The Groove Issue 108 - Why Creativity Invites You to Make Your Own Rules
Welcome to the 108th issue of The Groove.
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WHY CREATIVITY INVITES YOU TO MAKE YOUR OWN RULES
You’ve heard it so many times: “Break the rules!” “Nothing creative ever comes from coloring inside the lines!” This and a variety of other platitudes and clichés that are as meaningless as they are unhelpful.
Breaking the rules and coming up with new things should be a gradual process, based on the fact that if you want to be a rule-breaker, you should already know what you are doing to begin with.
Paradoxically, breaking rules is not a haphazard, blind activity done in haste. On the contrary, it requires expertise and knowing precisely what to break, what to keep and where to build something new.
But there’s also an interesting angle to look at rule-breaking, which is rulemaking. If you think that breaking something doesn’t fit your style, what about making your own?
How Alighiero Boetti Made His Own Rules
Alighiero Boetti in Italy in the 1980s.
Alighiero Boetti abhorred categorizations and avoided being known for a particular style. He created his own rules and played in an environment of his own creation.
As he experimented with every idea and medium, by 1971 and until his premature death in 1994, Boetti developed what would be recognized as his most significant work: his embroideries, which were born from a collaboration with artisans from Afghanistan.
Boetti with one of his Afghan collaborators in 1989.
First it was the Mappa, a series of embroidered maps of the world, flattened in the shape of an Afghan rug, each country blocked out in the colors and designs of its own flags. There are conflict zones delineated, countries that changed borders, and when the Afghans ran out of a particular color, Boetti didn’t mind if they used a different one. He gave them freedom to create under his direction at a time where artists wanted to have full control over their practices.
After the Mappas, he made the Arazzis, also embroideries on mosaic grids, with letters that combined fragments of poetry, math problems, or phrases that had to be read from left to right or from top to bottom.
From “Game Plan”, Boetti’s retrospective at MoMA in 2012.
Maybe these things don’t sound innovative right now, but when you think about the context 50 years ago, Boetti was elevating crafts to fine arts and using a team of people who lived continents away from him. This was at a time when other artists in Turin, Italy, were involved in Arte Povera, a highly conceptual movement that didn’t care about disrupting the purity of its concepts.
“I’m a creator of rules. These rules, tricks and mechanisms enable me to play around and play with others,” Boetti said on many occasions.
Here’s where Boetti was so good at coming up with new rules: he felt at ease navigating a fine line of contradictions, which he embraced and harmonized in his work: the conceptual and the human, the rigorous and the playful, the planned and the serendipitous.
Reverse The Order of The Rules
The world of entrepreneurship is ripe for new rulemaking and for creating products or services that people don’t even know they need yet.
In a normal scenario, you build a product first and then try to sell it. But in 2008, Drew Houston had the great idea to create a service where people could store and share digital files online in an easy and friendly way without eating up all their computer memory. He had engineers help him build it out, but he wondered if people would want it.
So, without having the product he wanted to sell fully built, Houston made a very basic 3-minute video, sharing his screen and explaining how the system would work and inviting people to sign up for the beta launch. The list went from 5,000 to 75,000 people, and it pushed Drew and his team to work around the clock to meet the momentum and be able to deliver the first iteration of what is now Dropbox.
Whether it is an entire new set of rules, the introduction of something that isn’t the norm or changing the order of the steps of how things are done, being creative gives you a license to make your own rules - as long as they don’t go against legislation or the laws of nature. Give it a try.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members of my online course, Jumpstart.
If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
Have you already gotten your copy?
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook.
TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.