Five Secrets to Making Any Job Creative

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In a recent post we highlighted a TED talk by Daniel Pink arguing that what truly motivates people are intrinsic factors like autonomy, mastery and purpose, rather than monetary rewards. It’s a sentiment Brazen Careerist founder Penelope Trunk appears to agree with when she argues: ” It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging.” In other words, good jobs may be high or low paid, but all good jobs are mentally stimulating, or in other words, creative.

So what do you do if you agree that what motivates you is the challenge of mastering hard tasks and making an impact, but you’re early on in your career and stuck in a job that lacks creativity. Trunk’s answer, bracing as always, is blame yourself — just about any job can be creative, but it’s up to you to make it that way. How? She has five suggestions:

Change your mindset. So much of solving our own problems is fixing our outlook. Bad situations breed creativity, but only if you feel responsible for fixing your own problems. So stop blaming your job or your boss or your work, and start looking to yourself to make your life more creative… This usually means solving problems no one asks you to solve. That’s right: Creativity at work is often about finding your own work, finding and solving your own problems. Change your response to stress. We tend to respond to stress with routine responses �C almost all of them bad for us…. So when you have stress, try a new response and see what happens. Change the pace of what you do. John Freeman points out in the Wall Street Journal that changing the pace changes what it’s like to do that task. You know this intuitively from dancing or sex. But it’s also true of workplace tasks like writing email or cleaning our desk. Try job hopping. This is a way to change your level of creativity on a larger scale. A big reason that job hopping helps your career is that people who job hop are more engaged in their work. [professor John] Mirowsky explains this further: “People with a wide variety of jobs manage to find ways to make them creative.” Get in a long-term, intimate relationship. Be careful putting too much burden on a job. You need to be creative in order to feel fulfilled, yes. But…. the connection between a job and happiness is totally overrated. Intimate, long-term, relationships matter most �C and, not surprisingly, the act of putting two lives into one life requires creativity, always.