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ALLEN GANNETT: How to be more creative: Creative Curve #066

Allen Gannet is the founder and CEO of Trackmaven, a company that works with large brands to help them uncover the meaning, revealed by patterns, in their marketing data. In working with major brands like Microsoft, Marriott, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Home Depot, Gannett noticed a significant pattern: most marketers, event well-known ones, weren’t hitting their goals. While their ad campaigns demonstrated creative thinking, their commercial success often fell short. He asked himself, could there be a method to combining creative and commercial success?

FREE Creative video shared on the show:

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

  • What is the method of creative greats
  • The power of structure
  • Why education has actually stifled our creativity
  • The FOUR Laws to creativity
  • How “Creative Genius” is a social phenomenon
  • The importance of timing
  • Campus Network vs. Facebook
  • How so many of the greats are copycats
  • and much more!

creative curve book

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:


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The Creative Curve: How to develop the right idea at the right time




Topics include:

•Honing Your Humanity with New marketing strategies to create brand influence

• Influence Building: Growing your confidence, career, and income

•Future of Work: Managing Millennials


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Have you ever found yourself waiting for a great idea to HIT you?

Ever gotten STUCK because you felt you just didn’t have just the PERFECT idea or plan?

You’ve likely found yourself struggling to muster a creative concept in your life, thinking you’re not like Jobs, Musk, Warhol, Mozart, or Rhianna… as such, you may have, as a result, thought less of yourself – disqualifying yourself from forward progress and the next step towards this thing in your head defined as “success”.

What if I told you it simply isn’t true?

What if you actually have the capacity for great ideas? What if you are capable of conceptualizing that THING you so desperately want to dream up?!

Today, I want to help connect you to your inner creative, base on the book “Creative Curve – how to create the right idea and the right time”… and at the end of this show, you’ll get an exclusive link to download a very special video by our guest. He recorded a brief tutorial just for this audience about how to jumpstart your creative process. So stay through to the end to get that link!

Earlier this year, I was speaking at an MGM Resorts event in Las Vegas and met Allen Gannett. Coincidently, one of his PR people had sent me an early copy of his book, The Creative Curve, and like the great networking that I am – knowing that Allen was going to be there, I had already begun reading it… so, of course, we already had stuff to talk about.

Later, after I had devoured his book, Allen and I jumped on a call and discuss. And, in my focus to make sure his side of the conversation sounded great, my microphone sounded horrible… so we’re going to do this show a little differently. More of a journalistic style if you will…

Allen Gannett is the founder and CEO of Trackmaven, a company that works with large brands to help them uncover the meaning, revealed by patterns, within their marketing data. In working with major brands like Microsoft, Marriott, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Home Depot, Gannett noticed a significant pattern: most marketers, event well known ones, weren’t hitting their goals. While their ad campaigns demonstrated creative thinking, their commercial success often fell short. He asked himself, could there be a method to combining creative and commercial success?

Allen Gannett:  Yeah. So my day job is I work with marketers and so I run a company that is a big inquiry behind them. So we have our own analytics platform, we do consulting. And so we spent all our time trying to apply science to art. And in doing this I was talking to all these marketers and marketers who are supposed to be the most creative people in business I found were over and over again. Like, oh, like I wasn’t born creative. Like that’s not me. I can’t do that. Like, you know, if I want to be creative, I have to hire an agency. And I was hearing all of this like I can’t, which drives me sort of batty and so I started researching more and more about creativity and getting really interested in the topic because I was trying to tell marketers the story of like, you actually can become more creative.

