Creativity is the key to developing solutions; both to problems you’re trying to solve and to problems you haven’t yet realized exist. Without creativity, we would be tied to processes and simply following what has been done in the past. Nothing new would be created. In fact, nothing would have ever been created.

Realizing this is the key to embracing every creative urge that hits you. It often feels that society values the process-oriented more than the creatives. We frown upon the smart student that decides to pursue a career as a sculptor, sigh at the loss of a brilliant mind when a math whiz takes up ballroom dancing. What we don’t realize is that those minds are putting their creativity to work – and as I said before, creativity is the key (obviously) to creation.

I’ve always been one to lean towards languages, starting with my declaration as a ten year old that I was going to transfer to French Immersion. From there, I was struck with the language bug; I fell in love with poetry in high school, discovered the wonder of linguistics in University. This is not everyone’s calling, but for me, language was how I transformed from defining myself as someone who gets good grades, to someone that seeks creative development, inside and outside of the classroom. Throughout my journeys as an amateur writer, I discovered something significant.

I didn’t understand was creativity really was or how powerful it is.

For the first few years as a writer, I only wrote when inspiration struck. If I was hit with a thought or an idea, I’d scribble it down furiously until a poem or a passage of prose existed. This is how I developed my fear of creation. If creativity was simply left to inspiration, to the lucky occurrence that you were feeling it that day, how could you ever trust what terrible work you might come up with on an off-day? It wasn’t worth the risk to even try to create, for fear or producing something that was worse than what had been devised on an inspired day. This fear lead to weeks without writing that left me feeling stagnant and even more incapable of creativity.

Finally, I laid the smack down and set myself a 30-day challenge: write in my journal every day. No matter how late I got in, no matter what assignments were due the next day, which exams were lurking, or how much fear I had built up when I picked up the pencil, I had to write. No excuses.

I pulled off a few decent poems over the thirty days and a collection of great sentences to mine from in the future. The greatest realization? That some of the best pieces had been written on days when inspiration felt like it had flown out the window. Some nights I sat for an hour before thinking of something to write, wrestling with every word, physically pinning them down to the paper. Sweating until something stared back at me. These were not lucky occurrences. These were products of my creative labour.

This made me realize that there are ways of juicing your brain, even when it feels like you’ve got nothing going on in there. So I’ve begun my mission to determine how to foster creativity, in order to inspire the heart, but also in order to develop problem-solving skills that go well beyond processes. What started as an attempt to drop inspiration as my crutch when writing, became my passion to understand how creativity works. What can we do to make ourselves more prone to creation? How can we develop ways of thinking that help us reach unexpected conclusions, be it a new poem or a solution to a business problem?

Join me on this journey as I leave you with the first of many articles I’ll read in order to build up my repertoire of creative thinking tricks. Once you’ve read them, go out and see what you can create today.

Recommended reading: Warm Showers, Friction, and Failure, Four Simple Ways to Create More and Worry Less

I attended the Student Leadership Conference a few months ago and to my surprise and great luck, my favourite spoken word poet, Sarah Kay, was the opening keynote speaker.

Her poetry and her motivational talk opened eyes that had started the early morning droopy and inattentive. Sarah addressed the conference theme of breakthroughs by describing he own experience with the phenomenon. Her approach is simple, but rings true; there are two types of breakthroughs: those that strike you suddenly, and those that you work tirelessly towards. The second was the most important thing to be said, because it seems too often that keynote speakers tell stories of luck. There’s nothing wrong with a little luck, but it’s not too motivating to think that all you have to do is wait around with your fingers crossed in hopes that you’re one of the lucky ones. 

Let’s face it, to a great extent, we create our own luck. Of course we don’t get to decide the country or circumstances that we’re born into and of course some of us are handed a head-start right out the gate. This is luck. But of all the people handed cards of opportunity, it’s the ones that recognize their luck and bust their butts to do something with it, that get to experience the second kind of breakthrough.

I speak of this because I feel like I’ve been struck with a breakthrough that in part has been a result of the stars mysteriously aligning themselves, but has also been due to the huge amount of passion and commitment that I’ve been putting into creating ideas, projects, and experiences that create value. Taking initiative and jumping in to offer ideas, help, or even just a bit of food for thought, can lead you down wildly unexpected roads.

So where’s this breakthrough coming from? It’s a mix of me starting to figure out where I want to go with my life and career, me having initiated and executed an awareness campaign with popchips, me having pursued a continued summer experience at a company I love, and me recognizing that sometimes it’s okay (and even necessary) to take time out of your day to work on hobbies that bring great joy.

From my spontaneous hop on a plane to Toronto for a case conference this past November, to the anniversary of a music blog I launched as a passion-project a year ago, I’ve been building my life on the idea of waking up every day to create something I love.

