T d jakes, The Creative Power of Stimulation

The Creative Power of Stimulation

What if, I ask Jakes, you don’t know what you’d run out of bed to do? What if you can’t seem to figure out what makes your heart beat the loudest?

To hear our instinct, he says, we usually have to break out of our routines. We’ve got to spend time around other people who are making things happen. “We were designed like plants to cross-pollinate,” he told Oprah. “We cannot be fruitful by ourselves.”

We tend to sink into our own little worlds, keeping to the people we know, places we like and ideas we’re comfortable with hearing.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be where you’ve always been,” he says, leaning forward. “People become creatures of habit so easily. We get up, we go to work, we come home, we shop at the same grocery store, we drive on the same street. Get out of the box and see what else is out there that would impassion you and inspire you. Stop hanging with the same people. Get in another circle. Risk feeling awkward. Get out of your comfort zone. Get in a room full of people where you don’t know what is appropriate to say. If you always walk with people who look like you and dress like you and think like you and vote like you, you’re going to die of boredom. All of creation exists through cross-pollination, and that’s when different things come together to be fruitful.”

We need each other—that’s Jakes’ message. We need each other to stimulate creativity, stay hopeful and keep moving toward our goals. Most important, we need to tap into the energy and creativity of others in order to tap into our own.

I  guarantee you—you cannot show me anybody who’s successful at doing anything in business who got there by themselves.

“My mother said, ‘If you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you always know he didn’t get there by himself,’ ” Jakes says. “I  guarantee you—you cannot show me anybody who’s successful at doing anything in business who got there by themselves. If they grow coffee beans, they need somebody to grind them; they need somebody to sell them; they need somebody to serve the coffee.” All of those relationships are necessary for one person to succeed.

In Instinct, Jakes tells the story of how Nike started with two guys who loved to run and who each had $500. “They looked at a waffle iron and a pair of tennis shoes and said if I take the waffle iron and put it on the tennis shoe, I think it would make the tennis shoe faster,” he says. “That and $1,000 started Nike.”

He suggests we find somebody who is doing what we want to do—but on a higher level. Otherwise, he warns, we’ll always be surrounded by people who subtract from us rather than people who add to our vision. “Find somebody who’s crazy with you,” he says. “Find somebody else who did something ridiculous and hang around them. Find somebody who’s out of your element. Find some way to be around and serve them. Wash their car, make coffee—anything you can to be around somebody who’s doing what you do on the next level or 10 levels above you.

“If you can’t get next to them,read what they wrote. Because you know reading what people write not only gives you the beauty of language, it tells you how they think. And the greatest gift anybody can give you is how they think. It’s one thing for me to hand you a glass of Kool-Aid, and it’s another thing to let you see how I made it.”