And isn’t that the way most of us think? I’m not like this person, I’m not like that person…

Allen Gannett:  And so I started giving a talk about how creative genius is actually if you look at any of the science is really a nurture thing, not a nature thing. And I was applying it specifically to marketers and the talk was going really well. People really motivated by it and it sort of over time I realized that this is not just a problem for marketers, but it’s craters of any field, right? You think about the people who are daydreaming about being great chefs are musicians and they’re like, Whoa, is me. I’m not, you know, a Michelin Star Chef. I’m not Mozart. I’m not, you know, Santana, I don’t have these amazing talents that just oozing out of me. But we actually read the stories of creative genius. You want to talk to these people. They’ll tell you over and over again. That’s not how it actually works, but for some reason we’re not willing to believe it. And so this book was all about trying to convince people with a lot of, you know, science and data and, you know, firsthand interviews and no, no, no. Like, you actually can learn this stuff.

If you and I are always disqualifying ourselves, focusing on what we aren’t, what we can’t, or how we’ll never… our future becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy… never actually realizing our full potential and impact on the people and career around us.

Yet, when we were children… we saw the world as an endless sea of possibilities.

Allen Gannett:  So, uh, there’s this amazing quote. I think it’s attributed to different people at different times, but I think, you know, whoever acts to Saturday night, I think it will open, as you know, this famous creative executive went to a kindergarten class and he asked me the kindergarten class to raise your hand if you’re creative. Everyone’s hands went up. He went to a sixth grade class, ask them question. Half the hands went up, you went to a high school senior class and you’ll quarter of the hands went up, you went to college class. No hands went up. And this is sort of the notion of, I think when we’re little, all of us realize our own innate creative potential and we sort of go through the system of life and education and sort of beat out of us really violently. And so, you know, my, I was,

I love Allen’s choice of words – Violently… yet, that’s how we begin to believe that we are not as awesome as those around us. We compare ourselves to others. We doubt ourselves and our abilities. We actually sabotage ourselves from being “creative”.


What if, instead, we understood that almost all of the greats had some similarities to their creative genius? First, they had a method…

Allen Gannett: 11:17 Yeah. So the thing is, when you look at any great creative, so take a musician, take a playwright over and over again, you find that the highest performers actually have the most structure. So I give an example in the book of


There actually is a methodology to creating new ideas and innovation. And later, you’ll learn it’s a lot easier than your think. You see, we are way to focused on the outcome and not nearly cognitive of the actually process of how anything actually comes about.


I spent a day with the Ben and Jerry’s flavor team and their process for creating flavors is incredibly data driven. It’s incredibly methodical. Every year they come up with 200 flavor ideas and then they test those with the audience of 750,000 people via survey and they asked questions. The two questions are, how long are you to buy this flavor and how unique is it? Because the thing is I about the book is that great ideas are both familiar and novel and so if Ben and Jerry’s just ask people what are they most likely to buy that all they’d ever have is cookie and Brownie caramel flavors, right?


Allen Gannett:  And what they need is they need ideas that are both commercially viable but also unique. So it actually pushes the brand forward. So it’s actually innovative and there’s a really fine balance there. And the issue is that when you’re just free associating and brainstorming, there’s no process, right? You’re shooting in the wind, there’s infinite possibilities. You’re not learning, you’re not building knowledge upon each other, which is not how the great creatives actually work. I talked about in the book, there’s a sort of mafia, a pop song, writers all focused around Max Martin, who’s a Swedish hit doctor, you know, he’s written tons of number one singles. He’s written, um, Taylor swift, reasonability run most number one singles, a lot of the Katy Perry hits and he’s taught all these people his way of writing music and they’re all become wildly successful because they build upon each other. They have a structure. They’re not just free associating. They have some money to build upon that. They know that works. Then they can in turn bring their new ideas and innovations back to the group and really create this sort of dynamic where there’s a community of these amazing songwriters. And so that’s radically different than sitting in a conference room with a whiteboard just saying. What ideas do we have?


For me, I moved to Nashville to get around other creative individuals – those who were doing some of the same things I wanted to do. Allen describes this as one of the LAWS – it’s Creative Communities where the power of these creative peers create clusters, patterns, and collaboration.

I tend to like being the dumbest, poorest guy in the room because I want to be around others that inspire, challenge, and motivate me.

