Creativity helps us figure out what is possible from the unknown while Data helps us inform what has happened and what could happen based on the past. No new idea has been proven to be valid and correct in advance.

Intentionally making it a principle to immerse oneself, around people, around ideas, around diversity of experiences and thought has and will continue to pay dividends for me personally, as a husband, dad, brother and friend, and professionally, as a Media/Brand expert. Especially since I grew up in the first half of my career thinking data is the key to making breakthroughs. I realize it’s only half (or even less) of the equation two years ago as I dived deeper into Media and binged listened to podcasts like Sway and Recode. 

Here’s a comment made by Bob Iger (Disney ex-CEO) during an interview with Kara Swisher that resonated with me. Click here for the Full Interview

“And having spent almost 50 years on the creative side of our business, it became more and more clear to me that while data was already playing a very important role, that it should not be used to determine what stories are told. If we had tried to mine all the data that we had at the time to determine whether we should make a superhero movie that was essentially about an Afrofuturistic world with a Black cast, the data probably would have said, don’t do that.

And “Black Panther” never would have been made. There are a number of examples of that, where someone’s instinct or a group of people’s instinct on whether a story is worthy of being told and is in the hands of people who will tell it really well— I don’t think a machine or data, no matter how much technology enables, essentially, input of massive amounts of information to be processed— I don’t think you get the right answers to that.”

#foreverlearning