A Virtuous Cycle: Creativity and Analytical Work
Analytical Work is Creative, and Creativity Makes us Better at Analysis
This is Josh, one of the Messier founders, writing. It’s been a little while since we posted! That’s partly due to my taking a new day job that’s consuming a lot of my energy in the ramp-up. 99.9% of the creative people I know have “day jobs” to support themselves, their families, and their creativity. For my part I’ve been lucky to have, for most of my adult life, day jobs that I care deeply about.
Much of my day job career has focused on climate and renewable energy, a set of problems and solutions that in many ways define our time. I spend so much of my day doing analytical work – building financial models in spreadsheets, analyzing industry data and trends, conceiving and building programs – that people who know me in that analytical world are sometimes surprised to hear that I try my best to maintain a rich creative life.
I’m not surprised that they’re surprised. Conventional wisdom dictates that creativity and analytical thinking don’t overlap. We’re trained to believe that. But most of the most intelligent people I know have a creative hunger and can’t contain it. A close friend is 1) one of the best musicians I know and 2) a super successful virus researcher. One of my favorite books, Oliver Sachs’ book Musicophilia, tells the story beautifully that music and intelligence often go hand in hand.
I’m preaching to the crowd here when I shout from the mountaintops that my day job work is deeply creative. I’m betting many of you feel the same. And I hope you also feel that being a creative person outside of work is not a liability, it’s an asset. It makes us better at our jobs. I hope that’s a narrative we can all drive home, as people like Messier advisors Roni Reiter-Palmon and Theo Edmonds have so eloquently done for years now.
And I hope you’ll download Messier, share it with a team at work (or the whole company!), and experience firsthand how creativity can feed daily work. And, in turn, you may just help people tap into their own joyous creative/analytical cycle.