Recently I had the privilege of delivering my third commencement speech. I love graduation ceremonies and what they symbolize: achievement, overcoming adversity, reaching the next level.

Addressing thousands of graduates is a daunting task. With only a few minutes to impart some lasting wisdom, what message would you deliver? I decided to share the 11 principles that have guided me since I wore that graduation robe many moons ago.

In preparing my remarks, I realized that these nuggets didn’t just apply to freshly minted grads; they apply to us all. These are the principles I live by and the philosophies that have enabled my own success. Here’s my advice for graduates, dropouts, young guns, and seniors alike:

1. Put Passion First – People will constantly tell you what you “should” do. Instead of doing what others expect, follow your dreams and your heart. You’ll be much happier, and you’ll make the world a better place too.

2. Build Your Creativity Muscle – This will be your most important skill, and it will allow you to thrive and win. Develop your creativity early and often – it will pay off big-time.

3. Don’t Stumble Over Something Behind You – Regret is the worst human emotion, since you can’t do a thing about the past. You’ll make lots of mistakes, which are nothing more than the portals of discovery. Fail fast, learn, and move on.

4. Leave it Better than You Found it – Every interaction, meeting, project, game, and relationship leaves you with a choice. You can add value or remove it. Do the right thing instead of the easy thing. You’ll be glad you did.

5. Reject Limits – Break free from limits that others try to impose on you. Your ideas, creativity and potential are nearly limitless. Reach for the edges.

6. “Do or Do Not, There is No Try” – This is a quote from Star Wars’ Yoda. Simply put, commit to your dreams and do whatever it takes to reach them.

7. Playing it Safe is Irresponsibly Dangerous - The history books never talk about people that lived small. Those that take risks, shatter complacency, and create their own future are the ones that make the biggest difference. Make your own mark, and never let fear hold you back from your true potential.

8. Embrace Change – The world will continue to change at breathtaking speeds. Those that get locked into one way of thinking get passed by. Standing still is the beginning of the end, so always stay ahead of the curve.

9. Be Appreciative and Humble – Einstein once wrote, “You can live each day as if everything is a miracle, or as if nothing is.” True ‘dat!

10. Be a Lifelong Learner – Continuously sharpen your mind and devour knowledge. Learning constantly will enable success in every area of your life.

11. Have fun! – Life is meant to be savored. Enjoy every sip, sound, and bite.
We all face many challenges, which is why a few guiding principles can serve as a helpful North Star. Play you biggest game and seize the enormous opportunity that’s waiting for you.

No tassel or funny hat required.

The ultra-premium and highly-coveted high heel designer Christian Louboutin has been racing the hearts of fashionistas for over 20 years. One of the most sought-after and expensive shoes in the world, they are a symbol of design, beauty, and luxury.

They are also incredibly distinctive.

The sole of every single Louboutin shoe is painted bright red. Pantone 187C to be exact. Every boot, pump, stiletto, and mid-height is adorned with this brilliant red color. While high-fashion designers routinely copy each other’s ideas, Louboutins have captured the hearts (and wallets) of the luxe crowd around the world because they are unique. Special. Different. Remarkable.

At up to $1800 a pair, I’m sure the quality is good and the assembly is professional. But that’s not what women buy… women buy that alluring red sole. That’s what Louboutin is known for. It’s what makes his shoes distinctive.

Volvo is known for safety. Wal-Mart is known for everyday low prices. BB King is known for making the blues pour directly from his soul into his guitar. Now I’m sure Volvo also offers great performance and BB King can play Country Western if he really wants to. But the most powerful brands in the world – both businesses and personal brands – stand for one thing: They own their category. They are truly distinctive.

What’s the one thing your company stands for? If you stand for great service, low prices, fantastic quality, speedy delivery, stylish design and being environmentally friendly… you actually stand for nothing. You customers, team, and partners won’t understand your true value proposition. By trying to be all things to everyone, you’ll end up lacking definition and delighting no one.

In today’s cutthroat world, your personal brand needs distinction too. Steven Colbert is hilarious and compelling because he is distinctive. His character mocks the droves of blowhard pundits, and we all love him for doing it relentlessly. For the last seven seasons, he stays true to his single, distinctive, authentic character, which is why he’s irresistible.