Another one of these LAWS is Consumption – the act of exposing yourself to a large degree of content around your area of focus. As our brain is processing all of the available content, it discerns patterns and concepts along the way.


Allen Gannett:  Well, so what you’re saying, I mean, and some of those buzzwords. I think the way that I’d say to really simplify a lot of this is that a lot of the things that we. When we think of the sort of Western model of creativity, which is this sort of like aha moments, creative genius oriented model is really based around that. There’s these mystical moments, but when you actually look at the science of these mystical moments and scientists have studied this, they, the scientific term is sudden insight. Scientists have studied this. It’s not actually mystical, it’s just different register. It’s just unique and what happens is this type of processing, it all happens in our right brain is much more subtle. It’s much more metaphorical. It’s like the shy kid at the playground is thinking of ideas and like only when things get quiet or only when an idea is really great does actually pop into consciousness.

Allen Gannett:  And so in order to have those great ideas that your right hemisphere can process, you have to have all the inputs. You have to have the ingredients, you have to have the fuel. So if you haven’t consumed lots of music, it can be one. Lots of books. If you want to be a writer, you’re a right hemisphere is not going to be able to connect those dots. So of course you know, you  don’t wake up with great melodies in your head like Paul Mccartney did with the creation of the song yesterday because you haven’t spent, you know, literally 10 years as a kid in a musical family surrounded by music and then went and worked in a cover band where you’re constantly hearing all this music all the time. Right? And that’s actually not surprising. And so I think that for me is one of those things where when you look at how our brain works, these things that seem magical are actually just biology.


And there’s a strong correlation to these inputs that causes us to sub-consciously connect to the things we’ve already known… and it’s that familiarity that hooks us into believing this is something that we like!


Allen Gannett:  Totally. Yeah. So I talked about in the book, but basically they did this amazing study where this professor Greg Burns took these students and put them in an Mri machine and had them listen to music. And then these were all songs by unknown artists. They weren’t hits and he had them say which songs they liked and didn’t like. And what he found at the time when he first did it was that there was no relationship between the songs that they said they liked and how their brain activated. There’s no patterns. Fast forward five years and he said the same data and he looked at which of those songs have become a hit. And what he found was that there was a correlation between the songs that became a hit and the one that activates certain parts of the brain. And so what that tells us is, even though we’re not actually conscious of it, there are certain underlying things that are brain picks up on it, our brain likes and those formulas, those structures. If you can tap into those, that’s incredibly powerful.


So what a number of greats actually did was to copy the systems that they observed around them. The IMITATED the forms and structures of songs or stories…


Allen Gannett:  Yeah, that’s good. So when I talk about in the book is that, you know, you have to consume lots of content, but it’s actually not just about consumption. Because in order to go to the next level, which is actually a little structure, own ideas, you have to actually have what I call interactive imitation, which is that I interviewed, for example, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who’s the guy who cowrote billions. He has deal book on New York Times wrote too big to fail. Like just like sort of a wonder kid. And he talks about how he learned how to write as a journalist is he would go to the New York Times Archive. He was a 22 year old New York Times writer, had this dream job who go to the archive. He would find front page stories from the business section and he would actually go and he would actually write out what was the outline, what was the structure of the story, you to start with a quote and start with a metaphor, how did this work?

And then he would take his own stories and fit it within the structure that he knew worked. And by having this process, he learn what’s the great structure of stories. And that’s really important. That’s a trend you see over and over again is that these creative grades go through some period of intense imitation where they’re constantly imitating or to learn these structures that will resonate.


So who are the greats in your field? How are they doing or performing the things that you so respect or admire??? Are there patterns you can follow or IMITATE?

We’ve already share three of Allen’s four laws to the Creative Curve:  We talked about CONSUMPTION and taking in lots of relevant content. Then we covered the Creative Communities for patterns and collaboration, and then Imitation – like for music, story arcs, and the Franklin Method…

I think the fourth one is most important and we’ll get to that in a minute. But first, I wanted to ask Allen what it was like to write a book like this and the inherent expectations readers might have for him to really nail this.


