Gold Nuggets
- All the analytics in the world cannot tell you what to do when you’re trying to sell something, and yet the market is buying something else.
- I think that sometimes when we get stuck it’s because we have learned either in school or through experience to look at that problem in one way and one way only, and sometimes just having a little creativity can help you look at it in a different way that inspires you to come up with a solution.
- Creativity is something that we’re all born with that we’ve kind of forgotten along the way. We were all kids and we were all creative and somewhere along the way, we lost touch with solving problems.
Meet Nir Bashan
Our guest is Nir Bashan, CEO and founder of The Creator Mindset. He is also a world recognized creativity expert. He has taught thousands of leaders and individuals all around the world how to harness the power of creativity to improve profitability, increase sales, and ultimately create more meaning in your work.
His company produces workshops, consulting, he does some coaching, keynote speaking, and travels all around the world and has quite a list of clients, including Microsoft, AT&T, and the NFL Network.
Smart Man, Smarter Woman References
We talk about a lot in each episode; however, we don’t want you to miss a thing! Here are some key items were mentioned if you want to take a closer look.
Book Recommendation
The Creator Mindset
Website
nirbashan.com
Learn more about our Cloud Accounting Services here
Transcript
Steve Loates: Welcome to Smart Man, Smarter Woman, a podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs and thank you for joining us today. I’m Steve Loates.
Juliet Aurora: And, I’m Juliet Aurora.
Steve Loates: And, we are your co-hosts, but before I introduce our very special guest for today’s show, I would like to hear a little more from my wonderful co-host, the Smarter Woman herself, Juliet. So, are you feeling creative today, Juliet?
Juliet Aurora: [00:00:30] Always, I’m always creative. Welcome, everyone, to our episode and I think you’re going to find this a really interesting episode. I know that I certainly am. I am very much a left-brain, logical kind of person and so our episode today is going to talk about the other side of the brain which doesn’t necessarily resonate with me, so I’m going to be interested to hear all the different things that I can use to use the other side of my brain. So, I think it’s going to be a great half an hour, 45 minutes. [00:01:00] I’m looking forward to it.
Steve Loates: Excellent, well, thank you. Now as I mentioned at the beginning, our podcast is for and about entrepreneurs and our goal with each episode is to provide some entertainment, but most importantly, some value, some insights, some gold nuggets that can help other entrepreneurs on their own journey. We have a great show for you today. We have a very special guest joining us all [00:01:30] the way from sunny Florida. His name is Nir Bashan, he is the CEO and founder of The Creator Mindset. He is also a world recognized creativity expert. He has taught thousands of leaders and individuals all around the world how to harness the power of creativity to improve profitability, increase sales, and ultimately create more meaning in your work.
[00:02:00] His company produces workshops, consulting, he does some coaching, keynote speaking, and travels all around the world and has quite a list of clients, including Microsoft, AT&T, and the NFL Network, and so without further ado, let’s bring our guest into the show, Nir Bashan. Welcome, Nir, and thank you very much for joining us today.
Nir Bashan: Thank you. Hi, Steve. Hi, Juliet. Thanks for having me.
Juliet Aurora: Wait, Steve, and before [00:02:30] you move forward, you did forget to mention that Nir also has a new book coming out in August of this year. Can you give us the title of that book?
Nir Bashan: Yeah, thank you. It’s called The Creator Mindset and it’s coming out in August through McGraw Hill and it’s going to be available everywhere. You can get it on Amazon now if you’d like and Barnes & Noble and all of the various bookstores. You can [00:03:00] get it wherever you like to buy books.
Juliet Aurora: Excellent.
Steve Loates: Awesome, well, and there we are again, audience. As you can see, Juliet ahead of me as she usually is which is why we call this Smart Man, Smarter Woman.
Juliet Aurora: We need to make sure that we give shout-outs to our fellow authors because we know how hard it is to write a book, get it out there, that we want to make sure that we help our fellow authors as much as possible.
Nir Bashan: That’s right, you guys have firsthand knowledge here in this arena.
Juliet Aurora: First and last, [00:03:30] we’re done.
Steve Loates: Absolutely. That sounded pretty adamant there. You have a really awesome background, very interesting, lots of things I want to try and get into during our time together. Your book, which Juliet mentioned, has already received some pretty terrific pre-public release reviews from [00:04:00] some very famous people. Two in particular caught my attention, as because I’m actually big fans of their writing and the first one was Marshall Goldsmith, author of Triggers, big fan of that book, and he said that your book is a must-read for every business professional.