Too often, power brands reach too far and end up diluting their message rather than bolstering it. They launch products or services into categories that undermine their distinction, and end up jumping the shark rather than driving real results.

In a time when we all want to stand for so many things, choosing your single point of distinction can be more difficult than solving quadratic equations. But doing the hard work of simplifying your message into its most powerful core will end up driving incredible results. You’ll blast through the noise, while your competitors are tripping over their 47 “unique” value propositions.

Whether it’s for yourself or your organization, cut away the waste and narrow your pitch to a single sentence. Think of yourself as a sculptor chiseling away at the excess rock to reveal your masterpiece underneath. The clearer you can make your single point of distinction, the closer you’ll get to seizing your full potential. And that’ll really get your competition seeing red. Pantone 187C to be exact.

Fact: Creativity has become the most needed skill in business. It’s gone from a nice-to-have to becoming mission-critical.

Fact: Creativity is a learned behavior. All humans have enormous creative potential.

Fact: Most of us don’t feel all that creative. Most of us have radically underdeveloped creativity skills and we hold back our most innovative ideas due to fear and socialization.

Why don’t more of us unleash our true creative potential? Why don’t we let our imagination soar with reckless abandon? Why do we restrict our sense of wonder and possibility? Songwriter Harry Chapin answers these questions far better than I can with the lyrics to his song:

Flowers Are Red, by Harry Chapin

The little boy went first day of school
He got some crayons and started to draw
He put colors all over the paper
For colors was what he saw
And the teacher said.. What you doin’ young man

Flowers are red, green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen.
—

It happens thousands of times a day, and not just to kids. When will we stop shaming each other into following straight lines? When will we realize it is our responsibly to encourage divergent thinking? When will we teach each other that if you follow the rules, think there’s only one “right” answer, and avoid mistakes at all costs, we’re simply resigning ourselves to mediocrity?

Its time to unshackle our imagination and let our creativity come out to play. What color are your flowers?

I was recently helping my 13-year-old son Noah with his math homework. Long division. By hand. Ewwww. Looking at his pained expression, I realized how pointless and outdated this exercise was and how our schools are teaching kids the wrong things.

I’ve been a business leader for the last 20 years, and I have never used long division in my career. Not once. Thanks to technology, there are readily available tools that compute faster and more accurately than any human. I also don’t live in a mud hut, ride a horse to work, nor communicate via telegram. So why does education focus on outdated concepts and techniques when there are so many more important things to learn?

The world has changed dramatically over the last few years, and a new set of critical skills has emerged as the currency for success: creativity, original thought, and imagination. These are the only functions that can’t be outsourced. In today’s ultra-competitive, incredibly complex environment, creative problem-solving trumps rote memorization. Fresh ideas beat rigid processes.

So why do we teach the exact opposite? We’re taught to follow-the-rules, guess-what-the-teacher-knows, be obedient, avoid risks, do what we’re told, and most importantly… don’t make mistakes! Yet this type of linear and fear-based thinking is the biggest inhibitor for creativity. The biggest inhibitor for success… in both business and life.

Nurturing creativity is job #1 for leaders of any organization, from big businesses to non-profits to families. We can’t prepare students for the challenges of tomorrow by teaching the skills of yesterday. Instead of cutting “soft” programs like art, music, and drama (courses that develop right-brain, abstract thinking) we must recognize these skills as critically important. More important that standardized tests and flash-card memorization.

Most of us teach others in some capacity – as parents, leaders, colleagues, spouses, and even as customers. You will make a greater impact by encouraging creativity and imagination instead teaching how to follow procedures. Our organizations, companies, and families can benefit greatly by exploring new ideas instead of favoring rigid obedience.

This week, think like an art teacher instead of a math teacher. Encourage others to look at their situation as a big, blank canvas with limitless possibilities for creative expression. Let go of those rules-driven norms, shun the status quo, and have those around you – from kids to co-workers – paint instead of compute.