Allen Gannett:  …as I was writing this stuff, there’s sort of like a Meta experience where when you write a book of that creativity to hits, like it kind of has to be ahead or else you’re screwed. And so, um, but one of the things I was interested in was I was reading thousands of pages of peer-reviewed research on creativity and innovation, all that stuff. I would have all these Aha moments in the shower when I was running and the gym about like really nuanced, like things around creative philosophy and thought that like I would never have those ideas if I hadn’t been consuming this huge ingestion of content. And so that was very reassuring to hear things when I was doing interviews and then to be able to practice them and see the results as I was actually creating,


So even as Allen was writing this book, he was also sort of living it too. So I wanted to go deeper, digging into what it’s like for a marketer at some large Fortune 500 company to think like this. It’s been a challenge I’ve seen first hand when I ran an association around innovation. It’s one thing to talk about innovation, it’s an altogether other thing to actually implement.

It can create great friction when a large company wants to be innovative, but at the same time, wants to keep control of their brand, the messaging, the tone, etc. I want to know how the create momentum and deliver on actual innovation.


Allen Gannett:  That’s a great question. I think it all comes down to having a person who’s responsible for designing a process around innovation. So a lot of organizations have thought about this, but I look at companies, for example, I’m like into it, which have a corporate wide process for how innovation works, how they come with new ideas, how they put teams together. I think Ben and Jerry’s has been doing this for a very long time. Their business is r and D, right? Because if Ben and Jerry’s had the same flavors forever, it gets stale. You get bored, you get over it. And so the organizations that actually bring innovation inside and do it well, organizations that are incredibly structured about. It’s not just about having, you know, kickoffs and conferences, internal conferences with speakers and all that kind of stuff. It’s about being incredibly methodical and it’s also about using data.

Allen Gannett:  And so I talk a lot in the book about the movie industry and how the movie industry is so data driven now. So you know, before they even start production on a movie, the studio executives will do all sorts of polling to decide whether or not to green light a movie. Right? They’ll see whether or not the concept resonates. You are people interested in it when they start actually making the movie, they’ll take early cuts to a screening audience and actually get feedback and they’ll change scenes or characters or reshoot things based on the famous aimlessly. The final title, traction was completely rewritten based on a preview audiences reaction and went on to be this huge success and win Oscars and all sorts of stuff. And then I’m saying from wire,

Allen Gannett:  Sure. So moved. So you know, they’ll take early cuts and they take early cuts and shown to preview audiences and based on that reaction, they would go and change characters. They would change scenes. They would entirely reedit and reshoot things. So for example, famously your fatal attraction and they realized that the original ending was boring, so they completely redid the ending. It went on to make a huge commercial success and won all these Oscars and awards because they actually had a process for how they created their art. And then this is what I thought was really mind blowing is once the is actually done, that in the marketing side of it, they actually America to see what movies are going to go to. It’s called tracking. It’s very similar to a presidential election. And if for example they see that, you know, men aren’t as excited about the movie as they think they should be, they’ll change the trailers, they’ll change the ad spend to actually do more with men to try and get more men to the movie. And so you know, these people who their jobs are innovation are actually the ones who use the most data, the most systems, the most process. I think that’s an important lesson for anyone in any corporation is thinking about innovation is thinking, well I need to hire a bunch of, you know, radical creatives and free thinkers. And No, no, no, you actually hire people who are incredibly thoughtful about this.

I was talking to Kenya Barris, the creator of Blackish, and he was like, of course I use a three act structure, like I’d be an idiot not to.

