The Exchanges

Q How do you measure that? Like, Alan, how do you measure that? I don't understand how, like, what's the measurement tool for that?

A Great question. So they have a bunch of differences. Researchers have been studying creativity for years. There's actually a field of study that you would love, Dathan, called the, uh, the study of greatness. And it's all about people who are great. Just, you know, you interview people like this, I guess, except for me. And in the field of greatness, one of the things we look at is measures of creativity. So for example, there's something called a divergent thinking test. In a divergent thinking test, you give a subject a prompt, and you say, you know, how many ideas can you come up with when I give you this problem? Then you can actually look at the number and the quality of those ideas to assess how creative that person is. So that's a really good academic test to help us understand both creative potential and creative achievement. Mm-hmm.

AI assessment note: “there's something called a divergent thinking test”

Q and I love only focusing on the leads that are going to close, so I encourage you to try ProsperWorks. They're sponsoring the show. Check them out at prosperworks.com forward slash love your CRM. Folks, that's again, prosperworks.com forward slash love your CRM. Okay. This is like bad foreplay right now. Tease us a little bit more. What is number one and two and leave number three and four open?

A So number one, I talked about this a little bit before it's consumption. I'm interviewing people who are at the top of their fields and over and over again, even to this day, they spend on average three to four hours every single day consuming content related to their vertical. So if they're a musician, it's listening to music. It's trying, you're hearing new sounds. They're a chef. They're constantly trying new food, ingredients. A lot of them have gardens that they tend to. The second one is imitation. So it was interesting because what I found was that all of these creatives consume huge amounts of content. But, you know, most Americans watch a lot of TV, but we're not actually writing great screenplays or great movie scripts, right? And so what I found was not just how much they consume, but it's actually how they consume it. And how they consume it, I give this story about Ben Franklin. So Ben Franklin, when he was 18 years old, um, his father found a letter he wrote, and it was all about arguing whether or not women should be educated. And you could say, well, what did he think? Well, he thought women should be educated, but that wasn't why his father, when he read this, got mad at him. The reason his father got mad at him was how poorly written it was. So Ben Franklin said, okay, I have to become a great writer. This is going to be, you know, a calling of mine. I need to…

AI assessment note: “So number one, I talked about this a little bit before it's consumption.”

Q So here's the risk with this interview. Most of my listeners are SaaS software folks. And if, and if we go straight to author, they may tune out. What can we tell them about track Maven to help them understand you eat your own dog food. You know what you're doing?

A Yeah. So track Maven is a company that's about five years old and it's a SaaS company backed by NEA. And basically what we do is we have our own proprietary platform where we ingest huge amounts of marketing data from big leading consumer brands. So you mentioned some of our clients before, uh, Basically, we take all that data in, we give them their own visualization layer, their analytics layer, their reporting layer, and we have an in-house team of people who are basically, you know, the best data people you could want that'll give you the insights you want and give you the answers you want. And so instead of you trying to make your social media manager into somehow a data scientist, people hire us to give them those insights, give them those answers. Um, and it's a And, um, you know, having fun.

AI assessment note: “track Maven is a company that's about five years old and it's a SaaS company”

Q Interesting. So walk us through, I mean, how have you tried to communicate this to the, like an average reader or someone that wants to be more creative? Is it, is it like a step-by-step approach? Is it a storytelling approach, like a fable almost? How have you modeled it?

A Yeah. So the book comes in two parts. So the first part is where I explain the inspiration theory of creativity. And this is how most of us in America think about creativity. Creativity is a solo thing. Think about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, You have to be somewhat manic or neurotic. Um, it's overwhelming, right? When these ideas hit you, they just sort of strike you, this sort of lightning in a bottle moment, and then ultimately it's kind of easy for these people, right? For these people, it's like intuitive. This is the standard model of creativity we have, especially in Western culture, but if you actually look at the science of creativity, the history of creativity, what actual creatives say, That is very far from the truth. You think about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, they have thousands of people working for them. This is not a solo activity. When you actually look at studies, looking at the psychology of people who are creative geniuses, you see they're just as normal and just as messed up as everybody else. And so the first half of the book, I talk a lot about what the science tells us about creativity, but the science tells us is that everyone with an IQ over a 104 has the same creative potential. That's over 40% of the entire world.

AI assessment note: “So the book comes in two parts. So the first part is where I explain”