Whenever someone tells you to be more innovative, more creative, or more influential, beware. Listen like a doctor. Look for signs of nerosis and take no prisoners.

The fact is, talk is cheap. Illusions of grandeur, cloaked in “be more” ambiguations, really are smoke and mirrors. People in today’s digital communications playground blog about being more of this and that, but are they actually “being” anything? Where creativity is concerned, if you need to say it then you missed the boat about two paragraphs back. No, “10 steps to better being” is not the way to creative revelation.

Back to Basics

Let’s put our cards on the table. “Be” is a verb. Saying it won’t win you any prizes. To get it done, you’ve got to climb inside the word and feel its muscles. Let go of your fear and separation — it’s no good here. Dive in the water and feel the icy shock of river rushing your skin. Do not think you need to be more of anything. Do not think the water is cold and brutally exhilarating. Be that fish gliding and thrashing survival.

Then you might make a discovery. Like how to twist 140 Twitter characters into a marketing campaign. Or what the business integration point of YouTube is. Or why MySpace today is the domain of musicians and young-preneurs whereas just four small years ago it was the Web’s social capital.

When business leaders talk about being more, better, greater, they talk in numbers. The glass is half empty or half full. Predictions were off by 20. Profits are up but revenue is down. Then go for more. More innovations and more creativity will improve our margins. More people, more prospects, more wins will increase our bottom line. That’s when they, eyebrow slightly askew, look to you to deliver a creative moment.

Creativity Unveiled

Like “beingness,” creativity is an action word. It can’t be quantified or harnessed or calculated. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, creativity is a flow we enter psychically and emotionally in which time stops and our synapses fire and focus. It takes us over the edge of reason, to the wellspring something cosmic.