Everyone thinks they are creative; very few people actually are. They could be, but they are frightened that their creations will be spurned, mocked or laughed at, and they cannot face failure. We all need to succeed. Those who demand unremitting total success end up doing very little. The risk-averse remain solvent but poor.

If we can get over the fear of failure we can think creatively. Not easy, but possible for anyone, it demands disciplines that are difficult to measure. The four Nobel Prize winners who discovered penicillin did not have financial accounts or Key Performance Indicators. They observed the underground miners rubbing fungal growths from the mine shafts onto their wounds which then amazingly healed. Of the seven rules for being creative observation, as in this example, is the first.

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To pay a man for driving a nail into two planks of wood you measure the worth of the job, monitor the time and materials taken and assess whether it is done well or badly. You may negotiate the price but “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”

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One of the most creative people I knew in the advertising agencies I ran was a man who only produced excellent work when he was wearing corduroy trousers. I have no idea why this strange habit released the muse in him but it did. Another, perhaps more predictably, wrote his best copy after a generous helping of vodka. Alcohol has always been a stimulant to creativity, unwinding the inhibitions from which all of us suffer to some extent.

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