It’s what my audience expects. It’s a way in which stories, it gives me a familiar baseline, which I can then play with and create these novel twists and stories and twists and turns. But yet oftentimes when you’re talking to your people who are in the hustle trying to make it happen as a screenwriter, you’re talking about how they’re having writer’s block and they’re just sitting there and they can’t think of anything and it’s just so different than the people who are actually great at it. Right? The people who are actually great at it are very, very. It’s work, right? It’s actually just a thoughtful process


So if it’s not simply being creative and, if there’s a series of systems and processes, it’s about HOW you apply these techniques. It makes me think of Donald Miller and his Storybrand technique – where you, as a brand, position yourself as the Yoda and the customer as Luke Skywalker… every great brand is creating a technique of guiding you into some sort of identity or transformation. Like Harley Davidson makes you a bad ass or Nike makes you a “just do it” kind of athlete… even Starbucks turns customers into some perceived sense of high affluence for drinking their coffee or visiting their stores.

These are all methods and techniques, thinking about your company, product, or brand in a different way.

Russel Brunson, states that we should follow a pattern where we encourage our customer’s dreams, justify their failures, alleviate their fears, confirm their suspicions, and throw rocks at their enemies. Again, a different kind of example to great techniques in creative storytelling.

But another element to consider is also the timing of these ideas. It’s not just conceptualizing, but it’s also the place that you’re at, and the status of culture you’re in… for some ideas, for example, if they’d been done 15 years earlier, would have never succeeded or taken off.


Allen Gannett:  So this is. This is, I think when the most interesting lessons for me around that, this book is that your creativity is ultimately social construct. When you say, just start that again. Yeah, sorry. This is one of the most interesting things I’ve found with writing the book is that creativity is actually a social construct. So what do I mean by that? You know, a bunch of sociology buzzword. Basically what it means is that, you know, if I was to draw drawing and you saw it, it’s probably terrible. You would definitely not say it’s creative, but it’s unique. Maybe it’s even innovative. Why isn’t it creative? But then there are certain artists who are amazing artists, technically incredibly proficient, but they draw something even though it’s highly proficient. It’s still not creative. So the idea, the concept of creativity actually when it comes down to is that a group of people, and it can be a small group or a big group that’s important, have to agree that something is both novel and valuable, has to be both of those things.

And so what’s interesting is, you know, if you think about the fashion use doesn’t New York, they’re looking at very, very hip fashion and they can say, oh, this is creative, right? Among us, we agree this is creative. But then mainstream America is actually a separate group, right? So what they say is creative is different. So in the book I talk a lot about mainstream heads because they’re actually a really interesting example of creativity because they’re very obvious. It’s very obvious. There’s a group of people. We’ve decided, oh, you know, Pablo Picasso is creative. We’ve all sort of agreed to this, but since it’s a social construct, it’s dependent on people. You have to be in the right place. You have to know the right people, you have to be validated by the right institutions. And I mentioned in the book, but unfortunately that also means that a lot of minority groups are kept out of a lot of these fields.

So when you write a book on creative genius, you find when you look at lists of great creatives, like it’s a lot of white dudes. And the reason is really that because it’s a people business because labeling stuff is creative is a people business that, you know, people tend to be insular. You actually have the structural inequality that I think obviously right now we’re talking a lot about in mainstream sort of media and stuff. But that’s actually one of the biggest obstacles to creativity is that it really actually does come down to this people element.


I believe this is particularly fascinating. Especially when you consider that things like romance novels or movies would have considered gay issues or transgender issues as far too taboo. Or where Black Panther and other movies are now flipping old faulty logic, that minorities can, in fact, and should be heros, leads, and champions in storylines. Or that, faith-based movies can be box office successes too.


Allen Gannett:  Totally. And that’s what I think is such amazing about the time that we live in right now is that as those walls start to come down, I think these institutions are starting to realize, hey, people will vote with their wallets and they like diverse stuff. They like Black Panther has been one of the most successful movies of the last five years and it’s going to go on to have an incredible box office run. And you know, that’s a signal like, you know, executives get that. The other thing is I think the Internet has changed. There’s so much, you know, things like reddit where you can actually see what do individual people care about and individual people become the gatekeepers. Well, the individual people are much more diverse than these institutions. There’s much less structural inequality when it’s the people who are deciding. And so I think the Internet is having a really positive effect on creativity generally.


