An excerpt from author John Howkins on the Ten Rules for Success
‘Ten Rules for Success’
1. Invent yourself. Create a unique cluster of personal talents. Own your image. Manage it. Build momentum. Leave school early, if you want, but never stop learning. Dance as if no one is looking. Break the rules. Be clear about your own assets and talents. They are unique. And they are all you have.
2. Put the priority on ideas, not on data. Create and grown your own creative imagination. Build a personal balance sheet of intellectual capital. Understand patents, copyright, trademarks and other intellectual property laws that protect ideas. Entrepreneurs in the creative economy are more worried if they lose their ability to think than if their company loses money. Think about it.
3. Be nomadic. Nomads are at home in every country. You can choose your own path and means of travel, and choose how long you stay. Being nomadic does not mean being alone; most nomads travel in groups, at night. Writer Charles Handy says leaders must combine ‘a love of people’ and a ‘capacity for aloofness’. Nomads appreciate both the desert and the oasis; likewise creatives need both solitude and the crowd, thinking alone and working together.
4. Define yourself by your own (thinking) activities, not by the (job) title somebody else has given you. If you are working for a company X on project Y, say you are working on project Y at company X. People who are brave call themselves ‘thinkers’. Computer companies try to concoct and sell ‘business solutions’ to their client’s problems; in the creative economy we each can think and exchange creative solutions with each other. Play Charles Hampden-Turner’s Infinite Game’, in which everybody seeks a mutually positive outcome.
5. Learn endlessly. Borrow. Innovate. Remember US Electric Power ad, ‘A New Idea Is Often Two Old Ideas Meeting for the First Time’. Use retro, reinvention, revival – be a magpie. Creative artists scavenge for new ideas. It does not matter where you get ideas from; what does matter is what you do with them. If you’re bored, do something else. Use networks. If you cannot find the right network, start it. Take risks and do unnecessary things. Completely ignore Frederick Winslow Taylor’s famous instruction to the Ford Motor Company’s workers that they should ‘eliminate all false movements, slow movements and useless movements’. Wayward movements can lead to amazing discoveries.
6. Exploit fame and celebrity. The production costs are small and relatively fixed. Fame is what economists call a ‘sunk cost’, which cannot be recovered but which can be freely exploited at no further expense, and both fame and celebrity bring virtually unlimited rewards in terms of the ability to charge more for one’s services and to revitalize a life or career that is momentarily stuck. Being well known (even slightly known) is as important in the creative economy of the twenty-first century as good typing speeds were in the clerical economy of the twentieth. The essence of being a star, as shrewdly revealed by David Bowie, is ‘the ability to make yourself as fascinating to others as you are to yourself’. This is not about being famous for fifteen minutes, which is how Andy Warhol characterized the transience of media attention, and being famous for being creative, which was Warhol’s own achievement, long after he had stopped painting or indeed working at all.
7. Treat the virtual as real and vice versa. Cyberspace is merely another dimension on everyday life. Do not judge reality by whether it is based on technology but by more important and eternal matters such as humanity and truth. Bandwidth is useless without a message, without communication. At all times, use the RIDER process: review, incubation, dreams, excitement and reality checks. Mix dreams and reality to create your own future.
8. Be kind. Kindness is a mark of success. Data never say ‘please’. Humans can and should say ‘please’, and mean it. People treat each other as they themselves are treated; exactly as a fast computer produces data more quickly, so a kind person will be invited to more networks, receive more knowledge and create more.
9. Admire success, openly. Martina Navratilova, who won Wimbledon nine times and the US Open four times, was right when she said: ‘The person who said, “It’s not whether you win or lose that counts,” probably lost.’ Equally do not be fixated on success: be curious about failure. Creative people are the strictest judge of their own successes and failures because they want to learn from them (see rule 5). The worst thing is depression, not recession. You will never win if you cannot lose.
10. Be very ambitious. Boldly go.
11. Have fun. Film-maker David Puttnam, who starts the next chapter, says, ‘The most exciting, creative period of my life was in the early 1960s at the Collett Dickinson Pearce advertising agency when I was a group head working with Charles Saatchi, Alan Parker (who later directed Midnight Express and Evita) and Ridley Scott (who later directed Alien) – a pretty good group, you’ll agree. But the only thing I remember doing a lot, a really loft of, was tap dancing. We spent hours practising tap dancing and in between we’d work out an ad. It was a fantastic thing. We’d be screaming with laughter, absolutely falling about and meanwhile creating some very remarkable work.’ People who enjoy themselves are not only happier but they achieve more, faster. Above all, do not worry; Tom Wehr of the National Institute of Mental Health, Maryland, says the sleeping brain sorts out the previous day’s affairs as ‘a creative worry factory’. Feed it.
And when writing the ten rules for success in the creative economy, don’t worry if you end up with eleven. You can break your own rules (see rule number 1).
(Pages 155-158)
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