5 Creativity Hacks for Entrepreneurs with Jason Keath

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought Brought to you by HighLevel, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down five creativity hacks for entrepreneurs. And to drop these value bombs, I brought to Jason Keith and the EO Fire Studios. Jason is a creativity keynote speaker, author of The Case for More Bad Ideas, and co-founder of Social Fresh, the conference that helped launch the modern social media industry. And today, we'll talk about what stops most people from being more creative, how to be creative when you're short on time, how bad ideas lead to better thinking, AI tools to boost our creativity and oh so much more.

0:40And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Jason and our sponsors. Here's something most of us don't think about until it's a problem. Our phone service. Cape is a privacy first mobile carrier built from the ground up with security as the priority. If you care about protecting your digital life without giving up your smartphone, Cape makes that possible. Visit cape.co forward slash fire and use code fire for 33 % off Cape for six months today. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software.

1:18Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Jason, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Yeah, John, I'm so happy to be here. I think for me, taking risk or in another way, taking counterintuitive risk is something that pays off more than most people think it does. It doesn't mean it's always going to pay off. It doesn't mean taking stupid risk is a good idea. But I think thinking what everyone else is doing and steering away from that is often a really good contrast for finding success in the world.

2:04Well, I love that word counterintuitive. I'm glad you brought it up early. And Fire Nation, today we're talking about five creativity hacks for you, for entrepreneurs. So what stops most people from being more creative, Jason? I think the first answer you would hear from most people is not having enough time or not having enough freedom from a boss or other obligations. But, and those, I mean, those have a ring of truth. There's a little bit of truth there, but I think it's much simpler than that. We just don't teach creativity. So, you know, I went to art school, I spent five years in art school, learning design and photography and sculpting and painting and all of that.

2:40No one ever taught me a creative process in art school. I've worked at half a dozen agencies through my agency career, started a couple agencies. None of those taught me any type of creative process. They'll teach you how to do things, how to paint or how to design an ad, but not to how to come up with ideas. And I think simply, most people just don't have a personal creative process. Like that's a lot of the reason I wrote my book is to give people kind of a blueprint that can be personal, because it's going to be different for everyone. And a blueprint that can be personalized to the way you like to work or what works for you is kind of what most people are missing.

3:13Now, you did just bring up the word busy and that people don't have much time. So let's really dive into that, because I think that is a problem because everybody claims to be busy. They're like, oh my God, I'm running around in a million circles. My kids have all these sports and school and all these. How can we be creative when we're short on time? Yeah. So, I mean, my whole model of creative process is an intervention method, meaning having these little cogs and tools and processes that you can sub in when you get stuck, when you are short on time, when you're starting a new project. a couple quick ones the the cornerstone of my book the case more about ideas is using kind of bad ideas as a first step for a creative project and the simplest version of doing that is taking 10 minutes to write down 25 bad ideas for whatever you're working on it could be character ideas book title ideas blog posts you know campaigns whatever and defining those as either obvious or absurd might help you get started there i think that's a great shortcut the second would be a similar shortcut I call constraint questions.

4:17So writing down 10 constraints for, or assumptions or anything that's defining what you're working on is kind of a limitation. Writing down 10 of those for the project or creative task you're, you're starting. These can be cultural constraints. They can be resource, no money, no time, staff, it can be technical. I have a whole list in the book that is helpful to refer to. But once you have those 10 constraints, question each one of them and ask, you know, what would I, what would have to be true for me to ignore this constraint? And oftentimes that's a really good thought starter to get you going in some unique directions, again, creating some contrast potentially.

5:00And then lastly, something that maybe takes a little longer, but I find really does make you more creative more quickly in the moment, if you have the preparation is making more lists. I believe a lot of really creative people are great list builders. For my book, I have a list of bad ideas, which are kind of just counterintuitive creativity stories that I've collected over a decade. I have close to 400 of them now that I still keep going. And everything in my book started on that list. I keep probably a couple dozen lists of words and character ideas and just all kinds of things for business that I do every day.

5:36So I think becoming a list keeper, especially a list for common creative challenges you have and kind of creating taxonomies around complex problems, I think that's a very good practice that would help a lot of people be more creative in the moment because you have that idea list, that inspiration list backing you up. Now, as you were just talking about, you really do believe that bad ideas can actually lead to better thinking. Tell us more about that, but actually even go further with a specific example of when you wrote down a bad idea and that turned into something great. Walk us through that example.

6:12Bad ideas work because they get you moving quickly. They build momentum. They're typically more fun to work on than good ideas. Like it's much easier if I tell you to come up with a bad idea to think about a lot of examples. I tell you to come up with a great idea. There's a lot of judgment involved. We get a little quiet, right? So it's designed to create more connections. Sometimes it does lead to actually good ideas. I mean, Hamilton, the Broadway play famously was derided as a bad idea by everyone. Lin-Manuel told about it in the beginning. But I mean, for me, I'll point to two examples. One is we built a yoga app and the yoga app was built for short classes.