Sir Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin Group, announced this week that the first Spaceport (an airport for recreational space travel) will be built in New Mexico to support his newest business effort, Virgin Galactic. As he’s done in the past with music and air travel, Branson is pioneering new ground. And he’s always been fueled by a powerful emotion: the desire to put a thumb in the eye of the complacent incumbents. The need to “stick it to the man.”

Great ideas have been fueled by this same visceral desire for centuries. Columbus wanted to prove that the King was wrong. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to show the good-looking jocks at Harvard that he could beat them at getting girls by using his creativity to launch Facebook. Steve Jobs felt that intense fire so much that he made Apple TV commercials that mocked his rival Bill Gates.

So let’s put that passion to work for you with a fun exercise to spark creative ideas. The name? You guessed it… Stick it to the man!

We’ve all felt kicked around at some point in our lives. Perhaps it was the school bully, or an overbearing boss, or the seemingly unbeatable competition. Here’s your chance to get back. In this exercise, it is your job to be irreverent. To pick a fight. To shake things up.

To begin, think about a creative challenge and what you could do to really piss people off. Start with your boss. What ideas would send her into cardiac arrest? Next, move on to your competition. Think of all the things you could do to ruin their day. To pour salt in their wounds. To send them off the deep end.

Now that you are having fun, don’t stop there. What would create environmental outrage? What would engender a political explosion? Can you think of anything so obnoxious and racy that a riot may ensue? Don’t hold back. Here’s the one time where you goal is to be politically incorrect.

This type of thinking forces you way outside your normal thought process, and will help you generate wild creative sparks. Once you have a nice list of offensive ideas, scaling them back to something palatable will be easy. The hard part was accomplished in the midst of your mischievous fun – breaking old thought patterns and letting your creative abilities shine.

So go ahead ….throw stones, kick sand in their faces, and let your creativity soar to new heights in the process.

Imagine you had the challenge of inventing a better mousetrap. Literally. A typical brainstorm session may yield incremental improvements in the spring on a mousetrap, or the bait, or the construction materials.

The whole essence of igniting your curiosity is to question and challenge everything. Why does a mousetrap need to use a spring at all? What other ways are there to catch a mouse? How could a mouse be contained in a completely different way?

The more radical you allow your curiosity to wonder, the better. “What if we pumped water into the house and filled the entire house in order to flood the mice out?” This type of breakthrough thinking is exactly what you should seek. Of course you would not actually ruin an entire house with water, but perhaps you’d invent a mousetrap that catches mice in a water-based trap. The essence is to push yourself and your team outside of normal boundaries and let your imagination run wild. You can always tame it back later as needed.

Best-selling author and professor of psychology at the University of Chicago Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi said, “Creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains. The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice.”

True originality has never emerged from a formula. Rules are precisely what innovators and other paradigm shifters break. And to reach these new heights of creativity, let an unbridled sense of curiosity and awareness serve as your building blocks.

The old expression, “Curiosity killed the cat” couldn’t be more useless and out of date. A more appropriate phrase in light of today’s global business climate would be, “A lack of curiosity killed the cat”, or, “Curiosity helped the cat catch the mouse.”

Especially with your new patent-pending, revolutionary, groundbreaking water-based mousetrap.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do that!” the common phrase goes. “C’mon man, this isn’t brain surgery after all.”

I started wondering why these two disciplines – rocket science and brain surgery – are so highly regarded. They both involve tremendous precision, years of study, mathematical calculations, complex directions, excessive memorization, and level-headedness under intense pressure. In other words, it’s like the Left-Brain Olympics. The X-Games of Logical, analytical, linear thinking.

Why don’t we attribute the same statue to creative, Right-Brain practices? You don’t hear people saying, “You don’t have to be a film producer to do that!” or “C’mon man, this isn’t haiku composition after all”.

Is it more difficult and challenging to do repetitive, linear tasks? Should these be valued more in society than abstract, non-linear, imaginative disciplines? Personally, I think we have it backwards. Steve Jobs had the imagination and creativity to dream up the iPod, which was a much more significant accomplishment than merely engineering the circuit board. Edison invented the light bulb, a breakthrough of much more impact than the accountants who tally the corresponding profits.

