Zadra Creative Blog

Trade Minds

It’s a mistake to surround yourself with people who are just like you.

Trade Minds

Creativity Tip Number 1: It’s a mistake to surround yourself with people who are just like you. Why? Because they’ll usually come up with ideas that are just like yours.

Creative people and companies make a concerted effort to look outside their normal circle of contact, so they can cross-pollinate their own ideas with insights and ideas from other people, departments, eras or industries.

Thousands of good ideas have been discovered simply because someone was curious enough to poke around in a seemingly unrelated industry or discipline. In his best-selling book, “A Whack on the Side of the Head,” Roger von Oech relates that legendary football coach Knute Rockne got the idea for his “four horseman” backfield while watching a burlesque chorus routine.

U.S. military designers borrowed from the cubist art of Pablo Picasso to create more effective camouflage patterns.

Dan Bricklin took the “spreadsheet” concept from accounting and turned it into VisiCalc, the program that launched the microcomputer software industry. Continue reading

The World’s Most Creative Job

Silhouette of Mother and Young Children Holding Hands at Sunset

It’s one of the world’s most demanding and creative jobs. The days are long, sometimes extending all through the night—but there’s no paycheck, stock options or vacations.

It requires a wise mind, a patient hand, a gentle touch, a strong will, a huge heart, and a well-tuned intuition.

It involves leadership, art, cuisine, education, recreation, transportation, psychology, medicine, maintenance, entertainment, pediatrics and economics.

Anyone who can handle all that, and do it year after year with a smile in her eyes and a song in her heart, has to be someone very special.  She is.  She’s your mother. Continue reading

Hard-wired for Hope

You have good reasons to be optimistic about the future.

father and son on sunset beachWe are living in troubled times, that’s for sure. But, there’s an ancient human power that is still alive and well in every corner of the world. Regardless of how difficult or discouraging life has become, there is still a persistent belief that the future will somehow be better than the past or the present. There is even a scientific name for this uniquely human trait; it’s called the “Optimism Bias.”

At it worst, the optimism bias can lead us to overly-positive assumptions such as, “I will lead a long healthy life even if I continue to skip routine medical check-ups.”

But, according to a Time Magazine study, the optimism bias also protects and inspires us; it keeps us moving forward in tough times, rather than throwing in the towel. Without optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes. We might still be cave dwellers, still huddled together in the dark, dreaming of light and heat.

Continue reading

Thumbprints in the Jelly Donuts

I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.

Donut with jam and fruits

And now a special message for all you guerilla marketers out there. You may not have the time or budget to launch an in-depth customer satisfaction survey, but down deep you already know what bugs your customers—so start there.

Frontline employees at Lobridge Family Deli walked in their customer’s shoes for a week and asked themselves, “What irritates me about our deli?”

By week’s end, they had identified and begun eliminating 41 annoying items, including brick-hard butter pats; slow lines in the morning; fruit flies in the dessert section; and thumb impressions on the jelly donuts. Their slogan became: “Eliminate life’s little irritations.” Continue reading

Brighten your Little Corner

Today you may be the answer to someone’s prayer.

Sostegno e aiuto a persone anziane

Dr. Jo Blessing tells of an elderly patient who experienced a minor miracle in her life.

Despondent over the death of her only son, the old woman tidied up her apartment one morning. On her nightstand she sprinkled out the sleeping pills. Then she trudged to her favorite place, a little park on the corner, where she sat alone feeding the pigeons, and summoning the resolve to end her life.

At noon something happened that changed her mind. Along came a young man in a business suit and tie. He was about the same age as her son, and he appeared to be in a hurry. For no apparent reason, however, he suddenly stopped, smiled and asked politely if he could feed the pigeons with her. When he left, he touched her arm and said good-bye. “Take good care of our little birds,” he laughed. “Next time I’ll bring the bread.” He had no idea that his kindness had restored her will to live. Continue reading

Fail Forward!

Things fall apart so that things can fall together.

Disappointment concept.I once wrote a children’s book called Mistakes are Great. I wanted to alert kids that mistakes aren’t something to fear or avoid, they’re something to welcome with open arms. In fact, cultivating a love of mistakes is a secret sauce for all the best entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and new product developers.

