jansn

08 Oct, 2009

‘Define yourself by your own (thinking) activities’

Posted by: Bob Jansen In: Creativity| Personal

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TCE stands for The Creative Economy, a great book by John Hawkins. Inspired by his ‘10 rules for success in the creative economy’ I explore how this affects my daily life and work.

Define yourself by your own (thinking) activities
Do not shape yourself by the job title somebody else gives you. People who are brave call themselves ‘thinkers’. Computer companies try to sell ‘business solutions’ to their client’s problems. In the creative economy we each can think and exchange creative solutions with others.

The power of thinking is an underestimated value to most of the business activities we do today. Most of the times we only see acknowledgement for great thinking by ‘leaders’ of companies. People like Steve Jobs, Barack Obama and Winston Churchill are just a few examples. We see their actions and acknowledge them by thinking power. This is great, but mostly happens because they made a difference.

In our creative economy it’s great we more and more see the power of the individual. Driven by networks like, for example, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter the voice of the crowd gets a saying in a growing amount of important decisions around the world. We see change both big and small.

Combining the power of individuals and a growing set of creative ideas and impulses requires us to channel. We need to conceptualize our ideas in order to make them work and be able to put them out in the open. An idea is worth nothing. Everybody has ideas and it gets easier to put them out there. We need concepts, not ideas. Beautiful names, concrete plans, shapes and designs. Driven by actions is key because most people with the ability to come up with concepts, don’t get the chance to create them.

In my opinion, thinking activities are big pillars on which we can define ourselves. People that are able to create change from their thoughts are the new leaders. It’s an encouraging thought that in the world of tomorrow there will be room for millions of small and individual leaders and not only thousands of leaders that control the change the world is going through.

I was happy to see Rattan Chadha talk about this subject in his interview with KBIRI. He only rarely gives interviews, which is good because most of his time goes to building business and changing the world.