How To Build Your Creative Problem Solving Faculties

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The time of writing! (This is becoming a habit now ;P)

Table of Contents

Some Compliments

So – I was given two compliments this weekend that has inspired this blog post which are as follows:

There’s a thread between the two –

And I wanted to shed some light upon it.

‘Thinking outside of the box’ and ‘having a very wide perspective’ are the two.

Some of the success that Pearl Lemon has had, and hopefully will continue to have is because of the way I look at the world.

Fundamentally, I think this comes from aggressive experiential learning in combination with some light coaching around it, and continuous theoretical learning.

4 Hours Of Theoretical Learning A Week

Consistently doing this for 5-10 hours a week (as I have since May 2020) is, I believe changing the fundamental wiring in my brain.

What do I specifically mean?

Well as you have may have read from a previous blog – I tend to listen to Audible for at least 20 minutes a day – pretty much without fail.

This equates to 10 hours of reading a month. When I do this I’ll listen at 2.10x speed – so there’ll be 20 hours of new information.

All of the content I listen to is on a new subject, and all non-fiction i.e it’s all directly educational in nature, and I won’t just ‘listen’ – I’ll study it:

My 6 Coaches

I do this in combination with having a:

Sales Consultant (Max Newton from Business Developer)
Running Coach (Nick from the Running School)
SEO Strategy Coach (Craig Campbell of Craig Campbell)
Technical SEO Consultant (Paul Lovell of Always Evolving SEO)
Writing Coach (Chris Sowers of Writing Coaching)
Accountability Coach (Valentina Kibedi of VK Coaching)

I work with all of the people above weekly.

My Approach To Experiential Learning

I want to show you some of the emails I’ve sent out in the last 24 hours – I think it’ll give a really clear picture of the approach I take to ‘having an idea’ and then deciding ‘fuck it let’s just try it’:

We’ve totally transformed our link building process since I’ve started reading up on blogs here and there – and then trying to implement the things that I’ve read.

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Where I struggle though – is giving detailed explanations of my thought process and how all of this works.

Giving practical demonstrations of it – as shown above – is hopefully more insightful than the theory alone.

Documenting the journey

This is something I’m doing through the act of writing this journal.

As these do go up onto the Deepak Shukla blog there’s going to be a hell of a lot of repetition with these parts that you read – but it’s all part of the journey I presume.

Never before have I had 6-coaches working with me on different aspects of my character alongside an agency that’s growing really quickly.

Using this blog is a safe place for me to document and cement the new things I’m learning as I move forward.

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Mark Cuban talks about how most businesses don’t have a money problem – they have a lack of IQ at the top of their organization.

My business is definitely tiny, so it’s probably a poor comparison – but I want to use this as a base to return to the comments of Heather and Federica about my creative approach to problem-solving.

So anytime, I come up with something new that could benefit the business – this is my next step:

I’ll record a training video once I think I’ve figured out a new process – and I’ll send the video recording across to the team

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Importantly – I’ll send it within 5 minutes of figuring it out.

I’ve also started to take this a step further and take the team on the journey with me WHILST I’m trying to figure something new out (to ensure it gets documented because otherwise, I might not do it later)

And I do this almost every day right now:

5 of the last 8 videos I’ve sent across via Loom have all been short training videos to help push the ability of my team to execute new ideas further forward.

In this way, I don’t think I’ve ever actually done any 1-on-1 training on a call in the last several months with any of my team.

All of the training happens via video.

So when I think of the comments Heather and Federica make about the approach – it’s also because of the speed at which knowledge transfer happens.

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I think creative stimulus (coming from books, googling, and the desire to learn) is in part an intrinsic force that generates ideation.

However, it is nothing without tacking this to all of the elements above.

The way one is able to think outside of the box and to find creative solutions to problems that currently exist within your business – or rather to find new opportunities…

Is by employing a continuous and wide range of resources to assist in your continued professional development.

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This formula I described above – can be ripped off.

And to return to Mark Cuban’s comment about most businesses lacking enough IQ at the top of their organization (he’s totally right) – one way you can (partially) work around this is by this process of knowledge transfer.

The videos I make a PREDOMINANTLY (i.e 90%+ less than 10 minutes).

Everyone in the team is encouraged to watch them at 1.5x speed or above so it makes it even quicker to consume.

And by communicating my ideas across various looms and short messages – the volume of new ideas Heather and Harry have been able to pick up is vast.

Since we’ve started implementing these new strategies 8-weeks ago – this is how many new links we’ve built:

154 new do-follow links have been identified – and much of this has been driven by Heather, Harry, and Tenny who’d never built a link in their life before coming to Pearl Lemon.

Furthermore, I’ve not done any f2f training with them (bar one sessions with Heather)

Everything has been video-based

In this way then – you can quite quickly raise the functional standards of your team by providing them with direct and actionable training.

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So to summarise:

Study new information on a weekly basis. Don’t READ/LISTEN superficially – STUDY
Hire one coach at least – to help push you in the direction of your success
Engage in experiential learning – just continually try new sh*t out and see where the hell it can take you
Share your learnings whether through blogs or video training to cement it in your own mind and to up the level of your team..

And that’s it.

It’ll work 🙂

Oh btw – my finish time.