Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Creativity

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Creativity

Lin-Manuel’s Hamilton received 11 Tony Awards on Sunday. His show was one of the most creative entries from the already super creative Broadway theatre industry.

Earlier the June issue of Fast Company designated Miranda as #1 of their 100 Most Creative People in Business. Further, the June issues of Entrepreneur had a compilation of their 100 Brilliant Companies, and Inc. had their 50 Best Places to Work. No, Lin-Manuel is not on those lists, but all three publications have hundreds of descriptions of people and companies operating at cutting edge creativity.

These three magazines are a veritable treasure trove of ideas. An effective way of growing is to see what others are doing, how they think and how they develop disruptive paradigms. It is doubtful many will find the time or even have the inclination to read completely through these publications. Yet, it is important to become familiar with some of these ideas. A suggestion is get all three publications and flip through the pages, quickly looking at each page, and let your brain absorb the abundance of ideas they contain.

Regardless of how much you want to do, the reality is you can’t do everything, so my suggestion is to pick one or two things to try that seem doable. If you succeed at that, then try another one. If you expose yourself to ideas and can adapt, adopt or try one new thing a month, and succeed in just a quarter of them you will have achieved at least 15 advances over the next five years that would not otherwise have been done.

A further suggestion is to not buy the magazines, but to go to your local public library and spend a half hour flipping through these publications. Make that a monthly habit and you will be super surprised about how much extra you can accomplish.

Lin-Manuel Miranda was a game changer and you can be one too. Being creative just takes that little extra effort.