Role Model

Ricky Gervais is, unquestionably, a brilliant comic mind. He's prolific, fearless, and unique. And yesterday, I accepted him as my new professional mentor.

Gervais published a post on his eclectic blog about creativity and value of time spent, as he says, 'dicking about'. From the post:

I'm loving having a YouTube channel to dick around on. I know I've always dicked around, whether on radio, TV or at the Golden Globes, but with this it's actually expected of me.

I discovered that this is the best thing about Twitter too. Just playing; mucking about for the hell of it. Although, I could technically count that as work. Dicking about should be tax-deductible for me.

Let me explain. Scientific studies of creativity have basically concluded that it can't be taught, as it is a "facility" rather than a learned skill. Putting it very crudely, creativity is the ability to play. And, to be able to turn that facility on and off when necessary. This makes perfect sense to me. Everything I've ever written, created or discovered artistically has come out of playing.

Fast Company connected the dots in a business context, noting that, "It's safe to expand this point from art to other creative fields, like business, especially the kind that's preoccupied with innovation, as we at Fast Company incessantly are. To that end, there are two points for us to unpack here:

• that creative work requires exploratory mistake-making
• that exploratory mistake-making won't happen regularly unless systematized"

You could, I suppose, accuse me of cherry-picking a theory that justifies my penchant for procrastination, for wasting time, for, well, dicking about. You might well even be right.

But you'd better believe I'll be showing this to my boss the next time he catches me blogging at work, and explaining to him how important Gheorghe is to our team's success. I'll let you know how that goes.