Ultimately, creativity seems to require two things in combination – the familiar and the novel in combination. Be it our people groups, our societal norms, pop-culture, etc., those all have a place in what is the acceptable in familiarity… this is the magic sauce, in my opinion to actually crack the door open for something novel to be added upon.

Like a hamburger, you need the basics of a bun and a piece of meat… that’s familiar in American culture. And for my vegan, gluten free audience, you can replace those with soy-based alternatives, of course!

But then, someone says, “hey, let’s put some lettuce and tomato on that burger”. No problem… and later, someone comes along and says, “what if we place a fried egg on there, some smoked applewood bacon, and replace the buns with glazed donut?”

HA, I don’t want to totally lose my vegan friends on that one…This is probably why, even in the vegan world, the foods take on similar expressions – a vegan hotdog or vegan cheese sauce. These seem more approachable, familiar.

Again, we need the familiar AND the novel in combination… like a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

And one of the, now ubiquitous, online brands we all know today might not have existed if it hadn’t had some familiar expression to start.


Allen Gannett:  totally. So I talk in the book about as humans, our limbic system has a really powerful force over our entire psychology and as people we’ve learned over evolution that we should be fearful things that are unknown and seek out the familiar because they’re safe and unknown. My hurt us. But we also are constantly looking for new areas of reward. So we’re looking for new food sources and you know, new place where you get positive emotions. We also seek the novel. These are contradictory and the resolve is that anyway, they do studies around preference or trends or any of these things. This contradiction leads is beautiful bell curve, I call it the creative curve, which is that the more people are exposed to something, the more it becomes familiar, they’re more. They like it up into a point and then they actually start their novelty seeking winds out and they want to find new stuff.

And so their preference goes down. And so this is incredibly important because the facebook example, when facebook started, there’s a whole different time in the Internet. People you know, the idea of having your real name on the Internet. That was a big enough change, let alone campus network had, you know, the activity, feed the news, feed the wall, photos, groups, all this stuff that facebook would later have and make a ton of money off of. But it was too much. Right? People are like, Ooh, this is scary. Let’s just start with putting my first name on an internet site and see how that goes, and so getting that timing right. It’s something that is actually you can be thoughtful about and I think that’s one of the takeaways for me that was really meaningful from the book is that I think oftentimes when we think about timing, we think we have no control over it and I’d argue we don’t have complete control over it, but using data, listen to our audience, we can start to get a sense of where are we on that creative curve.


In Allen’s book, he subtly identifies something really unique in how you and I position ourselves within our community, company, or in general.

It’s something I want to speak to you directly, the listener. The UPPER TRIBE… You might be washing dishes right now. Are you dropping your kids off or just dropped off your kids? Wherever you’re at in what you’re doing. This is a critical element in of the book that I know I suffered from growing up in central Wisconsin and having this midwest, conservative sensibility where we don’t about ourselves or hold ourselves up. We don’t put ourselves out there, but there’s this quote for what seems like a very small little sentence

“Part of being a successful artist, or I’m just going to say creative, is being a persuasive salesperson for your own BRAND”, within our own company or if we are an entrepreneur or it doesn’t matter across the board, we’re afraid to show off or we’re afraid to show off our accomplishments and for you that are listening.

I want to say to you, you are amazing. You are beautiful. Your capable. Don’t hide that from the world. By you being small, by you being you know the lesson, courageous. You will never be who you are made to be or what your gifts have made possible for you to be. So I want to challenge you who are listening to let go of that ridiculous thought process that you are not creative or not enough and you be the best advocate for yourself.

