It’s often that creativity is looked at as incompatible with entrepreneurial talents. The starving artist and astute businessperson are two sides of the same, exaggerated coin — they are both stereotypes while simultaneously being miles apart in characteristics.
This, however, doesn’t mean creativity and entrepreneurial skills can’t exist simultaneously within the same person. Creativity is what brings us advertising, branding and marketing — without a creative yin to a business yang, these important skills would be lost.
The goal is to utilize your creative talents for your own entrepreneurial gain. Some may say that your extra skills have no place in the world of business — but I say they do.
Creativity as a Marketable Skill
Looking at business through a lens of statistics, fiscal amounts vand analytics is a very narrow way of seeing things. There’s a lot more to business aside from suits, table meetings and graphs. To create is to be creative, and thus every entrepreneur has a spark of creativity within them.
Creativity is actually a weapon of war when it comes to pitches, meetings and grinding away at the good ol’ drawing board. An entrepreneur with the creative edge is the one that comes up with innovative products, inventive marketing concepts and branding ideas that are out of the box in the best way possible. Businesses suffer when they continue to barrel down the already well-beaten path — innovators and creatives bring businesses into the modern era, and even on into the future.
This is how creativity should be marketed. Even if you do want to work in an area that specializes in facts and figures, your creative talents can still be utilized as a springboard for innovation in areas that don’t often see it.
Creative Areas of Business
Again, to assume business is only about making and counting money is narrow-minded. Who do you think comes up with the advertising that rakes in all that dough?
If you’re familiar with the show “Mad Men,” you may see characters like Don Draper as a businessman more than a creative, but that’s just because the visual is misleading. Even when you’re in your snappiest pantsuit or when you’re wearing your crispest tie, areas of business like marketing and advertising wholly rely on creativity to work for the business in question.
It’s also not necessary to be a literal artist to be creative in business, either. Creativity can mean you’re an innovative copywriter or that you know better than anyone else how to come up with a new way to communicate within your business. Creativity isn’t limited to pens, pastels and paper — it’s about an innovative imagination and the power to turn a vision into reality.
Businesses the world over are looking for talented, creative minds to help spearhead their newest product launches or to overhaul their business image. If you want to start up your own business, don’t fret — it’s not the presence of creativity that could be your downfall, but instead it might be the absence of other business acumen.
In short, creativity is never a detractor in the world of business: it’s a bonus. If you have the gift of creativity, don’t dull your shine to fit into the business world. Instead, let it shine bright.
