but I was personally blind to it. This is why take a hard look at your Duh areas and keeping tabs on them is important, our mind has this amazing way of hiding truth from us, so we have to keep on top of it.

I would love to hear about some examples of when you have felt very creative and been able to harness it.