This was posted this week.
Jordan Peterson on Creativity and SuccessThe final five minutes of his lecture on psychometrics and personality traits cram quite a few insights (and career advice) on the relationship between creativity, entrepreneurship and commercial/personal success vs. conventional "conscientious" thinking and stable income/steady employment inside the box.
The entire lecture is worth watching. He even mentions the antithesis of entrepreneurship: bureaucracy.
Jordan's career advice: get a regular job and be creative on your own time.
My view agrees with this and only adds that success in any job requires some creativity to distinguish yourself and demonstrate the "added value" you bring to your employer. Entrepreneurship is that extracurricular effort you make to demonstrate your added value, not to an employer, but to the marketplace at large, in the hopes that a large enough segment of it will recognize that value and be ready to reward you with checkbook in hand... RIGHT NOW.
You will maximize your productivity by owning the output of your unique skills, especially the skill of forecasting the economic future as it applies to whatever it is you do for a living or for your calling.
If you exchange your most productive entrepreneurial abilities for a salary, the bulk of the profit will go to your employer, not to you. Your employer has you on the payroll because he is making at least twice as much by keeping you on the payroll as it costs him to keep you on the payroll.
I don't think it's a good idea to sell your greatest creativity to anybody. You should monetize it or capitalize it by retaining ownership of the output of it. That's why you have to do it on your own time.
This does not mean that the creativity that is directly associated with your job performance should not be given to your employer. The creativity that is required to perform well on the job belongs to him. That's what he is paying you for. Don't withhold it. But to the extent that he is paying you to develop this creativity on the job, you should be able to capitalize it on your own time by developing your own applications of whatever general principles you have discovered on the job. Your employer gets his share of your creativity, which he has paid for, and you retain your share of the creativity, which you apply to areas of your expertise that your employer did not pay for.
Here is an example. You pick up a lot of knowledge on the job about your industry. On your own time, you create a blog and a YouTube channel related to your industry. You learn things on the job that can be applied to aspects of your industry that do not relate directly to your job performance. I don't mean that you give away trade secrets of the company. I mean that the perspective that you get as a result of being on the payroll can be applied to areas outside your actual performance on the job.
You then seek opportunities to develop your reputation. You can make presentations at industry trade shows even though you're not being paid by your boss to attend and make these presentations. You do this on your own time. You do it on Saturdays, not during the week. Of course, if your boss wants to pay you to do it as part of the promotion of the company, that's terrific. But it is your name that is front and center, not the company's name. You are the primary beneficiary, not the company.
Everything you do in public to increase your name identification within your industry is a form of capital creation. It can benefit your career. It can give you opportunities to become a spokesman for the industry. You can get paid for this. You may even get a much better job offer as a result of this. That is an excellent way to capitalize your spare time. You convert spare time into income.
The more public you are, the more likely that the CEO of your company is going to notice you. The more likely you are to get a promotion. The less likely you are to get fired. All of this increases your job security and your career opportunities. But because it is done on your own time, you have not violated any moral or legal principle. You are then in a position to take advantage of these opportunities, even though they come from outside your company.
If it is clear that you are giving away this information, and not directly profiting from it, there should be no suspicion that you are misusing your information. You're giving the information away, but in doing so, you are building name identification within your industry. Name identification is a major capital asset.
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