Your personal values shape every aspect of your creativity, from the industry you find yourself in, to the problems you try to solve, the way you try to solve them, and how you try to market them. 

Today were we talking about how your personal values influence your creativity. This episode, it’s gonna be you’re gonna take either one of 2 things from this episode. Either you’re going to leave it thinking “well it was a pretty interesting theory and yeah that makes sense” or you’re gonna really take this in and this is gonna be like a mind-blowing thing for you. 

We’ll start off by giving you a brief overview of how this works, then I’ll talk about my own personal experience, why I let this idea slip through the cracks and then the results I got once I actually realized that this was the source of a lot of the issues I was having with my creativity. From there we’ll talk about how you can apply that to your life as well. 

When I talk about personal values, I’m asking you to identify what is important to you. If you were to think about who you are and what is important to you… maybe write down your top 10 list, then those ideas would be the things that you value.

We already talked about some of my personal values in the episode we did on mastery. 

A big part of my value system comes down to contribution… to helping other people. Also, I highly value exploration. I really love the process of learning new things exploring the unknown. And the number 3 for me would be something like curiosity.

So think about just those 3 values there: contribution, exploration, and curiosity. How are those personal values going to affect my creativity? 

In the Componential Theory episode, we talked about the 3 components of great creativity: domain-specific knowledge, creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation.

If you look at your personal values, you can see how all 3 areas of your creativity are going to be impacted by your personal values. You can see how curiosity would lead you to explore more information, to reading books, and learn more ideas that you can then apply to your creativity. 

With creativity-relevant skills, you can see how curiosity is really the driving force that makes you want to know what’s going to happen if you try the “do the opposite” strategy or what’s going to happen if you combine 2 ideas that other people haven’t tried before. That’s curiosity at work.

And then lastly, of course, your curiosity is going to influence your motivation. Whenever you feel curious, you’re motivated to go and find the answer. So you can see right here that just with taking one of these values, the value of curiosity, you can see how it would already have a huge effect on your creativity. 

So that’s a good snapshot of how this relates to your creativity in general, but let’s look at the process and how your personal values will influence your process more specifically. 

So let’s break the process down into just 3 general categories: problem finding, problem-solving, and then some kind of persuasion or marketing. It’s a very broad way of looking at the creative process. 

So now, we ask ourselves how do your personal values determine each action that you take when you are in each one of these stages.

Problem Finding 

Think about how your brain actually goes about figuring out if something is a problem or not. Whenever you observe something, your brain is constantly checking it against what it expected. 

Think about the last time you were walking down the stairs and then one of those stairs was slightly shorter or slightly longer than the other one… or maybe you hit the last step but you think there’s one more. In these situations, as your foot should have hit the last stair, you suddenly realize there’s a problem. Your brain says “wait for a second! I expected to find the floor by now!” What your brain is doing here is it’s comparing reality with what it expected to happen. 

This is constantly happening throughout your entire day. In fact, this is the only way you can figure out if a problem exists. Your brain has to relate that to something else and that something else is your personal value. I can not say you’re wrong unless I also go into my brain and I figure out what I think should be right. 

Problem Solving

So that does it for problem finding, but what about problem-solving?

You would think that your personal values shouldn’t really play any kind of important role here because once you know what the problem is, ideally you should just figure out what the best strategy is to solve it and then just do that. It really shouldn’t have anything to do with your personal values, but of course, that’s not how it actually ends up working out. 

Think about all the times that you have really created your own creativity block. When that happens, the problem could be solved but usually, we create these limitations ourselves because we don’t actually like what’s that path would offer us. 

For example, as somebody who’s very introverted. Any strategy that requires extroversion is going to be way harder for me now. That shouldn’t be the case because I want to solve the problem, but my personal value is going to determine what it is that I have in front of me… what options are on the table. 

That doesn’t mean I can’t choose an uncomfortable option, but as you undoubtedly know from personal experience… the comfortable things are things that get done very easily, and the things that are really, really uncomfortable either take a long time to get done or we end up rationalizing why we shouldn’t do it. 

So your personal values are going to change how you go about solving the problem just because they change how you build your constraints, how you determine what limits you and what doesn’t. 

Persuasion

So moving on to the persuasion part of it. Once you’ve built your product, what happens then? and how is it determined by your personal values? 

When you’re marketing your idea, you’re trying to persuade other people one of the values that are going to determine your success is your ego. Do you value protecting your ego or do you value hearing harsh feedback and then applying it so that you can improve your product? 

Which of those 2 values is going to be more important to you? 

I’m not saying that you have to choose one or the other. You have both of these values inside of you. The question is which one is ranked higher than the other.