That certainly relates to our audience, and the other one was Greg McKeown, author of one of my favorite books, Essentialism, [00:04:30] and he said that in your book you beautifully explore how creativity can be learned by anyone in any organization and those are just fantastic recommendations, so that’s great, but before we actually perhaps get a little deeper into the book, and maybe why you decided to write it, I’d like to talk a little bit because our audience are entrepreneurs, perhaps you could share [00:05:00] with us a little bit your own entrepreneurial journey. How did you get to where you are today?
Nir Bashan: Well, definitely, and again, thanks for having me. I hope this show turns out to be interesting. Michael Ly is a hard act to follow. I listened to that show the other day and that was … but, the fact that he might be running for president is-
Juliet Aurora: We tried to convince him.
Nir Bashan: I’m a little bit [00:05:30] behind there. So, I guess the story starts when I was nine years old. My best friend and I, we grew up in very modest income families and we wanted to buy baseball cards and eat junk food, like all other nine-year old kids. So, we started a company where we went door-to-door washing cars and the things that I’ve learned going door-to-door washing cars [00:06:00] at nine years old have applied to every business I’ve either run myself or ran for someone else for the last 30 or so years. What we found was that what you’re selling isn’t always what people want to buy.
For instance, very few people let us wash their cars. Can you imagine a nine-year old asking for car keys in the 80s in Los Angeles and people were like, ” [00:06:30] No.” And so on, so what we did is we took out a lot of trash, we raked a lot of leaves, we cleaned out a lot of porches that were overflowing with stuff, we topped off fluids, and what I really learned in that summer that we started that business was really how to be creative. And, all of the analytics in the world can’t tell you what to [00:07:00] do when you’re trying to sell something, and yet the market is buying something different.
And so, fast forward several years in the most unboring way I could possibly portray this to you, Steve and Juliet, but basically I found that whether I was working for someone else in a sandwich shop making Subway sandwiches, or answering phones in a call center, I had my own furniture [00:07:30] refinishing business for a while, no matter what I did, I’ve noticed that the people around me in the businesses that ended up doing really well were creative and the businesses that didn’t do well and faltered and so on and so forth, were the ones that were the least creative.
And so, my entrepreneurial journey has been a process of really watching and learning [00:08:00] how businesses become creative and how to capture those moments into something that is prescriptive and something that anybody can do and that leads us to where we are now.
Juliet Aurora: So, I have a question. Can you maybe start us off even with fundamentals, a basic definition, just so everyone is talking about the same thing about creativity in business? Only because most people like [00:08:30] myself probably associate creativity with the right side of the brain which is drawing and painting and creating things, but not necessarily look at it from a business standpoint. So, can you connect … tie creativity and business together for our audience to start?
Nir Bashan: So, Juliet, this is literally the reason I wrote this book. Most people are like you and that’s okay. They think that creativity is [00:09:00] learning how to play an instrument, maybe playing guitar or trumpet, drawing a landscape, so on and so forth. But to me, real creativity is not that. That’s a very small portion of creativity, it’s like a 3% slice of the pie. For me and what I do with companies that I work with and keynotes that I deliver is speak about a creativity that is a business-type creativity, it’s a fiscal creativity [00:09:30] in a way that allows you to come up with ideas that help fuel innovation, come up with ideas that help you differentiate yourself in the marketplace, and really build out a creativity that is not one that is art per se, but using the side of your mind that we have not used for so long because we’ve traded it for analytical thinking and [00:10:00] really joining it together with the analytical side to excel.
You look at businesses like Google, you look at businesses like Amazon, Tesla, Apple, all of our favorite businesses, and you realize that the people leading the companies, the culture in the companies, are ones where creativity and analytics are combined in that the best of the human brain and the potential of our thinking is combined, not just focused [00:10:30] on one or the other.
Juliet Aurora: Excellent, and just for everyone’s reference, when Nir said fiscal creativity, he did not mean in our accounting space where you get creative with the numbers to the point of being irresponsible.
Nir Bashan: Definitely not that. When I say it I mean more or less looking at money and finance as a tool. I’ve consulted with a bunch of [00:11:00] businesses that are working in really bad cash flow situations and are facing loans or other means of drawing in equity and what I help people do is look at that problem not as an all-consuming … gosh, we can’t make payroll, which is a real problem. There’s no joke there, but what I help people do is restructure some of the questions that they’re looking at [00:11:30] in terms of cash flow or other financial things and to help them and teach them how to come up with ideas that will encompass the problem and allow them to have options to finally solve the issue.
