Synopsis: Creativity has everything to do with mindset – beware the zero-sum mindset.
Pause a moment longer to take a more considered look at it, and it’s easy to discern that creativity is always, always, always a multiplayer game too. Indeed this is fact doubly true. Not only are breakthrough creative ideas a result of an accumulation of many smaller ideas, but inevitably those many contributing ideas come from many contributors too, rather than some single, mythical, creative genius source. To punctuate the observation, consider that MacArthur Fellows, those famous creative folks who have the moniker of genius thrust upon them, are the quickest to tell you that, in the words of mathematician and Fellow Maria Chudnovsky, whatever they create rests on the broad shoulders of others before them, and that their greatest hope is that what they create will do the same for other people and other ideas yet to come. In short, the multiplayer nature of creativity is true both in any individual creation and across creations and time.
If all of this strikes you as somewhat self-evident, you might be asking yourself, why make the point? Considered in a thoughtful moment, the answer is just as clear, though in the current environment, all too easily missed. Our world is increasingly dominated by the short view, the quick answer, and the implicit goal of finality. On a growing list of subjects, we humans are also increasingly leaning towards not only an us versus them view, but strategy, a textbook zero-sum strategy where I must win, and you must lose, and together we fail to advance. At the very least, if our endeavor is a creative one, with this mindset we’re pretty much done before we even begin. But as zero-sum spreads to an ever-widening number of endeavors, it’s important to do the math. Inevitably, the conversation is about far more than pennies.
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