Certainly we need brain surgery, rocket science, mechanical engineering, and actuaries. But let’s stop devaluing the incredible impact produced by inventors, artists, musicians, dancers, photographers, poets, and other “creative types”. Who is to say that rocket science is more difficult than jazz improvisation? Who is to say that brain surgery is more difficult and challenging than writing a brilliant movie script? Who is to say that supply-chain engineering is more difficult than composing a beautiful symphony?

All progress – in business, society, family, and life – requires both aspects of human intelligence. The duality of linear, analytical, computational thinking and abstract, non-linear, imaginative thought. It’s time to celebrate creativity on the same level as detailed memorization. It’s time to raise innovation and original thought to the same stature as precision and computation.

So the next time someone says, “This isn’t rocket science, you know” you should reply, “Yeah. It isn’t painting a masterpiece with oil on canvas either!”

Chimps are to humans as humans are to ______ ?

Dr. Neil Tyson, the brilliant director of New York City’s Natural History Museum, speculates on what extra-terrestrials would be like if they were as much smarter than us as we are than chimps. It’s a very clever and fascinating speculation….
http://tinyurl.com/ll78v7

What’s the most innovative company in the world?

IBM has long held the title of the most innovative company in the world, because it turns out the most patents. But if you measure the quality of the patents, another company – in fact, several other companies – beat IBM. Which ones are they?
http://tinyurl.com/yfpakuh

How much is creativity worth?

The answer turns out to be 500 % if you’re two very clever kids selling a BMX bike, in one of the funniest marketing videos in a long time. http://tinyurl.com/kw5wxg

Does size matter in innovation?

We think of the IBMs of the world the chief source of innovation, but a quick tour of the latest Consumer Electronic Show demonstrates that innovation can come from unexpected places. http://tinyurl.com/yjcotvz

The Power of Lego to Inspire

If you didn’t play with Legos as a child you missed out. The good news is that it’s never too late. Lego – and any tactile construction-type child game like it – can help adults jump-start their creativity no matter how old or uninspired. This short moving will get you thinking about Lego and all the ways it can inspire your creative thinking: http://bit.ly/bVQLgr

The 6 Myths of Creativity

Do you need to inspire creative work in your organization? A recent study shows that the ways people usually think about creativity in organizations are not necessarily born out by the facts. Get the real scope on how to make creativity work for you here: http://bit.ly/d3xJVU

Sometimes It’s Just a Picture that Inspires

One sign of a truly creative mind is to take ordinary household items that don’t usually come under the category of inspirational and use them to create wonderful new ideas and mental landscapes. The artist here clearly thinks out of the box, the egg carton, and the bowl: http://bit.ly/cIEEZt

Helping Left-Brainers Become Creative

It’s not just the accountants and the lawyers – there are a lot of left-brain people in the workplace, and they need help becoming more creative. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to ease left-brainers into a more creative working mode. Find ten suggestions here: http://bit.ly/c0wTKS

Overcoming your fears – 7 secrets from the ages

All of us must deal with our fears, and often they are what stand between us and greatness – or at least making the attempt. Clink on this link to see what the experts have been saying for 2,000 years are the best ways to overcome those pesky obstacles: http://bit.ly/cjuPGR

Creative Advertisements – Lots of them

Perhaps you thought creativity was dead in the advertising world? Not so – in fact, it’s working harder than ever in a media-saturated, 24/7, TiVo wielding age. Click on this link to see a wonderful array of great ads – 90 of them. Yes, 90. http://bit.ly/adfRvN

Creative People in Health Care

Media reports to the contrary, there are many people working very hard to try to fix the US’s health care mess, and a number of them have some very creative ideas about the problem – and its solution. Click on this link to re-charge your enthusiasm for fixing this very tough problem with some real heroes: http://bit.ly/9YMc4T

Creative Motorcycle design

OK, here’s your outrageous toy alert for the week. For a mere $70,000 USD, you can be the proud owner of the Mission One motorcycle. This baby is electric, and just about the sleekest looking thing on the planet. Be careful, if you click on this link, you may be calling the bank to raise your credit limit: http://bit.ly/9j5fVf