Creative work isolates you because a substantial amount of it must be accomplished alone. But your relationships with others are some of your most valuable creative resources. If you neglect these relationships, you are starving yourself of a substantial and potential game-changing influence on your creative work. When you neglect your relationships, you limit yourself to your own experiences. But when you approach your relationships with purpose, you will be able to draw on many lifetimes’ worth of experience for insight and inspiration.
Investing in healthy, thriving relationships yields long-term benefits for everyone involved and can be especially beneficial in allowing you to see the world from new perspectives, exposing you to unexpected creative insights and helping you stay inspired.
Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back, believes that relationships are the key to success, enhancing our ability to thrive over the long term in our life and career. There are two critical elements of any successful relationship: intimacy and generosity.
INTIMACY
Intimacy is when we regularly share our life with others, and they in turn share their lives with us. By allowing another into the inner circle of your life, you not only give them the opportunity to learn from your experiences, you also learn how to better communicate those experiences to others. Relationships are messy because they force us out of our comfort zone, but they also help us see problems and opportunities from a new perspective. When we invite others into our life, when we allow ourselves to be intimate, we quickly come to realize that there is an entire sphere of experience that we miss when we live in a silo.
GENEROSITY
The creative process is an inherently generous act. Whether we are developing a strategy or crafting a piece of art, creating is primarily about sharing our insights and perspectives with others.
My (Todd Henry) friend Jeni Herberger has a theory about the nature of generosity and relationships. Jeni posits that there are two types of people in the world: those who live to fill other people’s buckets and those who are always looking to get their own bucket filled. For the latter, even the act of complimenting someone else is an inherently selfish act because they are somehow secretly trying to take credit for the other people’s work. When they offer up, “Hey! Great job on executing that idea! It’s a lot like something I did last year. Did I ever tell you about it?” it contains a subtle pat on their own back. They’re looking to fill their own bucket.
But there are other people who derive their energy from filling other people’s buckets. They love the thrill of seeing other people come alive, of collaborating, of giving away their ideas and subsequently the credit they deserve. They recognize that more ideas will always come, but investing in relationships and maintaining an ethic of generosity yields results we can’t gain when we hold tightly and selfishly to what we think we deserve. These are the people others flock to and who invigorate an entire room with their creative energy. They thrive because they make it their mission to help others to thrive.
There are three strategies that can help you be more purposeful about your relationships. Each is designed to help you achieve more interdependence, inspiration, and accountability in your work.
* Source: The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry