Five Secrets of Super-Successful and Creative People
We are all wired to create, but few of us achieve our full potential in our lives. What differentiates these super-successful and super-creative people?
In this article, I would like to share the biggest lessons on creativity and productivity that I have learned from super-successful individuals of our age (people like Oprah, Elon Musk, or Adam Grant).
In doing so, I hope to present you with valuable reflections and strategies on how to be super-creative and super-productive.
Without further due, let us kickstart this masterclass now — here are the five secrets of super successful people:
1. Super successful and creative people know themselves and what they truly want. They clearly define what success means to them and they are fully committed to achieving that version of success.
Find your own definition of success and own it. Allow yourself to be 100% of who you are. What do you really desire in your life? Go for it, as your life is quite short and you only have one chance to live it fully. So, you need to act as if you are the hero of your own life.
Be mindful and flexible in your definition of success in your life. This involves imagination and improvisation.
In my previous 40 years of life, I always defined success as academic achievement. I wanted to be the best in my classes. I wanted to become the best student. I wanted to graduate with distinction. I focused on getting academic medals and achievements. I wanted to be the best academic. I wanted to be successful in the mainstream and traditional way — I cared a lot about how other people thought of me.
After the pandemic, I have realized that I am not happy with these definitions of success anymore. For the sake of achieving one academic goal after another, I forgot how I played, how I had hobbies, how creative I was as a child. I realized that I need to go back to my childhood creativity and reclaim it.
I was creating and playing every day when I was a child. I had my games on everything. I built worlds, characters, sketches, and scenarios. I was not conscious of what I was doing, but I was being a dreamer, writer, doodler, curator, storyteller, comic artist, designer, and actor at the same time. After I started school, I gradually abandoned all these games and creative projects. I thought I have to be serious in adult life and always focus on achieving one goal after another. Work, work, work. Endless goals to conquer. Impossibly long checklists to go through. There was no time for play. I neglected and suppressed my creative side for years.
So, I have initiated a change in my life. I decided that I will aspire to a new level of greatness and creativity in my life. I am now doing all the creative and entrepreneurial activities I have neglected up to now. I have been challenging and developing myself as an artist and as an entrepreneur during 2020. When I look back on my life, I want to tell myself that I lived life as the best version of myself. This requires a radical, fresh, courageous approach. It involves a lot of play, experimentation, foolishness, and curiosity. If you want to learn more about my creative journey, please read the following article:
2. Super successful and creative people pursue their passions, hobbies, and interests. They are involved in creative activities that refresh and revitalize them. They make sure they have curiosity, joy, and play in their lives or work.
Super successful people get curious all the time. They spend a lot of time asking questions, being curious and learning exciting things every day. They think out of the box to explore exciting approaches and new solutions to everyday problems. They find joy and play in everything they do. They also find passions or hobbies that will energize them.
Whenever I feel tired or uninspired, I have started doodling in my diaries. Doodling turned out to be an activity that is refreshing, therapeutic, and playful for me. It was a wonderful way to refresh and revitalize myself.
Doodling feels magical to me. I can doodle to inspire myself, to keep learning, to organize my goals, to dream big dreams, and to produce ideas. I use doodling as a potent tool for entrepreneurship and personal asset creation. When I doodle, I think like a designer, a creator, and an artist.
What are the creative activities that will revitalize and refresh you? To find these, try to remember what you loved doing during your childhood. How can you reclaim your childhood creativity? Can you go back to your childhood and re-enact some of the activities that provided you joy?
Ask yourself: Do I have enough joy in my life? If you do not, you will turn to bad habits such as consuming excessive sugar, alcohol, porn, etc. All of these are addictions that arise from feelings of boredom, loneliness, and alienation. The solution: You should have more joy, relationships, friendships, contentment, and connection in your life.
Another solution is to design surprises and adventures for yourself in the daily fabric of your life. Perhaps you need to bike in the woods or travel somewhere you have never been to before. Or you might take a long walk and explore a new place around your town. Perhaps meet a new person and talk to them about your passions and excitements. Just go with the flow and enjoy where the journey takes you. You will end up in unexpected places and these will provide you joy. Perhaps you will even get lost or you will experience happy accidents, twists, and turns. Such adventures will provide you with contentment.
Design your life by surprise. Leave more room for flexibility, serendipity, exploration, and adventure. It is not easy to scare yourself and set yourself new challenges and adventures. In order to do this, you must get out of your comfort zone. You must set sail to new horizons and explore your own blue oceans. Embrace the chaos and the unknown — they are your friend. Losing yourself is one of the best ways to get more creative.
3. Super successful and creative people allocate time every day in their calendars to create assets. They produce a lot of creative assets that will help and inspire other people. They write, draw, and create relentlessly.
2021 was a year that I produced relentlessly — even if I felt pretty depressed at times. Writing, doodling, shooting videos, and producing content helped me to survive and thrive during Covid-19 times.
Whatever your circumstances are, you need to build a personal system of creativity and asset creation. Do your practice consistently, get better each time, keep learning, and keep creating assets over a long period of time. If you do this, you will create your own personal renaissance.
Imagine where you would be in just 6 months if you wrote one page every day, you created one visual, and you spoke one minute on video:
- You would have 180 pages written on your Medium.
- You would have 180 visuals/pictures on your Instagram.
- You would have 180 videos uploaded on your YouTube channel.
This would make you a totally different person. I am a living example and proof of this! I have aspired to write practitioner articles for the last 15 years, but I have always procrastinated on this. “One day, I will start writing a book,” I said, and that day never came. I felt like an utter failure and gave up hope.
The Coronavirus lockdown has enabled me to make a radical decision: I would write regularly on Medium during the lockdown period. I would try to write and publish a minimum of 1 article every 2 days — however small, messy, crap, and insignificant that article might be. During the last 18 months, I have written 400 articles on Medium.
I would have never guessed that I could write so many articles. I have come across a diary entry from last year where I told myself to write one article every month! This goal was not inspiring, so I ended up not writing for several months. When I decided to pursue ‘an impossibly high’ goal of publishing 270 articles in a year, I felt more intrigued and took this as a serious game to challenge myself. It worked really well. Each article was a different experiment and I failed in most of the experiments. However, I have learned tremendously. I feel that I am on track to become a serious writer, thinker, and experimenter.
I have used the same method for kickstarting my YouTube channels. Just do it. I did not think hard or strategically. I just started shooting videos with my sister Merve, and my friends Gokhan and Cemal. We did weekly Skype or Zoom sessions and we have published these on our YouTube channels (most of the videos are in Turkish).
I have created and uploaded more than 600 videos until now. The great majority of these videos were created during the last 18 months. I loved the process of creating these videos and these channels have now a lifetime of their own.
Not all of these videos are informative or educational. I also had fun creating my own parody series — this was a foolish idea, but I did it anyway to entertain myself and my friends:
Take-away: If you really want to make a lasting contribution in your field, you need to give yourself a decade’s worth of inventing, experimenting, creating, inventing, innovating, creating assets, and disrupting yourself. Start with a challenging goal you can achieve in 6 months. Start small and give yourself hundreds of chances for failure. This is the best recipe for achieving your personal renaissance and personal growth.
4. Super successful and creative people read and learn widely beyond disciplines. They expand their interests and become a polymath. They compound their skills, learning, knowledge, and assets for the long term.
To become a polymath, you need to expand your horizons and read books from diverse disciplines. A polymath is an individual whose knowledge spans a significant number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. From Einstein to Feynman, from Darwin to Tesla, and from Leonardo Da Vinci and Marie Curie renaissance people pursue a wide variety of interests. They are polymaths who have built unlikely combinations of skills and knowledge across diverse fields.
Elon Musk, the renaissance person of our times, combines multidisciplinary knowledge from engineering, software, physics, astronomy, design, neurology, business, manufacturing, and finance to transform industries and create breakthrough innovation. His curiosity, learning, and inventiveness have no boundaries. Elon knows about creating electric cars, improving batteries, digging tunnels, designing reusable rockets, implanting neural laces to the brain, terraforming Mars, and creating starships. He performs at the highest level because he can transcend beyond disciplines and domains. Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day — he reads widely and wildly.
To develop your polymath side, be greedy about your learning, and read widely and diversely beyond disciplines. Read at least 100 books every year (which means 2 books per week). Provide yourself with more opportunities for pure-play, exploration, and adventure. Similar to Bill Gates’ think weeks, schedule time in your calendar for learning and exploring new things. Time for learning, playing, or exploring is not wasted time.
2021 has been the year that I have read most intensively in my life. I have read and learned wildly and got tremendous joy out of my multidisciplinary exploration.
Steven Johnson in his book titled “Where Good Ideas Come From” mentions the significance of coffee houses, open networks, fresh connections, cross-disciplinary interactions, happy accidents, and sparks of brilliance in creating breakthrough innovation. To solve the wicked problems of the 21st century, you need to think beyond borders and disciplines. One way to develop multidisciplinary knowledge and perspectives is to master the mental models of different fields and use them to develop a holistic perspective and make better decisions in your life. Play the long-term game and imagine that you are running a marathon. Below is the new success equation:
Ask Right Questions + Follow Your Interests + Intense Curiosity + Continuous Learning + Imagination + Passion
In order to develop polymath skills, you need to hunt for the most interesting stuff. Spend time every day learning new things that excite and surprise you. Surprise yourself by challenging yourself to write in domains that you are curious about, but do not feel qualified for. For example, I have started writing about transdisciplinary topics outside my comfort zone including Mars, neural laces, doors, a squash, GPT-3, singularity, BTS, panarchy, entrepreneurship, and corporate spiritual responsibility.
When I look back at these stories, I am deeply surprised. I did not think that I would be writing articles covering imagination, futuristic visions, technologies, or innovations. I did not think I had the confidence or expertise to write on these topics. I surprised myself and my brain through the power of curiosity. So, it pays to be a hunter and learner of the most interesting things. You need to become a relentless learning machine and develop your own mental models to strengthen your perspectives.
When you are curious, you become a relentless learning machine. You get excited and want to explore the topics in more depth. As you read more, you get momentum and want to learn even more. Your brain has amazing capabilities of limitless learning and neuroplasticity. You can change your definition of yourself and you can rewire your brain to learn fast and achieve fascinating things. That is what I have experienced over 2020. I have re-invented myself as a futurist writer despite my lack of technical expertise. This is the power of neuroplasticity — you can re-wire your brain and tremendously amplify your learning skills. It all starts with changing your inner conversations with yourself.
This is the golden era for people who value self-directed learning and interdisciplinary perspectives. Information is abundant and free. You have access to all the world’s knowledge at your fingertips. YouTube gives you the chance to learn from world-class scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs. You can stand on the shoulders of giants and teach yourself anything that you want. As you learn and experiment with new things, you can share your progress with the world. You can pursue your passions and curiosities to build up fresh and exciting things.
Take-away: Expand your interests, be curious, and become a polymath. Compound your learning and knowledge for the long term.
5. Super successful and creative people immediately move to action. They do not wait for the right time to act. They know that the secret is to act now. Whatever they want from life, they know they need to take action for it right away. They start small and do it now.
Super successful people commit to their visions and ideas. Once they figure out what they want to do, they immediately jump into action. They do not wait for inspiration. They find out what works for them, stick to it, and create consistently. They understand that their long-term vision will take tremendous work and effort, but they know the payoffs will be great in the long run.
During the pandemic, I learned that I can change my life instantly. It is a simple decision. If you want to be healthy, do 5 push-ups now — that’s it. If you want to be an artist, start creating your art right now, right away. Do not wait for inspiration — it is not coming. You first do the work, and inspiration comes in later anyway. If this means you need to eat the frog first thing in the morning, do it by all means.
Change starts in very small increments. You can build positive habits by starting small and giving yourself a lot of opportunities for small experimentation every day.
If you want to be a writer, write for 15 minutes now and every day. The trick is to show up each day even if you do not feel like writing. I do this by setting myself a very tiny writing goal every day. I make my goal so small that it is very easy to accomplish. For example, I will write for a minimum of 15 minutes every day. Or, I will write a minimum of 100 words every day. Starting small will give you the confidence and the momentum you need. Writing is difficult and you need to approach your writing routine with a sense of patience and self-compassion. You need to develop your own system of creativity and productivity that works for you.
Writer’s block is not real. It does not exist. If you run out of ideas, you can just write down your stream of consciousness. Develop a consistent writing routine every morning. Do not break the chain and make sure you write every day. If you write every day, your writing will improve tremendously after a couple of months — and you will be surprised how much you have grown as a writer.
Success happens in small steps and increments. Conduct small experiments in your field every day. Start small and make it practical. Fail early and fail often — give yourself hundreds of opportunities for failure and experimentation.
If you want to be a renaissance person, you need to continuously learn, adapt, take risks, do a lot of experiments, and provide yourself lots of opportunities for failure. Sir James Dyson tried 5126 times and he failed each time — until he invented Dyson’s bagless vacuum cleaners.
Conducting 10,000 experiments in a field is now hailed as the new recipe for innovative success. Super successful people thrive by doing 10,000 experiments.
Whatever your passion is, you need to create a huge body of work to make a big contribution, and this means creating thousands of pieces of your work. Joe Rogan created 4000 episodes of podcasts which were downloaded almost 200 million times. Creating this huge library made him the king of podcasting and Spotify paid Joe Rogan $100m to license his contents.
From Leonardo da Vinci to Mozart, from Edison to Einstein, prolific inventors and geniuses allowed themselves to do thousands of experiments. Einstein had 2332 patents on his name. Einstein published more than 300 papers. Leonardo started every day with a list of things to learn that day — from geology to optics.
