The Grace of Great Things
If you’re thinking about updating your personal brand or creating a new product, a new company, or a new life path, I hope Robert Grudin’s The Grace of Great Things – Creativity and Innovation will serve as an inspiration, a guide. Grudin viewed “the creative achievement as a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.
Grudin prompted me think about my own creative process. I decided to refine it and incorporate what Grudin called “heroic habits and qualities” into my daily practice:
1) a passion for work that one chooses to pursue,
2) fidelity to one’s creation so that the idea virtually inhabits the mind,
3) a love of the problematic that embraces a sheer fun of venturing into something new,
4) a sense of beauty
5) a sense of wholeness, appreciating that “every distinct object is both a special combination of interacting elements and itself an element in a larger form.”
6) an acceptance of suffering, such as the failure of experiment, the shock of criticism, and the pain of closure,
7) remembrance, recognizing that memory can offer new ideas. Inspiration may be “the revelation of something completely new, but it is also the discover of something always true.”
8) openness to new ideas, new methods, and new resources,
9) integrity as “a psychological and ethical wholeness” that links to the creator, their tools, and product; and integrity in one work’s habit and environment, as well as integrity in both process and product, and
10) courage to step into the unknown, to face one’s fear of not creating something worthy and being rejected, and courage to be an independent thinker.
The Grace of Great Things also inspired me to leave my management consulting job and leapfrog onto my creative and entrepreneurial path. It remains a cornerstone of my practice and graces my bookshelf as an old and wise friend. I hope you’ll find Grudin’s ideas about creativity and innovation thought provoking and helpful on your journey!
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