I know that incredibly joyous feeling that Sarah described as the spill-over effect of a breakthrough. I’m tasting it right now, and I can’t wait to keep pursuing it for the rest of my life.

Social entrepreneurship always feels like such a lofty topic when it’s discussed in classes. On top of this, if you ask for an example of a social entrepreneur, you’ll hear the name Craig Kielburger a hundred times over. If you ask for another example, you’ll probably be thrown the example of TOMS shoes. Both are great initiatives, but what about something that gets a little more…well, dirty.

This article offers some great incite into how Kenya’s sanitation problem has become a fertile place to grow a social enterprise. I urge you to read it and reinvent how you think about business.

Ground Zero for Sanitation Innovation

In a marketing course, you’ll learn that attitudes are difficult to change, and therefore marketers should rather look to change a consumer’s beliefs, as they hold less emotional charge and are easier to sway.

My issue with this approach? What happens when you aren’t just looking for a way to effectively market a product (in which case you have a choice between changing beliefs or attitudes), but are rather looking to shift society’s attitudes and opinions regarding a given issue? In this case, you have no choice but to find an effective way to change attitudes, or else abandon ship and allow people to continue with their established attitudes.

[Please watch before reading on]

Don’t read on until you’ve watched the video.

 Stop cheating and go watch it.

This Australian anti-homophobia campaign hits all the right notes. Instead of forcing an opinion down a viewer’s throat, it portrays an image of what most people in the given society would have a positive attitude towards. By keeping the partner out of view, the person watching the video has a reaction to the video that is rooted in their attitudes about love, rather than about homosexuality. Only at the end of the video does the focus shift – the viewer is caught off-guard and suddenly has to analyze whether the attitude they held while watching the video (that related to love) should change simply because the partner is the same sex. This is an effective strategy as it allows the viewer to transfer attitudes about one thing to another, before they can put up any barriers.

The video leaves this message on the table: Is it not strange to suddenly change all your attitudes about love, just because the people in love aren’t typical? 

By getting the viewer to ask themselves the question, rather than forcing it on them directly, it holds much more weight. The ending note to “end marriage discrimination” simply solidifies what the viewer is already thinking about at this point.

Attending this conference was definitely an eye-opener. It was my first chance to step into the world of case competitions, and my first shot at travelling alone for an entire week. From hostels to five-star hotels, it was a truly incredible experience. From the perspective of the conference itself, here are some things that I learned along the way.

• I learned that you benefit the most when you put yourself in uncomfortable situations. I volunteered to present our team’s vision, despite the fact that I’ve only recently overcome my fear of public speaking and presenting, and it went extremely well. We were asked to come back and present in a bonus round made up of the 4 strongest performing teams.

• I learned that when you’re driven by the desire to engage and learn, the rewards come as an externality. Two events during the conference drove this concept home. The first was listening to the keynote speaker Drew Dudley, who spoke about how he has learned that the key to success is simply working hard doing whatever you love, and the rewards will follow suit. This could not have been better emphasized than when my team sat down at the awards gala with no expectations to even place in the competition, but with a sense of accomplishment for what we had done and learned over the weekend. We were all stunned when we were called up to receive silver medals – none of us had set winning an award as our priority; we had simply set a high standard for ourselves, which clearly paid off.

• I learned that time management is about always being ready to absorb the next task. It’s not about laying out a timeline that perfectly allows for a task to be accomplished, but rather about strategizing and working to complete something as efficiently as possible, so that you will have some flexibility when the next assignment gets throw your way. The competition kept us on our toes, with new rounds being announced constantly. I believe our team performed well because we were able to quickly prioritize and delegate, rather than panic, when new work arose.

My fabulous team members at the awards gala

The United Colors of Benetton have caused quite a stir with their new UNHATE campaign. Rather than advertising fashion apparel (their product), they’ve taken to delivering an entire campaign that centers around the concept of removing hate from the world. The real buzz though? They’re editing world leaders into the most interesting of poses (see above).

At first, I thought that the company was going entirely for shock value in order to catch consumer attention. As Martin Lindstrom states in Buyology, “when it comes to what truly influences our behavior and gets us to buy, controversy can often be the more potent factor.” It seemed that United Colors of Benetton was simply playing that card for all it was worth, going as far as to cause a scandal relating to an edited image of the Pope and the Imam kissing, which merited the following response from their public relations team:

Ponzano, November 16, 2011.”We reiterate that the meaning of this campaign is exclusively to combat the culture of hatred in all its forms,” said a Benetton Group spokesman. “We are therefore sorry that the use of the image of the Pope and the Imam has so offended the sentiments of the faithful. In corroboration of our intentions, we have decided, with immediate effect, to withdraw this image from every publication.”

