Surround Yourself with Diversity & Your Creative Potential will Accelerate

Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career.

Chapter 3: Cultivating Relationships

Jocelyn K. Glei

In this chapter of “Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career,” I read about how to build collaborative alliances and networks that will enrich my work.  “Put simply, opportunities flow through people.  If you want a job, what you need is someone to hire you.  If you want capital to start a business, what you need is an investor.  If you want to sell a product, what you need is a customer.  At every stage in our careers, whatever level of opportunity or growth we seek, we depend on relationships to drive us forward” (Glei 129).

“To achieve all that we’re capable of, we must enlist a group of allies to accompany us on our journey, empower our coworkers and clients to give us honest feedback, build collaborative teams with an eye toward fresh perspectives, and tend to our network of acquaintances with generosity and authenticity” (129).  Many creative people see their work as primarily an individual endeavor, but this chapter taught me that even though in the creative realm usually the best work often reflects a strong individual vision rather than a collective one, that if this approach is followed too closely, then we can miss out on valuable help that can advance our work.

The key takeaways that I got from this chapter were tips on how to work with people when things are going wrong, as they inevitably will, and how to manage it because “everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” a quote by Carl Jung.  Don’t go it alone by seeking out people who you can trust and ask for help, and who will hold you accountable, create social contracts by addressing “what could go wrong in a creative relationship up front” so then “when a conflict does arise, you’ve created a comfortable space for talking about it,” trust in generosity, ask and you shall receive, know that cross-pollination begets creativity and “try to assemble creative teams that include both veteran collaborators and newbies” because diversity accelerates your creative potential, and act like a master builder, not a master mind (181).  One point that I really liked was to “focus on how you can help others, and lasting connections will come.  The true spirit of networking should be generosity, not obligation” (181).

“In a world of collaborative creation, whom we surround ourselves with dictates how much we can achieve” (129).