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I believe ‘reverse engineering’ is essential for producing creative ideas. The video clip below is a cool visual description of the terminology. This clip is the first 23 seconds of the movie trailer for Pay Check (2003) starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman.

I wrote a couple of blog posts a few years ago on creativity and reverse engineering. Though I have included relevant excerpts from both posts in this post, I would recommend that you click the links for these posts to read the full texts.

The first post titled “Creative Leadership 6” was published in 2010:

King Solomon, in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, said that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything is an adaption of something that has previously existed. Google and Facebook were not the first search engine or social network platform in their industry, but their founders adapted what existed before and then created something better than the rest. Today, both companies dominate their industries. Steve Johnson argued, in his September Wall Street Journal essay, that “big new ideas more often result from recycling and combining old ideas than from eureka moments.” Creative leaders are lifelong learners. They expose themselves to a diverse range of old and new ideas in order to make connections that they can adapt to produce innovative solutions.

Nigeria recently had its presidential elections which was won by General Muhammadu Buhari, who beat the incumbent Head of State, Goodluck Jonathan. This is the first time that a Nigerian ruling party has lost the presidential election in the country’s democratic history. There was a fear that the country would descend into chaos if the electoral outcome didn’t favour the ruling party. A number of wealthy Nigerians took short vacations outside the country during the election period to be out of harm’s way. Thankfully, worst case violent scenarios didn’t materialise and the ruling party accepted defeat.

There is a career profile series called ‘Get that Life’ which is published weekly on Cosmopolitan’s website. I have read a few articles in the series especially the ones profiling individuals with creative writing careers and would recommend that you visit the website to check out some of the women profiled in the series.

The women in the ‘Get that Life’ series had found in their careers what Scott Belsky terms ‘the sweet spot’ which he discusses in his career-oriented chapter in the book – Maximize your potential.

 Aside from lots of hard work, great creative careers are powered by an intersection of three factors: interest, skill, and opportunity….The magic happens when you find the sweet spot where these three factors intersect. Scott Belsky

The hardest thing with any creative activity is starting it. It is daunting when you confront the blank page and you don’t know what to do. You want to express yourself, create something good but you are stumped. You try to pull out ideas from your brain and you produce nothing intelligible. A lot of folks give up at this stage and believe that they are simply not creative.  

I was invited by a lecturer in the Business School to do a session of guest teaching on one of his modules. The students on this module were full-time International MSc and MBA students. Long time subscribers of this blog might remember that the same lecturer had invited me to do a guest teaching session a couple of years ago. You can read the blog post I wrote about that session here.  He requested that I teach the same topic, The power of organisational and leadership metaphors, which I did two years ago.

Life is a story we live and tell.  You are the protagonist and storyteller of your life – your auto-biographical story. A protagonist is “the most important person in a real situation” {Oxford English Dictionary}.Everybody else in your story world is a supporting cast member of varying importance and relevance.

Today is the 12th day of the month. The clock seems to be running down on 2015 already. I bet most of you have set goals, targets or resolutions for the year. How is that working out for you? Are you still on target or are you struggling?

My main 2015 resolution is to build new habits and develop new skills. I aim to be realistic with myself this year. I would normally start the year with many goals, get overwhelmed, fail before the end of January and feel guilty the rest of the year for lacking discipline.

2014 has been a year of consuming stories. Aside from watching a lot of movies this year, I also listened to a lot of podcasts. My mobile phone has functioned more as an iPod than an iPhone. Last year, I read a lot of online longform articles and blogs via Pocket but not as much this year. My big regret is I haven’t read as many books as I would like. This is something I need to address in 2015 and I may have to reduce my video and audio consumption to do this.

I watched the movie, Locke, last weekend and I would rate it as the best film I have seen this year so far. This is saying a lot considering that I have seen 60 movies in 2014 already.