Going Slow to Go Fast - Making Time For Creativity and Curiosity in Your Work
How to find opportunities to be creative and advance your career
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Going Slow to Go Fast
One of the aspects of entrepreneurship and being a creator that I like is the ability to facilitate time and space for thinking, ideating, exploring curiosities and building “things'' into the actual design of my actual job. During these moments, it feels like time slows down, and in some cases, my measure of productivity comes to a fault. But when I come out of them or get to a final product, I often find the impact is significant. I call this the opportunity to “go slow to go fast.”
While I worked in jobs before that sometimes allowed for creativity, I often found it difficult to make actual space for thinking, creativity and building when working in the corporate world. So much of our ways of working are built around optimization of processes, structure and ways of working that work really well around robots and tech enabled systems, but don’t always work well for people and human creativity. To be sure, being efficient, meeting deadlines and measuring your outputs are important to running a healthy business and company, especially at the scale of organizations that I worked at. And we wouldn’t be able to do any of this without technology and automation.
But over time, I found that even in roles that allowed for creativity, it was difficult to make the proper time and space to actually think and be creative. This was especially true during the pandemic, but I actually think it has always been like this, I think we all felt it more acutely when we weren’t in the office.
My original trick for managing this was to treat my job like I treated college - there was your main job (classes) and then there was your second job (extracurriculars) For anyone who is reading this newsletter that went to college with me, you probably know that my creative engine (extracurriculars) was pretty full. I was in student government for four years, student body president, orientation leader, resident assistant, retreat leader, and many other things.
This mindset worked well, especially starting off my career at a company like Deloitte, which more or less encouraged outside of your day job extracurriculars (aka firm activities.) Once I got a bit of the handle of the day job, I started looking for other firm activities, many of which gave me the freedom to pursue interests and my creative engine.
The great thing about this, was that firm activities were something you were evaluated on, for your performance reviews. For some people, this was annoying, and that was especially true if you were working on a high burn high stress project and still had to do a bunch of extra activities on the side. But for me, I always viewed it as a way for me to find that creative outlet to do things, meet people, build and ideate.
For example, one of my firm activities at Deloitte was to do internal training for new hires and newly promoted consultants. While these activities were allowed and viewed by the firm as important, it often meant taking yourself away from client work (physically) but you still had to take care of work while you were leading the training, so you were basically doing double work. I didn’t care and most people who did these didn’t either because we enjoyed helping out with these and teaching and mentoring younger analysts. Furthermore, this work felt easy, not in the sense that I could go on autopilot, but more in the intrinsic motivation and desire I had to do this work, even if it was hard.
During one of the training sessions, I met a Partner who was also leading the training. We got into a discussion about the training, as well as some of the other work I had done with some of our other internal leadership programs which we actually turned into commercial offerings for our clients. He asked me about trying to do something like this for one of his clients, a Private Equity firm, and a few months later that actually led to us working together to deliver a unique project where we built a week-long leadership development program for the private equity firm and 50 of their top portfolio companies that I got to play a major role in leading on the project.
Another time at Deloitte, I was participating in an online social media community for people interested in digital collaboration technologies. Deloitte had just become a sponsor of the MIT Media Lab to explore opportunities within the lab to commercialize some of their social and digital technologies, and through the community I got connected with a partner who needed someone to identify which companies and founders might be a good fit for collaboration opportunities.
For the next 6 months, my job was every Friday, to go to the Media Lab across the river from my apartment, and meet with founders of the companies at the labs to see which ones were viable for commercial opportunities. I not only got to meet founders building interesting things, but also discovered my interest for commercialization and go to market, which was a huge driver for why I initially wanted to make the move from consulting to product marketing. The partner who I helped was also the partner who wrote my recommendation letter for business school. It was never an intended outcome, but certainly grateful that it led to that.
Experiments, creative pursuits, side-projects, extracurriculars give you an opportunity to learn, and learning is inherently a social activity, but many of us need an intrinsic desire to learn on our own. This is why mandatory training doesn't always achieve its intended outcomes. But when you make time to do something that you are genuinely interested in pursuing, even if you are trying to learn, since it’s on your own volition, you’re probably more intrinsically motivated to stick with whatever you are doing. Simply exploring a new topic, or diving deeper into a skill or activity you like is great, but the meaning goes up a few notches when you are engaged with others.
One of the best parts of finding space for projects, extracurriculars and activities that allow you to explore your creativity and interests is that it brings you closer with others. While this has all sorts of benefits to your overall well-being, sense of connection, and engagement to your job, what it also does is gives you the opportunity for feedback and learning loops. These are opportunities to gain new knowledge, master skills, and learn more about yourself.
