When I was at school I was very good at maths so whilst only 8 and in primary school, I was pigeonholed into ‘scientist’ and told that that was what I was good at. I also had undiagnosed dyslexia and so struggled with reading and English so it was reinforced and confirmed that the arts were just not for me.
I went through secondary school with the same set of beliefs never choosing to engage in art subjects believing that I was just not good enough. My A ‘levels were all sciences and predictably my degree is in Physics.
Setting up my first business came easy to me it felt like a normal thing to do. I opened my first bar in my early 20s but at no point did this challenge my belief that my calling was down the science field.
Business after all involved a lot of maths in understanding the finances in working out your prices, calculating GPs and Vat, and in analysing the data. The rest is of course all about systems and efficiency. Designing and building systems are after all engineering.
Yet here I am over 23 years later and I realise that all I have been doing was better understood in the context of creativity.
When I was younger (and less knocked around) I would come up with business ideas almost weekly. I would get excited and play with the idea in my head. These ideas could become all-consuming as I created worlds in my imagination to test an idea. Eventually, I would do this enough until I knew if the idea was worth a risk or whether to dump it. So many of my ideas went by the wayside like this but some were explored and developed in the real world.
In the real world, my businesses were always built whilst still imperfect ideas but ready to be tested in the real world. To have bits built up and then taken down when they did not work to be replaced by a tweak, a change, or sometimes even an overhaul.
Successful businesses are always changing, they are moulded to suit the environment within which they find themselves and they evolve to change with ever-changing society and communities. The ones that do not do this, cease to exist.
What is that if not an artistic process? The sculpting of an idea.
Creativity requires an abundance of imagination to be able to test ideas.
But then, when described like this you realise that science is itself a similar creative process.
The development of a hypothesis springs from imagination and then is tested to prove or disprove but it is the imagination and creativity that is required in the first place.
Innovation and creativity are synonyms of each other so why do we believe that they sit on other sides of a wall from each other. Why do we not understand them as being both one and the same?
To me now with 4 children of my own it is obvious that the old-fashioned idea of a person being either sciencey or arty is out of date. My children show an aptitude in both and I encourage them to explore ideas and thoughts without the constraint of putting them into boxes.
Problem-solving is of itself both a skill in engineering and creativity.
Whilst it is true that business requires a whole set of tangible competencies which require discipline and knowledge, entrepreneurs are by their nature artists.
They bring to life exciting possibilities that add value to our human existence.
An entrepreneur starts with an idea and then creates a world around that idea.
They need flexibility of thinking to be able to see new ways forward or to find gaps in the current world or to bend existing norms to create something different.
Sometimes this process produces a masterpiece, something that resonates so well within a community that the rest of the world wonders how it ever managed to exist without it but sometimes the result is mediocre or indeed sometimes even viewed as a ‘failure’.
But this is also just part of a process, a canvas with some lines on it from which to recreate or start again.
A ‘failure’ is always just a step towards something else and provided our intrepid entrepreneur has the resilience to keep going then that ‘failure’ is just the result of that experiment and an outcome to be learnt from to inform the next time or to generate a new idea.
It is an exciting journey to be an entrepreneur to be allowed to play with ideas and build new worlds.
It is a shame that as a society we only see the money aspect of business and not the huge amounts of creativity that are involved.
Not all successful entrepreneurs created their businesses because they thought they would change the world or build something that would make a fortune.
Like an artist who paints, not for the money but for the art, many entrepreneurs just created because they can and because they have an abundance of enthusiasm and imagination.
