What It Takes to Be Creative in an AI-First World

Key Takeaways:

How to treat creativity as a skill you can build, not a trait you’re born with.

Practical methods for getting unstuck when creative work stalls.

How to create a simple, repeatable systems that lead to more consistent creative results.

A system for capturing and organizing ideas before you actually need them.

How to use AI as a creative partner without losing your brand’s original voice.

Creativity is often described as something you either have or do not have. Some people are “the creative ones”, while everyone else is expected to be practical, analytical, operational, or focused on getting the work done.

That is not how it works.

Creativity is a skill. Like any valuable skill, it improves through practice, stronger inputs, attention, and a willingness to keep working even when inspiration is nowhere to be found.

For retailers, luxury brands, growing companies, and service businesses, that matters. Customers have more choices and more content competing for their attention than ever. Being good at what you do is essential, but it does not automatically make you memorable.

Creative thinking enables a retailer to transform a product into a story. It allows a luxury business to create an experience rather than just a transaction. It helps service businesses present their expertise more clearly, warmly, and effectively. Additionally, it helps any growing company articulate its unique qualities without resorting to empty claims.

And today, the bar is higher. AI can help almost anyone produce a usable first draft, a list of ideas, or a polished-looking piece of content. That is helpful, but it means that simply producing more is no longer enough.

The businesses that stand out will be those with a genuine point of view.

Step Away to Move Forward

One of the most important parts of creative work is also one of the easiest to ignore: stepping away from it.

When I’m stuck, my instinct is to push harder, especially when I need to deliver something on a deadline. I open more tabs, review or research more ideas or information. I’ll try writing another draft or playing around with my presentation’s design. I have this hope that the Hollywood-style “a-ha” moment will come to me.

Sometimes persistence is exactly what you need. But constant effort can also narrow thinking. You begin to recycle the same language, chase the safest option, or mistake activity for progress.

Creative thinking needs focus, but it also needs distance.

Simon Sinek often shares a version of the “two lumberjacks” parable. Both men begin cutting wood at the same time and finish at the same time. One works straight through the day, while the other disappears for an hour. Yet the one who takes the break cuts more wood. When asked how, he explains that he uses the time to sharpen his ax.

The lesson is not that breaks are an excuse to avoid work. It is that renewal, preparation, and perspective are part of the work. The story reminds me that creativity, like problem-solving, requires incubation, or what I say to my team: I need time to let that idea percolate. In my head, visions of an old coffee pot with the bubbles in the glass top come to mind.

For a business owner, marketer, retailer, or service professional, sharpening your creative ax may mean:

• Walking through a business in a completely different category and paying attention to how you are greeted, how the space is organized, and what you are asked. Reflective purposeful shopping helps inspire ideas.
• Spending 15 minutes at your design counter or welcome area as a customer would, without your phone, taking in the details you forgot about or never noticed.
• Taking a walk, picking up the phone and calling a friend or fellow business owner to chat about what you’re grateful for right now. Gratitude reflection has a way of opening up your mind and helping you let go.

There is plenty of research that tells us this; we often forget it. The Harvard Business Review suggests that scheduling breaks or switching tasks can help people find more insightful answers to the problems they are trying to solve.

This is also true when it comes to helping you find creative or innovative approaches for your business. When you step away, your mind has room to make connections it may not make while you are staring at the same document, screen, spreadsheet, or design.

Here’s an example I recently gave to a client: as a custom designer, you need to be like a wine sommelier visiting a table; ask your client about tastes, preferences, and the budget for this moment of enjoyment. I made this comparison because I have recently been learning more about wine in my personal life. I suggested they consider writing this as an article since they’re based just south of Napa Valley.

When you get out and look at things or experience other parts of life, you can find correlations that will help you be creative and differentiate yourself and your business.

To do that, you need to act like a kid and ask lots of questions. Why does this business feel welcoming or memorable? Why does it make the customer feel confident, understood, or excited?

Curiosity will lead to stronger ideas and help bring up new creative approaches.

Treat Creativity Like a Practice

Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit, which I read some years ago, makes the point that creativity is not a mysterious gift reserved for a lucky few. It is built through discipline, preparation, routine, observation, and effort. As the book’s description puts it, creativity is “the product of preparation and effort”, not a lightning bolt that appears only when you are in the right mood (again, another Hollywood stereotype).

