How Creativity Rules the World

The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas into Gold

Maria Brito

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781400235391
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: F&D

Axiom Business Book Award Winner in Entrepreneurship Category

Learn to make creativity work for your career.

Anyone, regardless of who you are or what you do, can cultivate the habits, actions, and attitudes that inspire creativity and innovation.

There has never been a more crucial time than now to develop your creativity and your ability to innovate. Coming up with original ideas of value is today's most precious skill.

How Creativity Rules the World shows that, despite contrary beliefs, creativity can be taught and learned by anyone. Creativity is an inexhaustible resource that is the key to thriving in the business world and beyond. This timeless guide promises to make the creative process of successful seven-figure artists and billion-dollar entrepreneurs—as well as Maria's own—accessible and actionable for you to take the power of their ideas to the next level.

In How Creativity Rules the World, you will learn how to:

• Overcome limiting thoughts and dispel myths about creativity.
• Unleash creativity through concrete data, historical passages, and examples of modern entrepreneurship.
• Develop timeless habits, principles, and tools that worked six centuries ago and continue to work today.
• Employ creativity in an everyday context to produce extraordinary results.

With revealing studies and stories spanning business and art, this book is a deep dive into history, culture, psychology, science, and entrepreneurship; analyzing the elements used by some of the most creative minds today and throughout the last 600 years.

Contemporary art curator and founder of The Groove, Maria Brito discovered the power of creativity when she transitioned from being an unhappy Harvard-trained corporate lawyer to a thriving entrepreneur and innovator in the art world. After applying the principles in How Creativity Rules the World to her own business, Maria started teaching them to hundreds of people, ranging from entrepreneurs to artists to CEOs. Proven by her students' creative successes, Maria will guide you to strike gold with your ideas as well.

PART I

THE INTERSECTION OF CREATIVITY, ART, AND BUSINESS

For the past two millennia, the history and evolution of the concept of creativity have been surrounded by fables and mysteries, erroneous beliefs, and misconceptions. The truth is that creativity is the most vital and necessary skill in any occupation or field. It is an exclusively human amalgamation of attitudes and habits, not replicated by any other species. In the following chapters, I explain the connection between creativity and artists, shed a light on how throughout history humans have evaluated their own creations, and how science has debunked, one by one, the myths that have kept creativity elusive and sacrosanct.

1

Creativity and Crisis

IT WAS MY fifty-fourth day on lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic. I was pondering what this new crisis would mean for creativity, innovation, and invention in every imaginable field, including fields that we don’t even know about but will soon exist. I had just reopened my online course on creative thinking applied to business and entrepreneurship and couldn’t shake these thoughts.

After forty-four years, the first half in Venezuela, I survived two failed coups d’état, tear gas day in and day out, and lootings and shootings. In the second half, living in New York City, I lived through 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, Hurricane Sandy, fights between political extremists, Black Lives Matter protests, and other vicissitudes. But I never imagined that in the era of technology, we would face such an unprecedented opponent. In the blink of an eye, we went from the optimism of welcoming a new decade to protagonists in a sci-fi movie.

I had been pressing ahead nonstop, immersed in work. I traveled from one continent to another, from one city to the next, curating an exhibition in Beirut, visiting clients in Los Angeles, attending the opening of the Venice Biennale, going to Miami for Art Basel, supervising an art installation in East Hampton, moderating a talk in Charlotte, and on and on. Our modern way of living was ensnaring and numbing us with piles of work, and I was no exception. On top of that, every week, I would also see at least twenty art shows in Manhattan, attend dinners and openings, benefits, and auctions, and meet and correspond with hundreds of people ranging from clients to art dealers. That merry-go-round spun continuously with no chance to get off to take a sip of water.

That Wednesday night in the beginning of May, I had to allow myself to feel my feelings because there was no way to escape them. I had nowhere else to go. For the first time in many years, I felt nostalgic for Caracas, the city where I was born and grew up, and which I hadn’t visited in fifteen years. After Hugo Chávez and then his appointed successor, Nicolás Maduro, amended the Venezuelan Constitution and carried out electoral fraud, perpetuating themselves in power and committing the most atrocious crimes against Venezuelans and democracy, I decided to never return. I let myself drift in my memories and feelings, remembering my childhood and that city I left behind, which many have told me is completely unrecognizable nowadays.

I thought of my maternal grandfather, Enrique Dao, who passed away one month after my wedding day in 2004. That was the last time I saw him. I’m grateful it was a joyous day surrounded by the people I love the most, as that framed what would be my last interaction with him. I was back in New York when he had another heart attack he couldn’t survive. There were no goodbyes, no dramas, no soap-operatic Latino funerals. I’m glad it was this way. We were extremely close; Enrique was not only my favorite grandparent but also one of my favorite people in the world and the embodiment of what it means to be a creative, resourceful human being. I wanted to preserve in my heart his warm, energetic, loving image, and not the one of a cold body inside a coffin.