Take James Dyson, for example. Inspired by an industrial cyclone at a timber mill, Dyson set out to invent an unorthodox vacuum cleaner—one with no bag, no dust, no clogging and no loss of suction. Along the way he made some 5,000 mistakes, but, within 18 months of hitting the market, Dyson was the world’s best-selling vacuum.

“I love mistakes,” says Dyson, “it’s a necessity as an engineer. Each iteration of my vacuum came about because of a mistake I needed to fix. What’s important is that I didn’t stop at the first failure, the 50th, or the 5,000th.” Continue reading

When 1 + 1 is More than 2

The 1 BookDoing good for others has its own arithmetic.

Service to others has its own arithmetic. Combine two or more goodhearted people in the pursuit of a common cause, and suddenly one-plus-one is more than two. Alone, we can all do a little something, but together we can do something truly amazing.

If we all use the arithmetic of service, there isn’t a problem in this world that can’t be solved. The hard part is convincing each person that their individual efforts, no matter how small, play a significant part in the total equation—that each of us has something to give which cannot otherwise be given—that we all contribute a crucial factor in the multiplier effect.

5 Hours a Week: Using the arithmetic of service one person can help change the social landscape of our country in a few hours a week. How? If every American donated just five hours a week to volunteering for a cause, it would equal the labor of 20 million full-time volunteers.

 4 Hours a Month: If every employee in every American company were given just four hours a month to volunteer for a cause of their choice, American companies could transform thousands of neighborhoods and millions of lives. Continue reading

Two Old Gardeners

Love like this can never die.

Sunflowers.

In the blue-collar neighborhood where I grew up lived an old Italian couple named Polly and Menta who loved children, sunflowers, Italian music and each other.

Right there in the middle of our concrete city, Polly and Menta had cultivated a lush green vegetable garden, complete with hand-split bean poles, trellises, Italian fig trees and tomato plants, two rabbits, three cats, five chickens and a raggedy old rooster that could barely crow. The whole neighborhood liked that rooster, and we loved Polly and Menta.

Menta was short and quiet, with big hands, gentle brown eyes, and a perpetual smile. He wore flannel shirts, red long johns and faded bib overalls year ‘round. Polly was taller, straighter and more outgoing. Like the big yellow sunflowers in their garden, she had a sunny disposition that lit up our neighborhood and our lives. Continue reading

“At Last I Think I’ve Discovered the Secret.”

TRUMAN X JONESSome of the best advice we ever receive is also the simplest.

Many years ago I drove from Seattle to San Francisco to spend a few days with the most interesting man alive—my cousin and mentor, Truman X. Jones.

Truman is an accomplished artist, sculptor and designer, and the creative force behind T.X. Jones Design. He is also a street-wise philosopher and truth seeker. Many times through the years a few well-chosen words from TXJ have changed the way I think about something forever.

On the last day of our time together, Truman and I were standing on the sidewalk in front of his place in the Russian District when he suddenly turned to me and said, “Dan, at last I think I’ve discovered the secret: Do whatever your heart leads you to do—but DO it.”

Some of the best advice we ever receive is also the simplest. On the drive back to Seattle I thought a lot about Truman’s 11-word insight. I began to realize that there were several areas of my own life where I had been taxiing down the runway for years, but never actually taking off. Continue reading

How do You Know it’s Bad?

A Taoist tale for the ages

Zen circle background

There was an old man who was considered to be an odd sort of fellow because of the strange way he had of looking at things.

One day, the old man went out to clean his horse stalls, but he forgot to latch the corral. A few minutes later his prized white stallion pushed open the gate and ran away.

When the old man’s friends heard the news, they rushed to console him. “We heard you lost your prized stallion,” they cried. “That’s too bad!”

“How do you know it’s bad?” was all the old man said.

The very next day the white stallion returned with two beautiful wild mares following him. The old man locked the three horses safely in the corral. This brought the neighbors on the run. “Good! Good!” they exclaimed. Continue reading