Business As a Creative Act

The genius of the creative spirit runs wide in the human race, but it doesn't run deep. Imagination and labor produce such a wide variety of products and ideas that we often pay more attention to their glittering differences than to the common cognitive process that made them all.

This is, of course, a troublesome thought. Most artists consider it heresy to suggest that creating a work of art shares anything at all with the mind and motives of a business person. That heresy, however, simply tells us that artists know very little about business. Business, as a creative act, draws on the very same strengths and suffers the same weaknesses as the creative act in art. They are more alike than dissimilar.

We can illustrate just how much artistic creativity and business creativity have in common with the following paragraph of advice to writers, taken from an interview of William Faulkner published in the Paris Review in 1956:

"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him"

Now, notice how well it works as advice to entrepreneurs -- those troublesome dreamers and innovators in business -- with a few strategic substitutions.

"Let the entrepreneur take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get business done, no shortcut. The young entrepreneur would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good entrepreneur believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old business, he wants to beat it."

Faulkner was no fan of business. The most unpleasant characters in his novels, the infamous Snopes family, used it to get ahead at the expense of everyone around them. Yet, in giving young writers advice on their craft, Faulkner unwittingly revealed a universal human truth worthy of his profession.

William Faulkner, 1954Photographer: Carl Van VechtenCredit Line: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LC-USZ62-110952 DLC (b&w film copy neg.)