I think that, Juliet, to your point about being creative, I think that sometimes when we get stuck it’s because we have learned either in school or through [00:12:00] experience to look at that problem in one way and one way only, and sometimes just having somebody who can help you look at it in a different way inspires you to come up with a solution. I don’t know the inside and out of every business that I work with, I don’t. There’s not enough hours in the world for me to learn what people do in the financial services in a certain unique market, but what I can offer them is some ideas about how to look [00:12:30] at that particular problem and awaken a response within them that I feel it had been long dormant, creativity, to help come up with solutions that are viable.
Juliet Aurora: Excellent.
Steve Loates: Thank you. What tips would you give to an entrepreneur or business owner that they can perhaps work on to … how can they train their mind [00:13:00] to be a little more creative than perhaps what it is today? Or I guess, maybe it is creative, and they just need some help in bringing that creativity out to make it of some use to them in managing their own business.
Nir Bashan: It’s a really good question, Steve. So, I have a process that’s called the concept, the idea, and the execution. [00:13:30] So, I can break down any business problem into those three realms. The concept is the largest way that you could possibly think of an idea or a business or anything that you’re working on that your listeners might be facing now. Let’s say they own a pizza parlor and they want to franchise it. The concept of the pizza parlor is not pizza, it is sustenance, or food, or some kind of grand thought that goes along with that [00:14:00] product or service.
Now, the idea portion is the more streamlined version of that. So, your idea, your pizza restaurant might be ancient recipe handed down through the ages from momma back in the home country and this is our pizza. And then, your execution is the most direct laser- [00:14:30] focused way to look at your business which is the meat lovers pizza with double pepperoni and cheesy crust stuffed with jalapeño peppers, that might be the direct idea. So, something that can help an entrepreneur now, today, listening to this podcast, going, “You know what, Nir? I’m a little stuck because that pizza ain’t selling. The people don’t want the double anymore, but that’s from momma in the old country, and people aren’t [00:15:00] buying it and I don’t know what to do.”
So, what I do is when I work with people is I help them lift up the idea. So, instead of going to the execution, now look at your idea. What’s the idea? It’s momma, old recipe, blah, blah, blah. And I say, okay, what’s a variation that we can do on that? Can we look at the sauces? Can we look at the way that we prepare the item? Can we look at maybe a different approach here or a different approach there? And, nine out of 10 times somebody will tell me, absolutely.
So, we have this thing that we tried once where we [00:15:30] took the sauce and we did it with less this and less that and became a healthy food. It wasn’t as healthy, but it was a little bit healthier. I said, “Okay, cool. Let’s take that idea and move it across now and look at the healthier sauce. What kind of executions can we get from a healthier sauce?” And then, nine out of 10 times, an entrepreneur will tell me, “Great, this is what I can do. I can do a thin crust with that particular sauce and try to get that out the door.” And now, we’re really making creativity. [00:16:00] Creativity is something that we’re all born with, Steve and Juliet, that we’ve kind of forgotten along the way.
We were all kids and we were all creative and somewhere along the way, we lost touch with solving problems. I look at my young son, he solves incredible problems with his Legos and the way that he organizes things, yet as we grow older it’s not the stuff of substance anymore it’s kind of like, whatever, creativity is an instrument you play or something like [00:16:30] that. I need real, hard facts to help me with my business, but nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that we’ve lost touch with creativity gets us stuck in businesses, and so that’s how I help.
Now, if you tell me, “Nir, the sauce that’s the lower fat version sauce, that’s not selling either.” I’d say, “Great, let’s go up again. What business are you in?” And, people tell me, “I’m a pizza parlor that wants to franchise,” or, “I’m a small franchisee of [00:17:00] an existing parlor.” I say, “Okay, let’s go back up there to the concept and let’s look at what real business that we’re in.” And, you’ll talk to somebody and you’ll find out that creatively they’re interested in this particular field because they want to do altruistic things like donate leftover food or something like that.