Super successful companies such as Zara, Google, P&G, and Amazon are known to conduct hundreds of experiments each month. The great majority of these experiments result in failure, yet they continue experimenting every day. They all know that experimentation is the only way to go forward.
How many experiments are you conducting every day? How many opportunities do you give yourself to fail every day? How many new, fresh, and exciting things are you learning every day? These are the true measure of innovativeness and success in today’s world. You need to continue experimenting until you reach 10,000 experiments in the field(s) that you want to contribute to.
Do not get discouraged if you fail. You need to give yourself a lot of opportunities to fail, learn, and reiterate. Elon Musk has had more than a decade of crashing and burning rockets under his belt. These failures were important because they provided critical feedback points for later experiments and iterations. So, what is the key lesson here? Fail early and fail often. Analyze your results, draw your conclusions, keep learning, and apply your learning to your next iteration.
Keep improving and compound yourself. Will you get better every day? Will you keep creating better writing every day? As James Altucher suggests, if you improve at anything 1% per day, by the end of the year you’ll become better at it by 37 times (1.⁰¹³⁶⁵ = 37.7834343329). This illustrates the power of compounding. When you apply your attention to the same issue or domain every day, you will get much better in just a couple of years and you will be unstoppable. Consistent attention is very precious and it will improve any situation over time. Pay enough attention to your health, your diet, your writing, your investments, and your relationships over time, and all can be improved tremendously.
Takeaways:
- If you want to live a happy, productive, and fulfilled life, you need to provide yourself with more opportunities for creativity, joy, fun, curiosity, failure, learning, and asset creation.
- Develop a personal system of creativity and productivity. Astonish and amaze yourself every day. Schedule some time for creative activities and use your wildest imagination.
- Creativity involves shifting your mindset from scarcity to abundance. You need to shift away from a mindset of fear and limitations and embrace a life rich with new and fresh possibilities. Create a positive story for yourself based on hope, courage, abundance, and self-confidence.
- Your portfolio of creative work will be one of the greatest assets you have in your life. Therefore, it should always be your top priority.
- You need to scare yourself and challenge yourself each day. Every day is an adventure. You can perhaps start a small creative project that you have always wanted to do, but you were terrified. You can start composing music, drawing, singing, dancing, or creating your own fashion line. What does your heart desire? Go for it.
- You can trick yourself into imagination. In order to do it, you need to refrain from listening to your inner voice that is constantly criticizing everything you are in the process of creating. The best art is created when you are feeling that it is sort of scary and ridiculous, but you want to try it anyway.
- You can use improvisation to increase adventure and quality in your life. To start improvising, you can use automated writing, doodling, drawing, ideating, imagining, and creating techniques. For example, practice automatic drawing and doodling by closing your eyes, holding your pencil, and moving it randomly on the paper. Just let your hand do the job. Do not worry about the end product. Attend to the creative process and just trust this process.
- Remember that your creativity is shy and gentle. You need to provide your inner child and creativity with ample opportunities and space to thrive. You need to be gentle, generous, and patient with it.
- The most valuable asset that you have in this life is your boundless imagination. Imagination is a real game-changer in your life. If you want to level up your game, you need to imagine and create wildly.
- Keep creating artwork you are proud of and keep compounding yourself and your creative assets. You will be surprised how much you will achieve in just a decade. Tap into the power of exponential returns over the long term.
- You can kickstart your own creative journey through very small actions that you can easily implement in your life. These positive habits, however small they are, will compound over time. Creativity is non-linear, so you need to be wild in your radical learning, experimentation, and creativity.
- Develop small positive habits and do them consistently every day. If you want to write a book, write one page every day. You will have your book ready in less than one year. I have done this myself. I doodled every day for one year, and this journey enabled me to create an inspiration book based on doodle exercises to increase self-awareness and creativity. If I had started with an ambitious goal of writing a book, I would have never achieved finishing this book. However, I tricked myself into creating consistently and moving with very small steps.
- The secret is in one line. One sentence at a time. One doodle at a time. One drawing at a time. One small step at a time.
- Set small and realistic goals you can achieve every day — just 15 minutes of creative work is fine. Practice every day, and do not break the chain — no matter what.
- See yourself as a work of art — always in progress. Reinvent yourself so that you can tap into endless opportunities in learning, growth, experimentation, and creativity.
- Establish your game. There are fascinating things that only you can bring to the world. Fresh, exciting, and original things. What are they? How can you take a small action now towards making these happen? How can you continue taking small steps every day? How can you continue your adventure every day without quitting and without breaking the chain (of creating)? What will you bring to the world out there?
