Why I Love Working In Creativity

I don’t have the most important job in the world. I work in creativity, specifically in advertising where I use creativity to help brands get an advantage in market. I’m convinced though that I do have one of the most rewarding jobs in the world because working in creativity allows me to make a difference. Creativity has the power to change the world but when I say “make a difference,” I don’t mean it in the way that doctors and social workers make a difference, I mean that the work my teams produce is different because of my unique contribution to it.

Creativity is combining existing ideas in unique ways to develop something new. And by definition, that something new is always something different. That’s the point of creativity, every creative output is supposed to be something unique. Every person on a creative team brings their own perspective and creativity to the work in a way that leads to a different final result than you’d get with any other combination of people. Even if you replaced someone on a creative team with someone else of exactly equal talent, the final work would still be different. And if that work makes even the smallest impact on the world, that means that one individual had a unique impact on the world.

I have a lot of doctors in my family so I’ll use medicine as a point of contrast. There absolutely is creativity in medicine — every scientific and medical breakthrough is an act of creativity and even in the treatment of more complex conditions there can be some creativity in finding what works best for each patient. But for the most part, the practice of medicine is not creative. And that’s not a bad thing, we prefer it to be uncreative. If you went to five different doctors about a medical issue, you would hope that they would all tell you the same thing. So if you replaced one good doctor with another equally good doctor, ideally nothing would change. If you brought a business problem to five different advertising agencies though, you would be horrified if they all came back with the exact same creative campaign.

Few individual doctors make a difference in a way that one of their colleagues wouldn’t. But the same can’t be said for working in creativity. In creativity, the work will always be different for you having been there.

We still need really good doctors, they’re more important than people who work in advertising. So are social workers, nurses, fire fighters, and thousands of other people in jobs who help others. But the one thing that we who work in creativity have that most of them don’t is the ability to put our unique stamp on work that has the potential to change the world, even if by just a tiny bit. But then again, creativity is ideas and ideas have limitless potential to change the world.