So, we’ll start to look at that as a business model and run it all the way down. Altruism, what can we do there as far as an execution. I donate [00:17:30] all the unused portions to the food bank. Great, what’s the execution? I get in my car and I drive there. And so, we start to look at these different elements and we try to create businesses based on creativity and I think that there is no problem that an entrepreneur faces, at least that I have in my life, that was unsolvable or insurmountable without creativity.
Juliet Aurora: I love that. I love that analogy because the pizza parlor everybody can relate to, no matter what industry you’re in, [00:18:00] pretty much everybody loves pizza. And so, you’re able to actually visualize all three steps, so I think that’s a great analogy. Thank you for sharing that.
Nir Bashan: Absolutely.
Steve Loates: That was great. It reminded me, in one of my previous lives, my previous entrepreneurial journeys, I owned a retail business and we sold musical [00:18:30] instruments and we had a music school and we gave music lessons, and I remember that there was a study done, I think it was one of the colleges in California, I think it was Stanford, but I’m not 100% sure, where they did a study on how children who were in the arts, whether it be music or [00:19:00] art, how they did overall in the school curriculum compared to students who were not exposed to art or music. And, there was quite a significant difference, that those kids who were exposed to music, learning a musical instrument at a young age, or even exposed to art at a young age that as they went through the rest of their [00:19:30] school years and education, they far outperformed those kids who were not exposed.
And yet, we seem like we’re doing this to ourselves because when we look at, okay, what programs are we going to cut from school, from college? It’s always music, art, so are we killing our own creativity by [00:20:00] taking it away from us at that time in our development where really we need to be more exposed to it and will benefit from it later on. Of course, we don’t know that at the time. So, in your opinion, do you think we’re actually really hurting ourselves, and I didn’t mean to get off on the topic here in talking about cutting school programs, but it really did resonate with me when you were explaining about the [00:20:30] creativity. What’s your opinion on that? Sorry to put you on the spot.
Nir Bashan: No, it’s a wonderful question, Steve. Part of the process of writing a book with McGraw Hill is an incredible, as you both know, rigorous attribution test where you can’t just write stuff in there that’s your opinion. You have to be backed up by a study or some research and stuff like [00:21:00] that. The portion of the book, one of them that I had the most trouble with, was really describing childhood creativity and what happens to us as we grow older and limit exposure to creativity. And, one of the things that I had found was exactly what you were talking about, was that students that are involved in the arts in some degree or another, whether it’s music or fine art or [00:21:30] dance or anything like that, they do extraordinarily better as they progress through school.
But, what we really have today, at least in the US, and I know you guys are up in Canada, but in the US we have a system where our public schools have been defunded for many, many years and we have a situation where teachers are moving away from a classroom being a creativity experience and into [00:22:00] it being an analytical experience. Most colleges are the same. I’ve gone through school. I have an undergrad and I have a graduate degree, and believe me, I was not taught how to be creative. I was taught how to analytically answer a question. I remember being in first grade, in second grade, a teacher asking, “Hey, what’s this?” And, she was looking for the right answer. She wasn’t looking for creativity to be generated and you see that repeating over and over and over again throughout school, then in college, and then in graduate school.
Also, you see it [00:22:30] in business school, so what I think is really an important takeaway is that, yes, the arts are incredibly important to children, but they’re such a small portion of what creativity really is. And, I think it’s a bad idea to pull music and dance and that sort of thing, but you can have so much creative value by allowing an answer to be maybe gray instead of black and white. How many times have you, [00:23:00] Steve and Juliet, been in a business? You guys are serial entrepreneurs, you know what I’m talking about. There’s gray everywhere, if they’re black and white, sometimes, but there’s gray everywhere and even in finance where you have to generate a number that has to be spot on, but the process and the way that you look at it can widely vary that number. You look at it when you put a proposal together for a potential client, you look at it when a contract comes in [00:23:30] and it’s got some contingency on it.
Again and again we see areas of gray and instead we’re taught to look at black and white, and I think that if we can educate children even in colleges and in graduate schools, PhD schools as well to embrace the gray, learn how to deal with the gray and experience things that aren’t black or white, I think we’d be a million [00:24:00] times better off as a society.
Juliet Aurora: I love that phrase and you actually either hashtag it or embrace the gray. I love that. I think that encompasses so much because you’re right, we are taught, especially in business it’s black and white. We talked a little bit about creativity in the entrepreneur, and usually, and I’m going to speak from experience, the challenge that I find is that even [00:24:30] if the entrepreneur can be creative and comes up with these ideas and these innovations, how do they get the buy-in from their team? So, how do you inspire creativity in your team to help raise your business as well? Any insights that you can provide on that?
