Creative you is a choice
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) The most important thing to know about the future of your work is this: anything that’s not creative can be commoditized.
You’ve already seen how automation and cheap labour have eclipsed factory-based work. It doesn’t stop there, |NAME|.
What gets commoditized in the future is just about any product or service that can be done faster and cheaper, thanks to technology. That’s a lot of things.
Twenty years ago, my business would have needed a bookkeeper and a full-time accountant to manage the back-end of my operation. Today, a cloud-based service looks after most of what I need for a monthly fee roughly equal to what I paid for lunch yesterday.
If you were a bookkeeper reading this, you might see that example as proof of the frustrating downside to technology and a hyper-connected marketplace. Or you could accept it and embrace it as an opportunity.
I’m not alone in that belief.
The Swiss-based World Economic Forum already ranks creativity as a top-ten skill for professionals of all stripes. They predict it’s going to be a top-three skill (http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution) by the end of this decade.
All professional work can be creative, |NAME|. Nobody has a monopoly on that skill…and that choice.
Creativity is no longer measured by whether you have a pretty portfolio of work samples: it’s determined by how well you understand the intrinsic value of what you do and can find smarter ways to bring that valuable thing to the marketplace.
Case in point: “writer” is on my business card but that’s not what generates the majority of my income. If I were to treat writing services as my core product, then I’d be competing in a marketplace where—let’s face it—most writers and editors work for next to nothing.
Instead, I’m in the advice business. My customers get the writing practically for free.
What they pay for is my ability to connect things in interesting, unusual ways. That’s my definition of what creativity is all about. And it’s how I help businesses solve interesting problems.
Not only do I use technology to make it easy for customers to find me and do business with me, it also helps me generate a lot of creative work in less time than what would have been possible two decades ago.
You can do this, too. But it’s a choice. It won’t happen by accident.
Whether you are in real estate or account management or fundraising—your challenge is to find the intrinsic value behind what you do and turn your output into a deliberate, repeatable work flow.
Disruption isn’t just something that happens to other people in other industries: it’s a symptom of something deeper that’s been churning for quite some time now in the market.
It’s up to you and I to connect the dots, break some rules and do amazing things with this new way of working.
Very best, Patrick
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