Someone just said this to me last week. They said, when you’re in your career, you can very easily get very committed to your boss or manager to the cause of the company or whatever, but at the end of the day like you need a picture of your family on the desk and that’s your cause. Like if I’m only make an X, this company and some other company is offering me Xplus and that’s going to help my family or it’s gonna make my life easier or this might even be on stretch me and my immediate challenge and scary, but it’s going to better something else. Like my commitment is to serve my Kiddos, to serve my partner, to serve, you know, something more intrinsic than that commitment to a title, a position or company. I know that sounds a little scary for you. Business people maybe, but this goes for you.


Allen Gannett:  I mean, think about some of the most successful artists of the last half century or Jeff Koons. Andy Warhol. These guys were promoters are. I mean Jessica, I mean it’s just like at both of them actually do very little of their own art. Andy Warhol had tons and tons of assistance and he directed, he was the artist, but it’s this idea that hit him or Jeff Koons is like in a studio somewhere. It’s like, no, no, no. Part of his art is his ability to sell it, to get people excited about it, to want to go and wait in line and see it and buy it. And like, and like that’s the thing where it’s like so many people, um, you know, think they have to be this tortured artist. And I talk about in the book, you know, this famous study where they followed art students. Art Students who reviewed most successful in our school were the ones who fit the tortured artist stereotype. They were the ones who were the least successful longterm. The ones who are most successful long term. We’re the ones who are pretty good at art and great at sales. They are the ones who are recognized as most creative.


So whatever you’re doing in life, wherever you’re at, you need to know that being creative is not impossible, it is NOT out of your reach.

You don’t have to suffer along in your life, accepting the level you’re at as default. You CAN transform and grow. You CAN learn and develop in your skills, in your abilities… in your human experience.

I asked Allen about what he learned in the exercise of actually writing this book.


Allen Gannett:  Sure. So I’d say two things. One, I developed a lot more creative confidence. I think seeing a book project through all the way, especially with your first book, it’s one of those things that you’re like, oh my God. And you know, everyone sort of. One of the funny things when you write a business book, everyone asks you, did you write yourself? And I’m like, yeah. And it’s funny because you’re writing the book, when I was writing it over, it was a long stretch of time. I don’t have that much time is the last half of the book was dramatically better than the first half. So to go back and rewrite a lot the first half and, but like coming out of it, you build up a sense of confidence so you’re able to learn this stuff, research it, like it’s all a skill you can get better at.

And I think that sense of Oh, I can learn things has been very exciting because it opens up well. So my goal for 2019, uh, I haven’t told anyone this yet, like publicly my goal for 2019 as I want to become a part time professional stand up comedian because I’m like, I’m like, I can like, it’s just a skill, like you can learn it. And so I think that’s been very freeing and liberating to realize that you can learn this stuff. Like if you’re thoughtful about it, you can learn it.


Which takes us to the fourth law from Allen’s book that I believe is the most important one, that is iteration. So for all of the Upper Tribe, iteration is not having to get it perfect – this entire life that we live in, it’s all really iteration. You go through conceptualizing something and then reducing it down to what’s necessary and then curating it, and getting feedback. That’s life at it’s most basic level.

So as we bring this into close, I want to read this last portion from Alan’s book, the Creative Curve, how to develop the right idea at the right time.

He says this:

“In your hands is not a book telling you that with minimal effort you can be the next Mozart, Picasso, Elon Musk, or JK Rowling. No, this is a book that tells you that if you choose to dedicate your life to creativity, there is a path and a set of key considerations that you need to bear in mind. These are the things you need to do and make success happen. Laws of the Creative Curve provide a blueprint for how every one of us can unlock our creative potential. The patterns or creative success can be learned, and with time, mastered.

I’m really proud of what my friend Allen is doing, both in his company and in the impact this book has had in people’s lives. I highly recommend you go grab a copy

So I’ve got a special gift for you. After our conversation, Allen created a brief tutorial in HOW to stir up more creativity in your life. In less that about six minutes, he eradicates false beliefs and offers you the simple tools to open up your creative process… best of all, it’s FREE!

Simply go to and get that video now. My gift to you!

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