The benefits are two-fold. First, getting feedback is super helpful in terms of refining your craft. Being a trainer at the internal training sessions gave me a chance to practice facilitation and training skills, and my peers and colleagues often showed me what I was doing well and what I could improve. While I’d like to think I am pretty self-aware I also fall victim to the self-awareness trap that many of us fall into, but when other people can provide timely and objective feedback and guidance, we can begin to see things that we can’t always see by ourselves, and find ways to get better.
But the simple act of consistently showing up and doing something that allows you to be creative or explore something you’re curious about has another important effect - it opens you up to opportunities that you simply wouldn’t have otherwise if you didn’t do the thing to begin with. Woody Allen once said 90% of life is showing up.
Showing up at the training after a long work week is what got me that opportunity to do the private equity project and further my path toward leadership development and facilitation. Showing up to collaborate in the online social media community got me the chance to work at the MIT Media Lab, an interest in Go-To-Market, and a recommendation letter to business school.
One of the reasons why I named my company Betterwork Labs, is that a lab is a place where you can experiment and test things that you can later use for further development or opportunity. I have always used this approach when working at large companies which are like big petri dishes. You throw a bunch of things in the dish (ex: different people in the organization, diverse ideas, different resources, different perspectives) put them together, and see what comes of it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but coming out of it gives you valuable data that can be used to find further opportunities both for the individuals and for the organization.
The question then becomes, how can you find more ways to find these creative and curiosity driven pursuits in your day to day job? How can you make space amidst the chaos to think, reflect, or identify opportunities, for yourself and for your team? How can you look for extracurricular projects or places to get learning loops that can fuel growth, new opportunities, and allow you to show up in spaces and places that give you a chance to unlock new opportunities?
To be sure, you have to do your day job, if you want to advance in your organization and show up well to your boss. But I don’t think finding space to pursue side-projects, extracurricular activities or creative outlets is mutually exclusive from performing well in your job or advancing your career. I actually think they feed each other very well, but here are a few suggestions:
#1)Start Documenting and Showing Your Work
One thing you can start doing right now and incorporating into your workflow is to start documenting the work you do. Leaving a paper trail of what you are doing and what you are thinking is a great place to start. This is helpful in that it helps you get visibility for the work that you are doing amongst other people who might be interested in it and that could help advance your cause. It also is helpful because in large organizations in particular, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, and if you want to make sure people know who you are and your brand, you need to get yourself out there.
But the other benefit is that it helps you actually clarify the work you are doing and the impact that it’s making. I’ve talked before about how internal marketing can help you advance your career, but what it can also do is clarify. Writing a summary of the latest product launch and the lessons you learned can be as helpful to you as the people that you are sharing it with. Some may see this as time that could be spent on efficiently doing the next thing on the to do list, but I think would argue that the process of taking time to reflect on the project, synthesize and write down what went well and what could have gone better, document the outcomes etc and then to share it with an audience is more than worth responding to an hour or two of emails.
#2) Find Others to Go On The Journey With You
One of the best parts about these opportunities is that you get to do them with others. We are social creatures, and being in concert with others fires off feelings of safety and connection in our brains. Whether that’s finding other people within your company to collaborate on or partner with, or externally (online or in-person) these are great opportunities to explore in a group. This is also why I am impressed and energized by people like Diego and Felix (PM Mastermind) Nick (Decentralaliens) Grace (Product Buds) and Joseph (TechPod) and many others, who have created their own spaces to pursue curiosities and creative pursuits that have become things much bigger than themselves.
#3) Collaborate with your manager on how to carve out time
Fully acknowledging that YMMV (your mileage may vary, or your manager may vary) but one thing to do is to work with your manager on creating space and time on your calendar, and on your own list of projects and priorities for this kind of work. There are multiple ways of framing this, but it all comes back to the fact that in addition to executing work, we also need time to plan, think and reflect. One way to frame is to use it as an opportunity to identify more impactful + strategic projects that could help your team add more value.
Another way is to think of it as time for career development, and a chance to help you build your brand and elevate your career. Another way to frame it, is to use it as a means to help advance the cause of your team, and your team’s brand within the enterprise. And another way to frame it, is to use it as a chance to build stronger relationships with others in your company. Whatever you think your manager will be amenable, go with that.
Finding time “to go slow to go fast” in order to unlock creativity, pursue curiosities and engage with others has a lot of benefits both to you as an individual as well as to your company. Whether you’re trying to find time to work on things that matter, get your work noticed in your company, or find ways to elevate your people, creating space for side projects and extracurricular activities that allow for people to thrive is great place to start.
if you’ve found time for extracurriculars or creative thinking, I’d love to hear how you did it!