You might want to hear feedback and improve your product, but if you don’t have enough ego strength then that is going to dominate that value system for you and determine your behavior. You’re going to hear the feedback and it’s going to be too painful for you to really accept the feedback and then be very analytical and cold-hearted about it so you can actually apply that feedback and improve your product 

So how much you value your ego versus the product is going to determine what you do once you’re marketing that product. 

How Personal Values Affected My Creativity

So as promised let’s talk about how I went through this process of going through writer’s block and then realizing that my own personal values were really the reason why I was stressed out so much while I was writing my book. 

My book is called Playfully Inappropriate. Inside the book, I teach a new structure for writing comedic stories. I’ve always been really interested in how some people can be really funny without ever feeling like they told you a joke. That was something that I really felt was missing from the stand-up comedy teaching that was already out there. 

I was really obsessed with this question. I was really curious about what the answer could be and I started exploring any kind of way I could solve this problem. 

So my personal values… they influence the problem finding because I’ve always felt like stand-up comedy jokes were way too structured, like you always felt like these comedians were being so fake with me. I really didn’t like that so my personal value really highlighted that this was a problem. Because it was a problem for me, I set out to solve something that perhaps other people weren’t even trying to solve. 

As I was writing the book, I stumbled upon an amazing theory called Benign-Violation Theory. I absolutely love this theory of comedy. It’s really it’s a super simple way of understanding what makes you laugh. I had a great way of describing comedy but I had nothing prescriptive, nothing to tell people what to do. So I had to create this entirely new structure for writing comedy. It was super fun, but at the same time, I was really struggling throughout this process. 

Eventually, I realized that my own personal values were really getting in the way. When I was writing and editing this book, I had the personal value of making sure I was safe. I was saying something that was really far out there. Nobody had tried what I was trying yet, but I still had this personal value of protecting my ego or trying to be safe in some way. That manifested itself in this writing style that tried to prove every single point that I was trying to make. I would give you the basic idea, but then my personal values made me feel pulled towards explaining every sub-topic and every exception to the rule. I did that because I really felt like I needed to prove to people that this actually was true rather than giving the most simple version of it and trusting myself and trusting the reader to find it for himself. 

So you can imagine going through and writing a book and constantly being worried that someone’s going to say that’s not true and then they’re going to start posting stuff on Twitter and they’re going to spread their ideas out there and then like it’s gonna be a problem. So I’m trying to cover my bases with every single paragraph and chapter that I’m writing. You can imagine how stressful of a situation it was, but it was all coming from my personal value of feeling like I had to protect myself. That is a personal value. It wasn’t something that really needed to be done.

What I realized was that the reason the first version of my book was so freaking complex and difficult to read wasn’t because this topic was complex itself … it’s kind of complex but that’s not the real reason. The real reason it was complex is because I was making it that way… as a way of trying to protect myself from any kind of negative feedback or criticism. 

So I eventually realized that I was the one who is bringing all the complexity into the process. I believed at the time that what I was doing had to be difficult and it was stressing me out because of that belief. 

Once I realized that it was my personal value of just protecting myself… Having that value made me take different actions, which led to the book becoming too complex. 

After I realized that, things got so much easier and so much less stressful. It started to be really fun editing out all of the crap that I put in there that I really didn’t need. And for each one of those paragraphs I cut out, I remember feeling like it was something that needed to stay, but the longer I sat with that feeling the more I realize this is not what I need this book to be. It was just my personal value messing it all up. 

I needed the book to be easy enough for people to grab onto it and then use to really see the value in telling comedic stories rather than comedic jokes, which is like the more conventional way of doing it. 

So after that, I really set out to simplify everything as much as I could. The difference here is that I was simplifying it instead of working harder to make it more simple… I really changed my value in the first place. I just took a step back and I said “I really need this to be simple” and I stayed in that mental space until I really believe it… until that was the value that was the most natural thing for me. Once I was in that area where I really felt like that was what I was valuing, that simplicity, then it became really easy and natural for me to edit and write the rest of this book in a way that was way more simple and easy for readers to digest. 

Okay so let’s wrap this up for today what I would encourage you to do is just to think about in what ways have your personal values really influenced your creativity. 

Ask yourself the question “in what way have I made things maybe too complex?” … How am I making it complex than it should be? 

Have you ever caught yourself saying the phrase like “Why does it have to be this hard?” I catch myself saying that a lot. When I do, I’m trying to get better at stopping and asking myself what’s really going on underneath. How have I structured my problem in a way that makes me feel like everything is so difficult? 

So I would encourage you to spend a little bit of time self-reflecting. I know I say that a lot, but I think that mindfulness behavior, that self-reflection, is really important. Mindfulness is really the way that you break down these barriers that you don’t really know are actually in your way. 

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