How to beat Conor McGregor Pt. 1 (Creative Process Workbox Step 1)
By: Cannon Hamaker
Tags: Creative, Business Strategy, Business Development, Creative Process, Creativity

How to beat Conor McGregor

The Notorious Conor McGregor is staring you in the face.

You are about to get a beating.

Unless?

What if there is a way to win?

You take a step back, and you realize, this isn’t a cage match.

You take another step back.

There’s a door behind and to the right. It’s open and you can smell the sweet air of freedom.

You take another step back and realize that there is nothing between you and that door.

There is nobody stopping you from just running like hell.

You have options.

Beating Conor is easy.

You just have to have enough space between you to define what a win is.

Create Space is the first step of the creative workbox, because it’s in this space that we define, not the solution, but the space around ourselves and the space around the problem. It is where we define the box.

It’s where we define what a win looks like, what realm the possibilities can live in.

People who don’t define the space around the problem invariably get stuck in step 2. They get stuck playing in the sandbox, because they don’t know what the outside of the sandbox looks like. They don’t have a definition of success, or win, or achieve.

Or, worse, they start with a preconceived notion of what success is. They invariably spend precious time and resources trying to solve a problem that won’t get them where they want to go, or will make things even worse.

Preconceived ideas of what the problem is, what a win is, what a solution is, sometimes work because there is such a thing as luck. They sometimes work because they achieve good, or good enough. If good enough is your goal, I’m not going to stop you. I create good enough solutions every day. Minor problems often mean minor solutions, we make patches and make do.

What happens though is that we end up with patchwork solutions without the structural integrity to hold up when the real storms threaten our solutions. Then it all unravels.

Things with real meaning, things that matter to you, your family, your organization, those things can’t be built of a patchwork. So they ask us for higher thinking, and that requires creating space.

Creating space means thinking about the mental, emotional, logical space in all 4 applicable dimensions. It asks us to define the edges, not just the distance. We literally create an imagined or real space in which our problems can live and start to define themselves. Then we expand or contract the space till we have a workable area in which to start defining solutions.

Einstein did this famously with his thought experiments. As he tried to imagine how light would behave inside his imaginary space, he began to see light define itself, it’s abilities and nature. He wasn’t looking for a way to travel at light speed, he was looking for the boundaries of light itself, which opened up further to the relationship between energy and matter. By being willing to spend time creating space, he was able to discover a mathematical formula which has changed the world.

Similarly, we can define our own space for creative problem solving with the following 4 dimensions:

The 4 Dimensional Problem Space

Distance: How far we get from the problem in order to understand the whole of it. Breadth: How many different skill sets we need access to in order to understand the problem. Depth: The depth of knowledge within a skillset we need access to, in order to understand the problem Time: the time frame in which the problem either needs a solution, or needs to be defined well enough to understand it.

Next time we’ll use this framework to figure out why, how, where, and when to beat Conor.

Till then, remember, you are the masterpiece, go create a space in which to make that masterpiece.