Embracing generativity
Would you find it easier to follow your ideas if using your own personal growth to have a positive impact on the world around you?
I was reading a book called Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff and found myself head to head with generativity.
As usual, the pen in my hand couldn’t stop scratching. I have borrowed, paraphrased, and personalised Le Cunff’s investigation of generativity.
Generativity: using your own personal growth to have a positive impact on the world around you.
Instead of leaving a future-based legacy, you transcend personal interest to focus on others around you. You gain energy from the interconnected nature of community, creating opportunities, and sharing experiences for collective growth.
It is the modest impacts happening in real time that directly enrich other people’s lives. And in turn, enriching the lives of the person as they grow personally and as a person of impact.
Keys for generative adventures
Do the work first
Don’t wait for the credibility or the permission. Instead, learn by doing, exploring, and experimenting. Transparency about the stage you’re at can help frame this outside your self-doubt.
Grow lateral roots
Expand your range outside the tenure track style of structure where levelling up in one structure or path is the true measure of success. Learn, enjoy, and incorporate a wider selection of life data and knowledge. Don’t feel compelled to fold everything into one career track (hello my old friend portfolio career).
Prioritise Impact over Image
Embrace fluidity. Forget about carefully curated brand images and career narratives (and alternating coloured posts on Instagram). Follow where TALENT + IMPACT lead you.
Close the loop
Finish what you start and learn from the impact you create. Dependability and impact collide to create a force to be reckoned with. Glean insights from experience. Debrief, hold autopsies, and reflect. Learn by doing, learn from discomfort and mistakes, and do better. Understand the finite nature of projects and ideas, finish things, even close them off, and integrate their gifts into the next chapter.
Play along the way
Don’t be the reward camel who stores reward or achievement, who delays enjoying the creative work, curiosity, or connecting with the work itself in favour of some far off (potentially non-existent) pay day. Deprivation and hard taskmaster motivation is just the lingering vestiges of Protestant Work Ethic and the trauma speaking. Embrace CREATIVITY, INNOVATION, EXPLORATION.
Remember:
Unconventional approaches meet unmet needs, create value in unexpected ways, and have a way of not being hampered by constraints.
Providing permission
Looking after yourself, building your skills and ideas, these are all positive things. Yet, somewhere along the way, the switch gets flicked that tells us that to be curious and creative is to be self-indulgent, and to speak about our journey in non-commercial, intrinsic, and non-measurable/quantifiable terms means it lacks substance.
However, most of what we do of value cannot be qualified via money, prestige, popularity or proliferation. Extending the frame further out from “I am successful” to “As a result of my influence, others succeed” seems a lot more healthy.
I don’t know about you, but I know I am sick of hearing:
Success in terms of income generated
The justification of “once I’m rich, I’ll give back” coming from those who ruin the planet, community, culture, etc.
How Business Guru™ will lead us all the business promise land… as long as we buy enough of their stuff to send them there first
My own head telling me that the ideas I long to work on lack value when measured in outcomes or by my wallet
Exploring ideas to connect seems like the right bloody ticket. Doncha think?
image: handwritten journal note about generativity as per the first section of this blog.