Admits the Corona Virus outbreak of 2020 I write this blogpost. Not feeling particularly well but still healthy physically so that’s a blessing.
Today I would like to write about two concepts that as we continue to become bigger and better professionals of the creative spectrum, we must understand.
Repetition and Innovation
Repetition
As defined by google, a repetition is the recurrence of an action or an event. In music we can see this as an overarching melody that gets ‘repeated’ through-out a song. In art poetry this can be the end rhymes to the verses, and in art we can see it as a pattern.
Artists use patterns as decoration, as a technique of composition, or as an entire piece of artwork. Patterns are diverse and useful as a tool that grabs a viewer’s attention, whether it be subtle or very apparent.
However as we extrapolate patterns and repetition into our creative careers, we can see that patterns and repetition could actually be detrimental to our growth. Think of an example company that post similar pictures on their social media.
Sure this can be a fun idea every once in a while, but producing the same content, with the same quality over the same period of time, means stagnation.
Stagnation for every business is a detrimental force. If we maintain our pattern of repeating content through the lifetime of our business, we will find that we will never grow. 30years in and we will be doing the same thing, we were doing that first year we went into business.
You might think “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” but I suggest a different idea, I say “If it’s not broken, break it.”
Or at least break it metaphorically. Sit down and write all the possibilities you can think of to improve and change your system, and while you are at it also consider what things could damage it in the long-run. This activity of thinking outside the box for established systems of operations, will give you room to experiment and come up with new ideas that you can implement to grow and change your system. Making it better and even more efficient than before. This is called Innovating.
Innovation
Innovation is the idea of taking something and making it better by having it become something else. For example; Movies and Netflix. Netflix took the idea of owning movies, renting movies, and even going out to movies and combined it all into a wonderful system that allows you to briefly own a huge library of movies, paying relatively low for each title (even cheaper than actually renting each movie) and still allowing for the excitement that comes with a new release by creating original content and releasing seasons, movie premieres and Netflix exclusives through their platform.
2020 and I practically don’t know anyone without a Netflix subscription. I actually know more people without TV’s than without a Netflix account. That is bonkers! Yet it is quite in-line with many innovative ideas.
Companies like Amazon, Tesla, Apple and many others are spending thousands of dollars if not millions of dollars into innovative technologies (even if they fail).
But why? Why spend money, time and resources on something that might ultimately not work? Well… Because it is better to aim for the starts and land on a cloud than to never leave the ground at all.
Innovation much like creativity is very much about the journey. It is about discovering new things along the way, and creating things that have never been imagined. Bob Ross said it best, “Art is all about happy accidents.” Those accidents will teach you, they will push you and the will motivate you into new realms of possibility, new concepts and new machinations. You are an adventurer and this business is a whole new adventure. So next time you come to the point where you are wondering if you should continue to repeat that ad campaign or that design process, give it a whirl, do it differently and see where that will land you.
Let me know how you applied innovation into your life and business, down in the comments section below.
MabsArts 