Welcome to Conspire’s Fun Friday Links, a weekly collection of interesting discoveries from around the Web. Most of the time, the goal is to get you thinking differently about innovation, collaboration, business culture, and life in general. Other times, we may toss an infographic or fun video your way. Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
How You’re Killing Your Own Creativity [Infographic]
As much as it’s human nature to place the blame for negative stuff on external forces, we’re often reminded to look closer to home — specifically, in the mirror. And when it comes to creativity, the reasons we may not be feeling as inspired as we should could very well be the byproduct of inattention and laziness. Thankfully, the team at Entrepreneur has produced a to-the-point visual filled with tips on how not to act if you want to stay stimulated (truncated version below).
Why There Are Too Many Chiefs and Not Enough Innovation
If you’ve ever worked for a company that went so promotion-crazy that it ended up with more people directing work than employees left to do it, you can probably appreciate the risk of instituting a plethora of executive positions. Still, the trend to assign Chief status to someone in every department of an organization is on the rise — but the risk may far outweigh the benefit. From Fast Company:
” In the creative department, the Chief Creative Officer has replaced the Executive Creative Director who in turn has replaced the Creative Director. There used to be a time when the Creative Director was the most sought after title. Now I’m unsure as to how much creative directing an actual creative director does.
In fact, the hierarchy of titles has gotten so out of control that on any one job there can be a Chief Creative Officer, an Executive Creative Director, a Creative Director, and an Associate Creative Director, leaving some poor 25-year-old placement team doing all the work.
We could just shrug our shoulders and say it doesn’t really matter. But in some deeper psychological way it does matter, for two reasons. One, hierarchies are a completely outmoded way of working, and two, self-important titles speak of a self-regarding industry. Both of which are not healthy reflections of how our industry should operate.”
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Train Your Brain to Think More Clearly
The extreme information overload we all face today means a great deal more than severely reduced privacy and increased amounts of data to sift through; it also means the geography of our brains is having to shift in order to cope. Positively, that makes us more adept at learning tons of stuff quickly, but negatively? Our thoughts are jumbled, fuzzy, and almost as challenging to dig through as cat videos on the internet. But, not all is lost. From Inc.:
“Analytical thinking is the process of remembering words and putting their meanings into context. This process is not simply accessing a mental dictionary. Every time you use words, you re-create their meaning.
The words you habitually use when you’re thinking (and then expressing those thoughts) mold how you see the world. For example, people who habitually think (and speak and write) the word “hate” tend to find an ever-increasing number of things to hate.
This relationship between word usage and perception is hugely important in business. When you train yourself to speak and write using clearly defined words arranged into concise sentences, you’re training your brain to think more clearly.”
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