Crossover Creativity, or why Ashore exists

At the end of Brad Stone’s The Everything Store is a list of books Jeff Bezos recommends to help understand how Amazon works.

Unusually, the top book isn’t a business book or an autobiography, but a novel: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

It’s this book that Bezos credits most for the decisions and frameworks that led to the creation of what is now the sixth-largest company in the world.

As he said in 2009:

"If you read The Remains of the Day, which is my favourite book of all time, you can't help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret."

Many know about the Regret Minimization Framework or Amazon’s Day One philosophy.

What they don’t know is that the inspiration for these principles - principles that built the sixth largest company in the world - were the fictional reminiscences of a butler in 1930s England.

This is what true creativity looks like: finding two completely unrelated ideas, putting them together, and creating something new.

It’s what London ad-man, and creative genius, Dave Trott, calls crossover creativity.

At Ashore, we believe that creativity, above anything else, is a company’s unfair advantage.

But to find that advantage, it's necessary to step back and make the space for creativity to happen in your day-to-day life.

The best leaders have always worked in this way.

Bill Gates took the decision to start taking Think Weeks in the early 1990s, spending two weeks every year alone, reading, and learning.

Marc Andreessen’s original guide to personal creativity advises: don’t keep a schedule, just work on what’s most important and most interesting instead.

Despite not being -- by a traditional definition-- artists, they approach their work as if they are.

Not necessarily true creatives, but to borrow from Trott again, crossover creatives: blending artistic inspiration with practical work.

To do this they first had to unlearn something.

One after another

Many of us have been taught that being creative is about a specific output. If you produce that output you’re an artist, if you don’t, you aren’t.

But that's simply not true. Creativity is a way of approaching the world. It can apply to any vertical, any sector, any endeavour.

In 2009, John Gruber stood up and delivered a presentation, The Auteur Theory of Design.

In it, he compares the role of a product designer with that of a filmmaker. Good products, like good films, emerge not from committee, but from a single arbiter of taste.

For Gruber, the difference between disciplines is overrated. If you’re creating something, it doesn’t matter what vertical you’re in; you can approach it with the artist’s eye.

As he puts it:

“Simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.”

Rick Rubin, in the Creative Act, says the same thing, albeit in a very different way:

“Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not. We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.”

They’re right. Whether it’s making a play in a football game, drafting a M&A contract, or building a React app: anything can be a creative act.

Getting your work in

However, accepting that it’s possible - no matter what you’re building - to be a crossover creative, is only the beginning.

As anyone creating something knows, the pace and nature of modern life makes it a battle to find the time and space needed for creative thought.

To win the fight, the best musicians, writers, and artists structure their lives around creativity, developing repeatable processes that are personal to them. As Jerry Seinfeld describes it, “getting your work in”.

But to get to that process, you need space. Or more normally, spaces.

That’s where we come in.

At the heart of the creative life is the studio. A place for focused time, where the craft is honed, and a brilliant product created.

However, until now there’s been no real equivalent for crossover creatives. The recording studio, but not for music, but for decks, strategies and spreadsheets: the things that build great companies.

Nor - unless you go full Bill Gates and buy a cabin in the Pacific Northwest - has there been the space to forget, take a step back alone, and let new ideas come together.

To be distracted, yes - but, borrowing from Zadie Smith - to improve the things you’re distracted by.

Great artists steal

Right now these tools are most useful to those at the forefront of strategy and development.

But when you look at the pace of AI development, the ‘business as usual’ tasks - emails, scheduling, admin - are on borrowed time.

And in a world where the mundane and everyday are automated, what remains of work are the choices we make, and the instructions we give.

Meaning that ultimately, all knowledge work is going to become creative work.

And to do those things well, the creative edge becomes a necessity.

This is not a new concept. Here’s Steve Jobs, the ultimate crossover creative, in 1996, describing the original Macintosh team:

“Picasso had a saying. He said, 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."

All that’s really changing here is that more and more people are entering the creative realm.

And to have the taste and intuition to make the right choices needed to build a truly great product, the way they work will have to change.

This is, undeniably, an optimistic view of the future.

It’s a privilege to create. It’s why the best people want to do creative work. To live a life - like the people I’ve mentioned above - as crossover creatives.

To take the creative techniques honed over the past centuries, and use them to not only create art and music, but to build great businesses too.

But they also need the tools to do it. To make the space to think better. And think differently.

That is why we exist.

aled@ashore.io