6:52And all the classes were 20 minutes or less. And we were just, we had a lot of business ramifications around naming the app, like wanted it to be search friendly, wanted to be memorable, but also wanted it to really define these shorter classes and the science behind it. And a very obvious idea that got pushed early was 20 minute yoga, which doesn't sound like super memorable. And then when we would search for it, there were a lot of like YouTube videos of 20 minute yoga classes. So we kept that bad idea around in the brainstorming because it was, it did meet some of our qualifications. Um, and someone came up with 19 minute yoga and that ended up being becoming the name of the app, um, much more memorable.

7:35And it was kind of very accurate because all the sessions were like 19 minutes and 30 seconds, 19 minutes and 19 seconds, things like that. Um, and that's one of those obvious ideas that, that stuck around that was just, uh, you know, not something that typically would stand through most brainstorm meetings. I just have to jump in here because it just brings me back to one of my favorite movies, dumb and dumber and the seven minute abs, not the eight minute abs. But if you don't feel like you got as good a workout in the seven minutes, we'll send you the eighth minute for free. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

8:07I mean, I love obvious names. I love like standard oil and you know, like there's, you can, you can do a lot of wordplay and create a lot of new words in the world, but sometimes a simple, obvious answer is there as well. That can also work. Um, Um, another example I'll give, and this is someone we've worked with Spotify. Um, the creative director of Spotify, um, had what he thought was a great idea back in 25, 20, 2015 for their annual, uh, campaign marketing campaign and explained it to his team and no one really got it. Didn't think, thought it was kind of weird. And he kept at it and kind of developed it more.

8:41Um, and it ended up becoming their thanks 2016. It's been weird billboard campaign, which took personalized data from users and made billboards out of them and kind of became the blueprint of what their marketing looks like today. And there would be billboards of, you know, someone listening to a song a thousand times in a week and kind of questioning what was going on in that person's life. It was just a very funny campaign. But it wouldn't have really lasted if he hadn't taken someone's calling it weird as a challenge instead of taking it as kind of a closed door and keeping that idea around and kind of perfecting it and showing people instead of telling people what it could look like.

9:17So, I mean, I think not being afraid to defend your ideas and be a champion of bad ideas when you know you have kind of experience on a topic and can defend something, that's something I encourage more people to stick with. Just remember, everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people who heard the slogan, got milk, they thought that was a bad idea. A lot of people did. I know a lot of people when they heard the phrase, Just Do It by Nike thought that was a really bad idea. So just remember, there's a lot of what some people and a lot of people think are quote unquote, bad ideas, and they turn out to be pure brilliance.

9:53And we have a lot more to talk about around this topic. When we get back from thinking our sponsors, here's something most of us don't think about until it's a problem, our phone service, the big carriers, AT &T, Verizon and T-Mobile have made headlines over and over for data breaches, tracking, and selling customer data. And the wild part is, even if you use things like VPNs or encrypted apps, that doesn't protect you at the cellular level. Stuff like SIM swaps, call interception, and silent tracking can still happen behind the scenes. That's where CAPE comes in. CAPE is a privacy-first mobile carrier built from the ground up with security as the priority.

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12:07So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. Jason, we're back and I want to get your opinion on this. Who is setting the standard for creativity in business today? Yeah, I mean, a lot of examples come to mind. I'll throw a few quick ones out. I think Crocs is doing some really interesting things, like clearly have made their product viral, but they're expanding their product innovation quite a bit and doing a lot of new things there.

12:46I think New York Times is an interesting example in media because they've gone from just a news company to, you know, one of the two of the top two reasons people go to New York Times today is games and cooking, which has nothing to do with news. And they've made a strong business unit out of that. And then I'll also throw out MasterCard. I think they are a just pro level course in branding. They've developed their sonic branding. Anytime you check out with MasterCard and there's a there's a point of sale device that has a speaker on it, it'll play their sonic branding. That's in all their ads, too.

13:20and all of their Instagram reels and TikTok videos. And now they've doubled down on that with one of the first haptic brands I've ever seen where your phone will vibrate to the tune of their branding, which I think is interesting. And I think just forward-looking, any brand that's becoming a creator brand, meaning they're creating podcasts, they're creating newsletters, they're becoming a media company. Two clients we work with, Robinhood and HubSpot stand out there. HubSpot has their own podcast network. Robinhood has built their own kind of finance news ecosystem with Sharewood News. I think any brand who's looking at the future of marketing and doesn't realize they need to be able to practice and perfect the ability to have creators in-house and understand how that muscle works, I think that's the future of what everyone should be investing in.