Despite the apology, one may still question Benetton’s intentions. After all some argue that any PR is good PR. I certainly believed this to be true and was ready to write about the campaign with a truly critical eye, questioning whether controversy is actually effective when consumers can so easily sense that it has been carefully constructed. That is, until I went to their campaign website.

The organization explains their mission on their site as follows: “The UNHATE Foundation, desired and founded by the Benetton Group, seeks to contribute to the creation of a new culture of tolerance, to combat hatred, building on Benetton’s underpinning values. It is another important step in the group’s social responsibility strategy: not a cosmetic exercise, but a contribution that will have a real impact on the international community, especially through the vehicle of communication, which can reach social players in different areas.”

First, it is interesting to note that on all the campaign images, the messaging states that United Colors of Benetton supports the UNHATE foundation, when in fact they created it. It’s an intriguing approach to cause-related marketing. It seems that they recognize the fact that people may not trust their intentions if it’s known that this entire project was constructed by the fashion apparel company, and therefore most likely has ulterior motives other than simply promoting UNHATE. This is a profit maximizing firm after all, not a not-for-profit who is able to spend all their time looking for ways to help others. We already have People For Good doing that, without the muddy line between profit and charity marring their way.

So far, it looks like United Colors of Benetton are simply skewing our perceptions in order to gain attention and draw in more consumers. But then you take a good look around their website and they really do have a full-fledged campaign aimed at making a difference underway. The site outlines the goals and upcoming initiatives of the organization, claiming that  “the Foundation will promote projects created by various players from civil society, which aim to spread a culture of tolerance.” They are also aiming to contribute to art initiatives centered around creating tolerance or overcoming conflict.

The campaign launched on November 16th 2011. I still have my doubts and will be interested to see whether the United Colors of Benetton actually work to create real change and tolerance in the global community, or whether they simply play their cards carefully in order to capture consumer attention. Only time will tell how authentic this campaign truly is, and only time will tell whether authenticity even plays a role in how effective this campaign is as a marketing strategy.

I leave you now with the campaign video. Don’t simply enjoy the video -please reflect and critique.

I found this on the Class of 2015 Facebook page and might actually try it out. It’s not as healthy as my 3 litres of tea a day (I wish I was exaggerating!), but it seems worthy of experimentation. Enjoy!

Study Tip #1:
Drink Coca Cola out of shot glasses while studying. It’ll feel like a small party, you’re consuming less sugary junk and it strengthens the caffeine experience.

When I was little, I started up my first “business” with fellow classmate, Sara Shams. We called ourselves The K&S Homeworkers and went to work creating a menu of our services and prices. The problem with our strategy however, was that every decision we made was based on being profitable without ever considering what the customer required. Sure, we offered fridge cleaning because our moms never seemed to have time to do it themselves, but we based the prices on how much that new toy we wanted cost, and not on how much we thought our customers valued the service. We did nothing to track what types of services were needed and simply jumped from services that made sense, like vacuuming the living room, to selling powdered Gatorade on an upside down recycling bin (I couldn’t make this stuff up!) Our customer base (our parents) saw through our attempts and knew that what we had to offer was not valuable to them. Eventually we lost all control over our pricing and their buyer power drove us out of business. Perhaps we should have also taken into account that a mother can easily insist that the work be done for free.

K&S Homeworkers resurfaced in various forms throughout the years, but without a clearly defined business strategy or a way to manage what our customers were looking for, it never lasted long.

I stumbled upon this youtube gem, and instantly connected with the experience. Sure, the video is a little far fetched, but the CRM system that it’s advertising makes sense as a marketing solution, even just for a little neighborhood lemonade stand.

I’m not saying that we would have made it if we had had one of these systems, but it definitely would have put us in the right mindset. It would have meant that we’d realized the need to provide value before we could extract value.

Now that we’re both working on our commerce degrees, who knows if K&S Homeworkers will resurface in some new form?

Beardo, an unexpected Whistler, BC success story, has hit gold with their strangely appealing BearMo beer bottle mustaches.

There’s not much I can say about this magnificent product, other than it speaks for itself. It’s one of those gimmicky things we never actually need, but somehow desperately want, despite the hefty price tag.

What better way to get them to fly off the (virtual) shelves than supporting the seemingly obvious Movember cause? I think that this company has hit cause-related marketing spot on by not only supporting an important cause, but by effectively matching it to their product. I might feel guilty shelling out $10.99 for six silly plastic mustaches, but I’ll probably feel fine, even proud, to put the money towards prostate cancer research. Philanthropy already has its advantages, but now I get these awesome party favours to go with it?

Win-win.

If I get to LIVE conference in Toronto, then I get to sit and absorb this amazing man’s words in the flesh. He pushes the boundaries of the education system and the struggles that we face every day between what we want and what we think we want.