Nir Bashan: I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful point, Juliet. Getting buy-in from your team is essential. I write about this in the book, and really how you do it is by your leadership style. If you’re [00:25:00] the kind of person that shows up, and I know that you’re not, but if you’re the kind of person that shows up, Juliet, and says, “This is what I’m doing and we’re doing it and we’re moving forward,” you’re not going to get a lot of buy-in. So, your leadership style is really important. In the book, I talk about empathy, and empathy is really one of the greatest unused, or underused leadership tools that is in our arsenal that we can all use starting now.
You’re listening to this podcast, you have an idea, [00:25:30] and you want to run with it, yet you have to convince other people, you got to get buy-in, so on and so forth. So, what I talk about in the book is how to use empathy to get people really behind something and there’s a bunch of ways to do it. You can talk about it, you can explore it together, you can use vulnerability, which is another trait that I talk about in crisis management, but it’s something that you can use in this case where you can say, “Hey, I don’t really have all the answers. I just think that this will work. [00:26:00] Help me fill in the blanks, help me connect the dots.”
If you show that maybe you’re a bit vulnerable and maybe you don’t have all of the answers as a leader, as the owner of the company, as the CEO, or any C-level executive, something amazing will happen and it’s the simplest things in life that can give you the most impact at work and when you combine that with creativity, you look at the problem and you go, “You know what, I don’t have all the solutions.” You bring in your team, you have discussions with [00:26:30] it, you show them various vulnerabilities, and various entry points to their own ideas. You then create a culture of celebration, of creativity, of excitement, and you move your organization away from one person who knows everything, into a group of people who know a small portion of the whole entity.
Juliet Aurora: Excellent, incredible advice. I like that statement, going to your team and [00:27:00] help me connect the dots because as business leaders we feel that we need to have all the answers and that’s a great reminder that we don’t need to have all the answers and in this case, shouldn’t even have all the answers.
Nir Bashan: Yes, there’s so much creative freedom that I would assume that a lot of your listeners are in pretty challenging times right now. I know I am. My business is going through hard times because [00:27:30] of everything that’s going on in the world, so I would assume that people listening and your audience is going through very similar challenging times and one of the best pieces of advice that I can offer is that you let it go a little bit because you don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to be the person who knows everything, you have to allow for creativity to work itself out of your system.
You, Juliet and Steve, have been pushing creativity [00:28:00] down your whole lives and just now it’s starting to reemerge and you guys are maybe having a few ideas about your own business while listening to me talk and those are incredibly powerful, earth-shattering, world-changing type feelings and that excitement and that freedom that you get from coming up with these ideas is what will be the answer for why you’re stuck now and where you need to go. You just got to allow it to happen. [00:28:30] We are doubtful of ourselves too often, we criticize ourselves way too harshly, we’re very afraid of failure when we should embrace it. Failure is one of the best things that can happen to anybody because out of failure comes a multitude of creative solutions that can come up.
But no, we want to be hard-headed, we want to go into a problem and solve it with our analytical tools as we’ve done always, but what you’ll find is one day, it might be tomorrow, it might [00:29:00] be today, it might be in 10 years, but one day those analytical solutions just ain’t going to work anymore and you’ve got to come up with something else and the good news is that something else is deep inside you. It’s been inside you since you were born, you just need to learn how to re-find it.
Steve Loates: Great answer. If you listen to many of today’s top experts on leadership today and so many of them talk about vulnerability [00:29:30] and the most effective leaders today are not afraid to be vulnerable because it makes them more real and the more real they are, the more buy-in they will get from their team because the team won’t feel like you’re pretending to be someone, that is who you actually are, and if I buy-in to who you are, then yes, I want to follow you. And so, [00:30:00] I think that vulnerability, it’s a great point.
Nir Bashan: You know what else, Steve? One of my favorite parts about this is that it’s free.
Steve Loates: For sure [crosstalk 00:30:14]-
Nir Bashan: It’s not a new piece of equipment you have to buy. I do this often where somebody will hear a few talking points and go, “You know what, we want this guy here. Help us with our business or whatnot.” And, there’s a tummy ache when I walk in there, oh no, we’re going to need to buy new [00:30:30] equipment. This is going to cost something, but everything that I talk about in the book and even today with you guys is essentially free. It costs nothing, and I just love that.