14:07Yeah, I can say I was part of the HubSpot Podcast Network for four years, and it was really cool to see how innovative that they were. And, you know, you're bringing up Crocs, I had to just ask you the question, is Birkenstock doing anything? Because I just saw a picture of my 14-year-old niece. She's graduating from eighth grade, going into high school, and she's wearing Birkenstocks with socks. And I was just like, how is Birkenstock still cool with the younger generation? What are they doing? I was baffled. Yeah. How is that coming back into style? Abercrombie Fitch is back in a big brand again.

14:42I mean, fashion is cyclical. I can't tell you that I'm a fashion expert by any means. But I will say when a brand is able to stick around for a while and is a quality brand, it has a higher likelihood of kind of being able to go viral, which I think you see the Stanley Cup. I mean, the same marketer that kind of helped elevate the Stanley Cup is the same guy who has worked at Crocs now previously as their CMO and now their chief brand officer. So I think there's some talent behind the scenes that's obviously moving some of these brands. But yeah, I mean, it's fashion is not my bailiwick, but I defer to younger kids on that.

15:17I love that. Now, listen, a lot of people think that scaling is going to cause less creativity just by the nature of it. But you actually believe scale can make us more creative. Tell us more. Oh, yeah, it's definitely the opposite. Scale is one of the key ingredients to creativity. So there's two levels of scale. And essentially, it comes down to this ratio of 50 to 100 to one. So for every idea or result that you need, kind of creative result you need, you need 50 to 100 ideas to get there. And the two modalities of scale are one ideation and two iterations. So ideation is just coming up with a big list of ideas to start.

15:56So if you're we can go to fashion, if you're a fashion designer, a lot of fashion designers will sketch out 100 to 200 sketches for everything that they actually make in a new collection. another example i love there is snl's weekend update we'll write around 800 to 850 jokes every week just for weekend update where 15 to 20 of them get on air that's about a 50 to 1 ratio as well on the iteration side you know it's just getting better at something by doing it over and over and typically if you are iterating on something more than someone else you are going to get better at that creative task mr beast is a big believer in this his advice for any youtuber is just to start by making 100 videos before you start nitpicking them.

16:38Like try to get one thing better with each of them. And once you get to 100, you can start to really learn what a good YouTube video might look like. So a lot of ideas at the beginning. Sometimes that's in a group format and a lot of ideas to iteration and prototyping and putting stuff out there into the world. Let's talk artificial intelligence. Can AI tools boost our creativity? Yeah, I mean, if you had asked me a few months ago if AI could be as creative as a human, I would have confidently told you no. And I still don't think we're there today, but I've started to build, you know, some of my concepts from the book into AI prompts.

17:16I've been very impressed with the results. I think if you ask ChatGPT for a list of ideas today, you know, there's a chance you'll get like some magic to happen. And sometimes it's very mid results. Like it's a little bit of up and down, hard to predict whether you're going to get good results that day. But it's very capable, not of making creative decisions, but being a creative thought partner. And, you know, you're still the taste engine, you're still the creative director. But if you can add iteration to it, if you can make it, I think, a little more divergent, meaning a larger variety of ideas, and if you can give it what an expert process would look like, I think it's I mean I've been really impressed with the results I think if you're able to build on the kind of unrelenting do things over and over repeatable process of AI and give it a few of these guardrails the results are very good it's not going to make the decisions you would make but it's going to give you a lot more ideas we talked about that 50-200 to 1 ratio you can get there much more quickly with AI so I've written a number of AI creativity prompts that people are using and testing all of them for marketing use cases like writing ad copy or content campaign ideas and you're welcome to steal those from me and iterate on them and use them for your creative challenges you can find them on my newsletter at morebadideas.com but I think the key is build iteration into your AI prompts, actually plan two or three steps and a lot of examples that you can give feedback on so the AI can improve with you and actually have a kind of creative conversation with you.

18:59Jason, you've rocked the mic today. We talked about creativity hacks for entrepreneurs. And I would love for you to just take a step back and give us the one takeaway of everything we talked about that you would really want our listeners to get from our conversation. Taking a larger view at problems is very helpful. I find framing it as kind of a what-if mentality helps me quite a bit. you know, if you're asking for bad ideas in a creative discussion, if you're looking for counterintuitive directions to explore, looking for more contrast, you have to have a very open mindset to those ideas to really find the value in them.

19:36So what if we were to try this idea, what would have to be true for this idea to work? And I think that focus on being more open, being more curious about even the worst sounding idea you can think of, trying to figure out how it could work. That's the true nature of a creative person. What is your call to action for our listeners today? If they want to connect with you, learn more, where do they go? Yeah, check out my newsletter, morebadideas.com. I actually write about a bad idea every week or so, and a lot of creative tips, a lot of examples and case studies. And you can also find my AI creativity prompts there as well.

20:13Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JK and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything that we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Jason in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. Jason, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. Thanks, John. Always a pleasure. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Jason for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment.

20:53I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, which is personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side.

21:42coaches, and agencies, build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software, say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.