EMOTION: THE BRIDGE BETWEEN CRISIS AND CREATIVITY

That night in May of 2020, I did something quite unusual, particularly in connection with someone who had been dead for sixteen years and had almost no relationship with the internet. I googled my grandfather’s name, and the first hit after I pressed “search” was a link to a Reuters webpage containing a three-minute video of the exact moment on March 6, 1971, that my grandfather arrived at his house after spending almost a month in a dense tropical rain forest atop a mountain after being kidnapped by the Venezuelan guerrillas. I was stunned with my discovery.

I hadn’t been born yet, but this event was so devastating for my mother’s family that it changed their lives forever. In my childhood and teenage years, I heard the story many times, from my parents, other family members, and, of course, my grandfather, who abhorred being the center of attention.

Before 2020, I had never seen these images before. Never. Who would want to preserve clips or memories of being kidnapped? And, even if they wanted to, how could my grandparents, or my mother, who was twenty at that time, have stored any of these files back in the 1970s?

The first time I saw that Reuters video, it hit home, literally. It starts with a shot outside of the 1960s modernist house in which I practically grew up; I spent so much time with my grandparents as a child. About twenty-five policemen, ten members of the military, and one hundred journalists and reporters with cameras and recording devices were waiting for my grandfather.

Another camera shows the moment my grandfather arrives at his house after twenty-four anguishing days in the jungle. He came walking from the direction where the Ávila mountain is. He had called my grandmother from a pay phone, she had warned the police, and they were waiting for him in Caracas to take him to the precinct first. After his testimony and physical exam, the police drove him to his house. He was wearing a white button-down shirt (he never wore anything other than white shirts) and dark sunglasses and looked a lot tanner and a lot thinner than normal.

He was escorted by someone I believe was the congressman who had negotiated his release; the man was giving directions with his hands and trying to protect my grandfather from the hordes of journalists, onlookers, family members, and policemen who swarmed around him. This was the moment when I cried. And I cried and cried. To see Enrique, alive, sixteen years after his passing, simultaneously burst open every emotion. I missed my grandfather; remembered the generosity, love, and humility with which he treated everyone; mourned the loss of the country I was born in and where my parents still live; and was nostalgic for my entire family, which is scattered all over the world. I longed for the fractured piece of history, the one that links my ancestors to me and my children.

Slowly, my grandfather tries to catch his breath. He is evidently exhausted, but he has the mannerisms and expressions I so vividly remember. I can read his lips telling a journalist, “Easy, easy, I will answer soon.” There is a quick jump cut, and then the second camera inside the house shows my grandfather, still wearing dark sunglasses, sitting on that memorable antique baroque settee next to his older brother, Aníbal.

In a semicircle around my grandfather and his brother, the journalists looked agitated and gesticulated in desperation to get their answers so they could complete their assignments and send their recordings to all the news agencies and TV stations around the world. They had been waiting for hours to have the press conference with my grandfather and were eager to leave. That marked the end of the video and the beginning of this book.

THE PIVOT FROM CRISIS TO CREATIVE REINVENTION

My grandfather had an incredible life filled with creativity that allowed him to experience remarkable reinvention. Even though I didn’t know it back then, he was my first example of what being creative can do for people’s lives and their fulfillment. I have often wondered what made my grandfather so creative. Was it his curiosity? Was it his open mind? Or was it his ability to change swiftly without getting stuck in the past? He was, from his early years, a brilliant, creative, and inquisitive person. He developed so many abilities and interests including painting, music, and languages. I am certain that the fuel that drove his creativity was the curiosity to never settle in one area; he was always looking to expand, and he wanted to learn as many disciplines as possible.

Enrique was born on a coastal city in Venezuela called Puerto Cabello, one of eight children of Lebanese immigrants. He moved to Caracas in the early 1940s to attend medical school where he graduated with honors, specializing as an ob-gyn. He had a stellar career, met and married my grandmother, became the director of the Red Cross, and had four children, including my mother, his firstborn. In his midforties he suffered a small accident and had the humility to acknowledge that he wasn’t as dexterous as he had been, and decided to quit his career as a physician to work for his family’s bank.

This might have been a crisis, but he reinvented himself spectacularly. Reclaiming his love for painting, on weekends he sat with his easel and many tubes of oil paint on his patio to create magic landscapes and lush still lifes of gorgeous vases filled with colorful tropical flowers. He also became an avid art collector. My grandfather was so brilliant that, within a few years, he became one of the top three executives running his family’s financial institution. He had found a new passion and career. The combination of backgrounds and interests made him creative and original in his ideas and their execution. Then he was kidnapped.