Juliet Aurora: It’s shifting your mindset, which yes, it’s free, it’s difficult, it’s probably not inexpensive because it is sometimes a difficult process and there’s a cost to that emotionally and mentally, but yes, from [00:31:00] a dollar perspective, absolutely. And, I guess the statement that resonated with me and Steve … you’re probably going to have to remind me of this statement many, many times over the next little while, is let it go because I’m horrible at that, at letting [crosstalk 00:31:15] and I think part of that is a trait in entrepreneurs that they need to control everything and you basically have said you’re not going to get that creativity if you try and control everything and that [00:31:30] you have to let it go.
Nir Bashan: Correct.
Juliet Aurora: And, that’s probably something that has held us back is my inability to let go, so we are going to have to remind myself of that over and over again.
Nir Bashan: It’s not just you, it’s everybody. As I’m speaking these very words I’m thinking the same thing. We want to be able to control things. Life is not a controllable thing, and so we start businesses because we feel like we can control that, but what ends up happening is they become [00:32:00] an analogy of life itself, but sometimes you just have to let go, and also you have to walk away sometimes too, Juliet, when things aren’t working. If that pizza ain’t selling, you just got to walk away. I understand that it’s momma’s recipe, I understand that it’s fantastic, I understand that in ’76 it sold like hotcakes, but it ain’t ’76 anymore. That was 40-some odd years ago now and you just got to let go and walk away [00:32:30] sometimes.
Juliet Aurora: Right.
Steve Loates: Well, and we’ve always believed that one of the keys to success is to make sure you exercise your know muscle, that there are lots of times that … and it’s difficult to say no whether it be to a new opportunity, a new product, a new service, whatever it might be, but quite often you are further ahead by saying no than [00:33:00] saying yes, and I did want to come back just touch on a minute. We talked about success and failure and we have a saying in our office, but certainly in our home that there is no such thing as failure. It is success and learnings.
Nir Bashan: I like it.
Steve Loates: And, because that’s all a failure is, you learn something from it every time.
Nir Bashan: [00:33:30] You bet, and I think this is an analytical mindset where we’ve done the numbers, we’ve looked at it objectively, we’ve engineered it as well as we can, but we’ve completely forgot one whole half of the human experience that deals with the emotional quotient, the emotional intelligence, the creative perspective, and we put it out to market or we get a customer to look at it whether it’s a product or service [00:34:00] and we’ve done all of our homework and it should be great, but sometimes it isn’t and sometimes why it isn’t is because of various reasons, but they’re incredible learning opportunities that come up with failure and I think that we need to fail a little bit more and learn a little bit more to your point.
Juliet Aurora: And, that drives into hashtag, embrace the gray. That’s a new hashtag, I love it.
Nir Bashan: I love it. You’re coming on as my social person, Juliet.
Juliet Aurora: [00:34:30] Perfect.
Steve Loates: We got to get that trending on Twitter.
Nir Bashan: That’s right.
Steve Loates: We’re getting into the last part of the show, and I did want to ask, the name of your book is The Creator Mindset, what do you mean by The Creator Mindset?
Nir Bashan: That’s a good one, Steve. I like it. It’s basically a mindset of creativity. It’s about shifting what we all know. Listen, [00:35:00] there’s millions of books out there on how to analytically run a business, millions, and one of the cool things about this particular title is this is the only book that I know of that teaches people how to be creative in business and the The Creator Mindset is really a mindset that you apply which is free, Juliet, yes, it’s costly in terms of self-development and self-change, which I probably shouldn’t say, but yes, and it’s a lot of work.
[00:35:30] I’ve never been such a good salesperson, but wait, there’s more. There’s a lot of work that it takes to meld the analytical and the creative together. It takes a lot of work. We’re not comfortable in those things, but sometimes doing what we’re not comfortable at is essential to the performance and the success of your business. I can give you guys thousands of examples and we could [00:36:00] talk until next week about businesses that have run from a very non-threatening position and have never grown, have never evolved, never worked their way through.
When we’re comfortable, we tend to create same old, same old results and in today’s world, that’s simply not good enough. We need to continually change, continually keep up with different events, and consumer habits, spending habits, so on and so forth, [00:36:30] and if we’re too comfortable we don’t grow with that. So, The Creator Mindset is really about shifting your mindset into something that may be a little bit more uncomfortable, but the more you do it, the easier it gets and the results you see are going to be extraordinary.
