1+1=3

Why "I can't be creative, I'm not an artist" is the same as "I can't make a sandwich, I'm not a cook"

I was talking to a group of would-be entrepreneurs last week at an event for a pre-accelerator. The session was focused on creativity and business. What struck me most was that much of the conversation centered on how we are "supposed" to be more creative in business, and what to do for people who are "not creative" - meaning the technical entrepreneurs who don’t identify as artists.

It reminded me a lot of the talks I used to have with my advertising and marketing colleagues. They would often tell me that a certain subject "wasn't for them" because they were "creatives." Therefore, they assumed they shouldn't understand finance, business strategy, or management well, or, in some cases, at all... I had never looked at it from the other perspective before, but it seems there is a significant gap on the both sides. People from technical or finance backgrounds often think of themselves as "not creative," while those from humanities backgrounds distance themselves from technical or business-oriented subjects.

We have created an "identity silo" between the technical and the creative, and it is doing much more harm than good.

A significant body of research indicates that while job stability and salary are factors, the primary deterrent for technical professionals entering creative fields is a perceived deficiency in "artistic talent". This stems from a societal conflation of creativity with artistic skills like drawing or painting, rather than viewing creativity as a cognitive process of novel problem-solving.

We discussed this at length during the event. I tried to push back on the notion that being creative is just painting a picture or singing a song for its own sake. To me, business is one of the most creative endeavors someone can undertake. It isn’t artistic per se, but it is definitely creative. Historically, these worlds have moved further apart, perhaps because academic institutions segregated liberal arts from technical training, enforcing the idea that they are mutually exclusive.

I finished a technical university myself, and I never thought of myself as "creative" in the traditional sense. I didn’t have the skills to paint or compose music. However, had I been exposed more to artistic training, I might have had a different understanding of what creativity actually is much earlier. When this disconnection grows, businesses suffer - first and foremost from incrementalism.

A technical firm without creative integration might optimize existing products but fail to imagine entirely new categories. Conversely, a creative firm without business acumen may produce groundbreaking work that is financially unsustainable (a good example - most of the advertising industry today…)

During my talk, I proposed a simple formula to define whether what you are doing is truly creative or merely "by the book."

That formula is 1 + 1 = 3. It’s an expression representing the assertion that creativity results in a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In conventional arithmetic, the sum of two units is always two. But in economic and social processes, the interaction of two elements can lead to non-linear outcomes where 1 + 1 = 3 (or even 1 + 1 = 1 in the case of a failed merger, for example). Striving for that "3" - finding ways to create that extra value - is the main point of creativity in business and in life.

It is important to keep a simple nuance in mind: there is a major distinction between artistic self-expression and entrepreneurial utility. Both involve the creation of something that did not previously exist, but the criteria for success are different. In the arts, the driver is often internal satisfaction or emotional resonance; the only criterion is "if you like it". In business, creativity is governed by the utility constraint. For an idea to be considered creative in a professional context, it must be both original and useful. The creator must account for what other people need, shifting the focus from the ego of the artist to the empathy of the innovator.

One of the most quoted creative entrepreneurs is Steve Jobs. In his famous Stanford commencement address, he spoke about the simple principle of "connecting the dots":

In the moment, you don’t know where your path is leading, but when you look back, you see how seemingly unrelated events helped you get to where you are today. When we tell ourselves we are "not creative," we close doors and stop generating the dots that are supposed to connect in the future.

This metaphor is a reflection of the cognitive mechanics of associative thinking.

In behavioral science, creativity is often defined by the "semantic distance" between concepts in our memory. Mednick’s associative theory says that the creative process consists of combining associative elements into new, useful combinations. The degree of creativity is determined by the "remoteness" of the links.

Highly creative individuals are characterized by flat associative hierarchies. In a "steep" hierarchy, a word like "table" leads only to "chair." In a "flat" hierarchy, an individual has a wider range of associations, reaching remote concepts like "periodic" or "negotiation". A specific metric used to quantify this is Forward Flow, which calculates the semantic distance an individual travels during free association. Research shows that Forward Flow scores are robust predictors of real-world creative achievement in entrepreneurs. This validates the need to create as many dots as possible. If innovation is limited by your library of associations, the best way to train your "creativity muscle" is to populate that library with diverse, non-obvious data.

How do we do that?

A simple analogy is going to the gym versus playing the game. If you only trained for tennis by playing the game, your development would be slow. You would only be perfecting what you already know. To get better and faster, you go to the gym to strengthen your core and your muscles. Activities that seem unrelated to the court but improve your performance once you are there.

To be better business people, we don't need to learn to paint. We just need to go to the "cognitive gym" and do things unrelated to our daily "game". This builds muscles for systems thinking and associative flexibility through non-judgmental observation. Non-judgmental observation is a metacognitive skill where you observe thoughts, data, and experiences without assigning them a value of "good," "bad," "useful," or "useless". In behavioral science, this is a core component of Mindfulness-Based Interventions and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). When you consume information without the urge to immediately agree or disagree, you are engaging in open monitoring. This receptive attention prevents the brain from "pre-connecting" dots based on existing biases.

We often suppress the urge to learn something new by asking, "When am I going to use this in real life?" (sounds familiar? That was my mantra all through high school) But most of what you see in art galleries, movies, reading fiction or talking to different people in different environments won't be useful directly. They become dots in a pattern that, later on, will make you consider something completely different. This practice helps you avoid premature closure, a cognitive bias where we stop searching for solutions once a "good enough" answer is found. By delaying the formation of an opinion, you keep the exploration phase open for more distant, valuable dots to enter. When you do this, you begin bringing concepts from one field into unfamiliar territory, triggering the Medici Effect.

This is how we got laser printers (a mix of lasers, xerography, and digital processing) and how architects designed self-cooling buildings by studying termite mounds…

If you read this far, congratulations.

You’re definitely on the right path. Now, take it one step further. Go somewhere you don't belong. Read an article about a topic you find boring. Watch a movie in a genre you usually dislike - but do it without an opinion. Force yourself to be curious about more things. And just take the data.

You’re not looking for answers today. You’re just collecting the dots that will make you a success, or maybe even a creative genius, tomorrow.