The 1970s in Venezuela were marked by social unrest, particularly from Marxist extreme-left antigovernment guerrilla forces that operated in remote rural areas far from the main cities. Some of these men had been trained by Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba, where the dense vegetation and the difficult topography presented the best conditions for clandestine operations. There was no better place to hide.

Enrique was the perfect target for the guerrillas who were against the government’s land reform and its economic, fiscal, and international policies. They wanted to drive Venezuela toward an “anti-imperial” socialism: and here was Enrique, a high-profile, bright forty-seven-year-old, second in command of an important national bank. His captors followed all his moves for months, and on February 10, 1971, they intercepted his car when he was driving to work. Three men with guns blindfolded him, tied his hands behind his back, made him lie down in the back of a station wagon, and then drove for hours.

In those first minutes as a kidnapped man, a million thoughts raced through his mind, particularly of his wife and kids. His pulse accelerated, and he began to sweat profusely, but as a physician who had operated and carried out thousands of procedures, he also knew how to compose himself and breathe until the panic had subsided. That is what he did, that day and for the twenty-three days after.

The men drove my grandfather through rocky grounds and arrived at their destination in the afternoon. They barely spoke to him while they exchanged his blindfold for duct tape and gave him a straitjacket that they tied tightly behind his back, then told him to rest in a hammock. He slept like that every day while in captivity.

During those interminable twenty-four days, he sent five letters to my grandmother, as proof of life, while the kidnappers also sent letters asking for ransom, identifying themselves as a cell of a national liberation force. That’s how the negotiations with my grandmother, my grandfather’s brother, and a congressman-negotiator took place.

He prayed; he was patient. It had been the only time in his life where thoughts and feelings, padded with infinite silence, were his only undertakings. I remember an impactful line in his narration: “I don’t hold grudges. They fed me, and they didn’t kill me.”

On March 6, 1971, at dawn, they told him he was free to go. They removed the duct tape from around his eyes and gave him dark sunglasses. They never allowed him to see them. The men pointed him in a specific direction, always with his back at them, and told him to walk all the way down the mountain.

Payment of his ransom is surrounded by many parallel accounts, even today. There were too many people involved in crafting a pact with the kidnappers: the government, my great-uncle Aníbal, the top management and directors of the bank where he worked, and my grandmother. The actual number is anywhere from $500,000 to $1,000,000, and that was half a century ago. What is undeniably true is that all the money that my grandparents had went to paying that ransom. They had gone from glitz to nothing.

None of that could deter my grandfather from pursuing other ventures, and what came after was his second reinvention, starting with a new entrepreneurial path. He bought a printing company that made everything from books to posters, business cards to lithographs, and anything in between. He served everyone with love and attention and kept his employees happy and his family always close. He continued acquiring art and at times also selling it and trading it.

He had such a level of dignity and respect for work, people, and life in general. It was a joy to be around him. He took all his crises as opportunities to better himself and adjusted his course every time he realized that what once worked wouldn’t do it anymore.

HOW CALAMITY FUELS CREATIVITY

It is fair to say that creativity and crisis are related. The biggest human developments, major industrial advances, greatest inventions, and most important art movements have happened after big crises. Art was being created even before the idea or the word creativity existed. The Italian Renaissance followed on the heels of the Black Death in the late 1300s. The Bauhaus, modernism, surrealism, and art deco movements came in the 1920s right after the Spanish flu ravaged the world and the devastation of World War I was felt in every corner of the planet. We wouldn’t have Picasso’s Guernica, painted in 1937, had it not been for the Spanish Civil War. The Great Depression brought Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” between 1933 and 1939 and with it the creation of several agencies that engaged artists in public art projects all over the United States. The era of “content creators,” the propagation of digital images and videos, leveraged by the social media revolution, came after the economic collapse of 2008. When we find ourselves with limited resources, when we confront harsh conditions, or need to figure out how to react to difficulty, creativity thrives.

The word crisis comes from the ancient Greek krisis, which means “to make a decision.” For the Greeks it also meant “the turning point of a disease,” where it either got worse or got better. Creativity comes from the Latin term creō, “to create, make,” and back then it did not have the same meaning and connotation it has today. Remarkably, creativity was a word associated with the divine. It was only after Darwin’s evolutionary theory highlighted that man and nature could be “creative” without appealing to God that the word and concept of creativity took a new turn. Even then, for more than seventy-five years, Americans didn’t use the word creativity in their day-to-day vocabularies.

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