BEHAVIOUR 09 OF 10 . +1

Why should I make something that has nothing to do with my job?

Because the making feeds the part of you that your job is spending. A thing of your own gives you mastery, control and relaxation that work cannot, and it comes back as creativity and generosity at work. Occasionally it becomes the work.

The one where you actually have to make something

Think, do, be. Every other behaviour on this list changes how you are in work that already exists. This one asks you to start something that does not.

Choose one thing and nurture it. It might become the thing.

What it looks like when it’s missing

Somebody very good at their job who has not made anything of their own in four years, and has stopped noticing.

They are not burnt out. They are producing. But everything they make now is in answer to somebody else’s brief, and the muscle that starts things from nothing has quietly gone soft. The tell is that they have stopped having ideas outside work as well, and they will put that down to age or to being busy.

Where this came from, twice

John, my co-founder at Sideways, was under the pump, running the business, in it every hour. And he could feel his capacity to create going. That was the part that bothered him. Not the workload, the loss.

So I told him he needed a +1.

He loves meat and barbecue. So that is what he did. He started making salts and herb rubs. Sourced the salts, built the unit, went to a market, took orders, shipped them.

Not to make money. He was already running a company. He did it because he needed a way out of his own head, because he wanted to share something he loved, and because he needed the energy back.

And BIFKiDS started the same way. I wrote a book for my daughter, called Ideas Girl, because she was wildly creative and I wanted her to have something that was hers.

That was a +1. It was not a business, it was not a plan, and I was not building a company for children.

It became BIFKiDS. Then a schools programme, tested in the UK and launched in New Zealand.

And here is the part people get wrong

The salts did not become a business, and were never meant to. That is not the lesser outcome. That is the behaviour working exactly as intended.

If you start a +1 in order for it to become something, it stops doing the job it is there to do, because now it is work with worse hours. The reason Ideas Girl could turn into a schools programme is precisely that it was not trying to.

Choose it because you love it. What it becomes is not your business at the start.

What the evidence says

Eschleman, Madsen, Alarcon and Barelka (Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 2014) went at this directly, across two studies, the second using performance ratings from peers and subordinates rather than people marking their own homework.

Creative activity outside work was positively associated with three recovery experiences: mastery, control and relaxation. And those recovery experiences were in turn associated with creativity in the job and with extra-role behaviour, which is the technical way of saying helping other people at work when you did not have to.

Some of the benefit ran through recovery and some of it ran direct. Their conclusion was that organisations should be encouraging creative activity outside work, because of what it gives people that the job cannot: mastery and control over something entirely their own.

Look at what those three words describe. Mastery, control, relaxation. A man who is running a company he cannot control, making a small batch of something he can, entirely.

What to do on Monday

Pick one thing you love that has nothing to do with your work. Not the thing you think you should do. The thing you would talk about at length if somebody let you.

Then make one of something in it, and let it leave the house. A batch. A page. One recipe, one drawing, one recorded track, one anything, given to one person.

Not a plan. Not a name and a logo and a five year outlook. One made thing, out of your hands and into somebody else’s.

If it lights you up, do another one. If it does not, pick a different thing. You have not lost anything, and you will have found out something about yourself that no amount of thinking about it would have told you.

+1 is behaviour nine of ten, and it sits with Tuning-in and Letting Go in Module 4, Deepening Your Inner Creativity.

Sources

  1. Eschleman, K. J., Madsen, J., Alarcon, G., & Barelka, A. (2014). Benefiting from creative activity: the positive relationships between creative activity, recovery experiences, and performance-related outcomes. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 87(3). Two studies; the second used peer and subordinate ratings of performance. doi:10.1111/joop.12064
  2. BIF source: Matt Hart on his Sideways co-founder and the salts, and on Ideas Girl becoming BIFKiDS.