From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
At WeWork, we believe creators are anyone that's pursuing their passions and contributing to a mission. You may be an artist who is working on an innovative new project, a freelance software engineer providing client services or a director of HR at a Fortune 500 company that's trying to build a dynamic work environment for employees – regardless of your company size, title or function, you are working towards creating meaning, intention and purpose within your life.
I want you to not deny your shadow, your darkest impulses, but to find ways to use them and turn them into something productive. We ought to take that ambition, those aggressive impulses, and channel them into our work, into great causes, into justice.
I believe many of our new generation of entrepreneurs put too much significance on money, and not enough on ideas. If you have a great idea, and the skills to execute that idea, the money will come.
Being creative is about being a collective. It's not something unique. That's why we can nurture each other's creativity.
I've always been self-taught, sort of like the Grandma Moses of acting. If I'd gone to drama school, I would probably have had a very different career- perhaps not as much fun in some ways.
Cooking is about precision, but it's also about understanding the science behind why ingredients behave the way they do. You can't innovate without understanding the fundamentals.
Curiosity is the engine of achievement. It's what drives us to ask the questions that lead to breakthrough moments, whether in science, storytelling, or understanding human nature.
The greatest film-makers have an ability to work beyond the genre. Kubrick, Scorsese and even the great Ford who made Westerns, but transcended them. There's something about the vision of these film-makers that can use the supporting framework of a genre but create something which appeals to a wider story and audience. That's why they are the great masters.
I'm always searching for that black-swan, what is that project, or who is that artist that feels specials, and feels counter-culture. Who is that artist that feels interesting and has a bold, unapologetic point of view? That's what pulls me in- and you know what, if you find that and put the right strategy around it? You can disrupt culture.
My mind just never stopped thinking about what we could be doing next.
In the 1960s, NASA commissioned a study to identify creative geniuses for hiring, and found that 2% of the adults they tested fit the bill. A few years later, someone thought to give the same test to four- and five-year-olds—and 98% of them qualified as creative geniuses. The researchers blamed the school system.
We were poor, had no branding, and had no money- the only way we could get people into store was to put everything on rollers, and move it to the side, so we could have yoga classes in the middle of the store- a lot of inventions come from the mother of necessity!