This is an important concept we all need to understand and teach our teams.

If good work happens only when someone feels inspired, has extra time, or suddenly has the perfect idea, the creative process will always feel inconsistent. Better ideas need a system behind them.

One of Tharp’s useful concepts is the value of ritual: a repeatable way to begin. The ritual does not need to be elaborate. It simply gives you a reliable path into the work.

For example, before creating a new marketing campaign, a team might start by reviewing:

• Customer questions, sales conversations, reviews, and email replies
• Product stories, seasonal opportunities, and recent business results
• A few examples of interesting work from outside the industry

That is a much stronger starting point than a blank document and vague instructions like, “We need a new campaign for our holiday season.”

Creative work needs some place to start, and that begins with raw materials. The more unique and organic that material is, the less likely the finished work will sound generic.

For a retailer, raw material may include the story behind a product, a recurring customer question, a staff member’s expertise, an event, a seasonal milestone, or a detail observed on the sales floor.

For a service business, it may be a misconception clients frequently have, a pattern you see in the work, a behind-the-scenes process, or a story that explains why your approach gets better results.

Start with what is real. That is where original work usually begins.

Build Better Inputs

Good ideas are easy to lose.

They show up while driving, shopping, traveling, watching a movie, talking with a customer, reading an article, or noticing an unexpected detail in a store or restaurant. Then another task interrupts, and the idea is gone.

Create a simple system to capture what you notice in the moment.

If you know me, you know I use voice notes on Slack, scribbles on my reMarkable, and screenshots or web page bookmarks with a note. You have to find what works for you, but the goal is to build the habit. When something catches your attention, save it before deciding whether it is worth using.

Ideas you might collect could include a phrase a customer used, a different product display, a headline that made you laugh, an unusual greeting, or a color combination you’ve never noticed before.

Not every note will become a great idea. That’s ok. What these notes become is a place to turn to when you’re feeling stuck. A note you capture today may become the beginning of an email, promotion, event, video, or website update months from now.

Sometimes creativity isn’t about coming up with a completely new idea, but rather about linking two things you recently observed at different times.

That is often what creativity looks like in practice.

Give Imperfect Ideas a Chance

I love the movie Under the Tuscan Sun. At the beginning of the movie, a young writer describes having such intense writer’s block that he is ready to leave his writing class. He thinks all his ideas are terrible. His teacher tells him, “Terrible ideas are like playground scapegoats. Given the right encouragement, they grow up to be geniuses.” She tells him to choose one and work on it.

Take that advice. The first version of a campaign, event concept, or business idea may be awkward, impractical, or incomplete. But dismissing it immediately may mean missing the better idea hiding inside it.

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant has noted that people who generate original ideas often produce more failures, too, because they create and test more possibilities. The goal is not random activity. It is allowing enough exploration to move beyond the obvious first answer.

The first idea may be safe. The second may be predictable. The third may not fit. But the fourth or fifth may reveal a direction worth developing. This ties back to the need to develop a creative habit.

Create a process in your workflow that allows time for rough drafts and half-formed ideas. Then apply judgment, strategy, and editing.

Leveraging AI as Creative Support

AI can be useful in a creative process. It can help organize research, suggest alternate headlines, identify clichés, turn one idea into several formats, or challenge your own assumptions.

But it should not become the sole source of ideas. One downside of AI is that it produces similar ideas for many businesses, especially when prompts are generic.

AI can generate options based on patterns. Your best work will come from what is specific to you: what you observe, what customers tell you, what your team knows, what your business has experienced, and what you notice in the world around you.

Use AI as a bounce partner. Give it a real idea or customer insight, then ask:

• What assumptions are we making?
• What question have we failed to answer?
• How could we make this more specific to our brand?

Note: This 👆 is generic prompting, but you get the idea.

That is a better use of the tool than asking it to create your entire point of view. That’s when things start to look like everyone else’s and lose the human creativity we’re trying to build in.

AI can raise the baseline. It can make it easier to move from a blank page to a working draft.

But your creative approach is what is needed to raise the bar.