Joy Is the Engine of Growth: 43 Rules for Creatives

Photo via Dmitry Kichenko on Flickr.
Photo via Dmitry Kichenko on Flickr.

In 1998, designer Bruce Mawrote a manifesto that changed design and storytelling as we know it. “The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth” is a list of 43 rules that apply to anyone doing creative work. The document now serves as the driving tenets for Massive Change Network, a strategic business consultancy co-founded by Mau with Bisi Williams.

Below is an excerpt — you can find the entire thing here.

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You
produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the
willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good.
Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as
you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If
process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to
be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments,
iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure
every day.

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers
as part of the process. Ask different questions.

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Whitney Ricketts is CreativeLive's Senior Communications Manager. Email her at whitney [dot] ricketts [at] creativelive [dot] com.