Intro: crunching numbers vs. crunching riffs

A few years ago, I had a job for which I traveled a bit doing recruiting. On one recruiting trip, I was sitting at dinner with my colleagues in a restaurant near my alma mater, where we were searching for new recruits, and a young woman came to our table.

“Excuse me, is your name Paul?” she asked shyly. I replied that yes, it was.
“Are you in ‘otis wants bread’?” she asked.
“I was, but we’re not around anymore,” I told her.
“Well, that’s too bad. I love your CD – I still play it in my car all the time!” she said.
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I responded with a blush.

As she left, my stunned co-workers stared for a minute, and then began to interrogate me. They hadn’t known that I had been a musician, or at least a musician successful enough to have people recognize me in restaurants.*

They asked a few questions, I told a few road stories, and so on. Then, finally, the last question was:

“So, uh, why are you doing this?” By which he meant, why are you working for a credit card company crunching data when you could be a rock star living the high life, or at least the interesting life?

I was stumped. I’m sure I came up with an answer that had something to do with the relative incomes and working conditions of the two professions. We moved on to talk about different things, and the moment was gone.

But two things always stuck with me about that conversation. First, my co-workers clearly felt that they were doing what they were doing because they “had” to; since they didn’t have the miraculous gift of creativity, went the reasoning, they needed to find dull office-type jobs in finance and human resources where they could do well. And second, they could not believe that somebody like me, who apparently was blessed with the gift, would choose to work where they did for a living.

As I write this post, I am lying on a couch with my knee swelled to the size of a watermelon. Earlier today, I had an arthroscopy to remove some cartilage damaged from a long and unfortunate habit that I’ve had of playing soccer and getting injured while doing it. I am by no means a good player, and most charitable descriptions of my play would include words like “workmanlike” and “hustle”. But I enjoy the game and have had the occasional high point in the 25 years that I’ve played; a great goal, a great save, a run and pass that threads a needle and catches a defense unaware. Those best moments always have the characteristics normally associated with “flow”, or “being in the zone”. Better writers than I have talked about the importance of such peak experiences and how they relate to creativity.

I bring it up to illustrate two things. First, creativity exists in every field. Like Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, I believe there are multiple ways to be creative. In fact, the two concepts are closely related; having an innate sense for how to do something (like kick a soccer ball, solve a math problem, sell an idea, or play a guitar) gives you a leg up when it comes to bending the rules to adapt to a particular situation.

And second, doing something creative is enjoyable and liberating, no matter what field it is in. My dinner companions had expressed surprise that I had given up life as a musician to become a risk modeler; to them, playing guitar and singing in a rock band was an innately preferable experience to crunching numbers. This might be true; but they didn’t see the miles of driving, the empty clubs and wasted booking agents, the endless rehearsals, the terrible bar gigs with people yelling “FREE BIRD!” that go into a reasonably successful music career. Nor did they see the less dramatic moments of success getting a mathematical model to work by tweaking a variable in a new way, or giving a presentation to the CEO and hitting it out of the park, that made my new job creative. I simply didn’t see being a statistical modeler as “less creative” than fronting a rock band.

This blog is about achieving those moments and integrating them into the working world. Check out the manifesto. Share your opinion. Maybe creativity can be learned; maybe it can’t be. But it is certainly not the sole province of art-school graduates, or teenaged entrepreneurs, or Hollywood writers. Or of guitar players in second-rate college rock bands. And it’s a good thing; if you’re not creative on the job, you’re dispensable. So you need to either get creative – fast – or start taking those guitar lessons for your next career.

* Truth be told, this probably happened to me two or three times in my whole life. But it wasn’t important for my co-workers to know that!