Steve Loates: Very good, that’s excellent. That brings me to one of my favorite parts of our show and that is where, again, I always date myself here, James Lipton’s [00:37:00] Actor’s Studio. For those of you who have never seen it, it was on TV for a long time. One of the things James Lipton always used to do with all of his guests was ask them about five questions at the end of the interview and it was always the same five questions. And so, I really loved that part of the show and I promised myself if I was ever fortunate enough to be in a position where I had a guest, [00:37:30] not on my TV show, but on my podcast, I was going to do the same thing. So, if you are ready, Nir, I would like us to begin with our questions?
Nir Bashan: Sounds good.
Steve Loates: Perfect. What one word best defines an entrepreneur?
Nir Bashan: Creative. Shocker, right?
Juliet Aurora: Yes.
Steve Loates: I didn’t see that one coming. [00:38:00] What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Nir Bashan: Finance.
Steve Loates: What profession would you not like to ever attempt?
Nir Bashan: That’s a good one. I would never want to be a commercial airline pilot, too much responsibility.
Steve Loates: What sound or noise do you love?
Nir Bashan: [00:38:30] Music.
Steve Loates: What book would you recommend for entrepreneurs beside your own?
Nir Bashan: Oh, that’s a good one. Just one?
Steve Loates: I’ll give you two.
Nir Bashan: Let’s see, I really like … I’m ready Amy Edmondson’s The Fearless Leader right now, a fantastic book. She’s an amazing woman [00:39:00] who leads a department over at Harvard in the Business School, so her book is incredible. Allison Schrager wrote a book called An Economist Walks into a Brothel, which is a really good finance book in terms of looking at numbers differently and she touches on creativity in there, which I think is incredibly helpful, but [00:39:30] that’s just the top of the reading list on the nightstand beside the bed. That’s just stuff that I’ve read probably in the last month.
Steve Loates: That’s great, a very interesting title for that last book. And, my last question, when your own entrepreneurial journey is completed, what do you hope your legacy is?
Nir Bashan: Wow, these are really … it’s a good question. I think [00:40:00] that I really want to help people understand a different perspective and look at the world as it can be and not as it is and if that’s something that I can leave behind, I think I’ve done a really good job.
Steve Loates: Great answer, thank you, and if any of our listeners or audience want to connect with you, what is the best way for them to do that? And, I’ll [00:40:30] make sure I spell the name for the audience, Nir Bashan, N-I-R, B-A-S-H-A-N. What’s the best way for them [crosstalk 00:40:41].
Nir Bashan: So, my website is my name, nirbashan.com, and you can click on there and get my phone number and my email and all that stuff is right on the website and the book’s website is thecreatormindset.com, no big surprise there. We are [00:41:00] in pre-sales right now and we’re trying to make one of the best seller lists, so if any of this sounds good to you, I sure would appreciate you looking and considering picking up a copy.
Steve Loates: Well, I can tell you we will be picking up a copy. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Nir Bashan: Great, thanks, guys.
Steve Loates: Do you have any final thoughts before we go to our conclusion here?
Nir Bashan: Thanks for having me on. I think you guys are [00:41:30] doing a wonderful job. This is going to be I think a very fruitful endeavor for you guys. The amount of time and just effort, research that you guys put into the show I think is incredible, so good job, you guys, and thank you so, so much for having me.
Steve Loates: You’re very welcome, thank you for joining us. One of the things, I am a noted quote nerd, [00:42:00] so we always finish off each episode with a quote and I was really torn this time and I’m not usually, but I had a couple, but I’ve decided I’m going to go with one from Brene Brown and it is, “There is no innovation and creativity without failure.”
Nir Bashan: It’s a good one.
Juliet Aurora: It tied in perfectly with the topic. Good job, Steve.
Steve Loates: Thank you, and so thank you [00:42:30] to our guest. We loved having you, it was even more interesting than I was anticipating it was going to be, so that was great. I really enjoyed it, thank you to my awesome co-host, but most importantly, thank you to you, our audience, for tuning in and giving us a listen. We really hope you found some value here. If you did, please subscribe. You can find us in all the usual places, iTunes, Spotify, Google, [00:43:00] we’re in all those places, or you can visit the website, smartmansmarterwoman.com. So, thank you, until next time, take good care of yourself and those you love, bye for now.
Song by Adam Vitovsky / CC BY 3.0
