Serendipity and Learning

What is creativity? I have attempted to answer this question a few times here and many times in my own mind. There is no real confusion in the minds of those who do it. But for the outside world, there is often a confusion between aesthetic creativity and problem solving creativity. Most people only recognize the former as creativity while missing the latter. So, if you ask people, the common answers that you will get on creativity is about music, movies, filmstars and such like. And often creativity is also confused with being 'fashionable' or 'wearing the right clothes' or 'I am different'  and this is creative, no doubt - because even being different is creative, but it may not result in any direct contribution to anything. So, if you are called in as a 'creative' expert to beautify/colour/spruce up some junk that someone else made, then believe me, you are being aesthetically creative (most likely) or perhaps helping a lazy person survive in the org...

When I was in MBA, one of the favourite lines we heard about job hopping MBAs justifying their job hopping was this "You have may 30 years experience, but it is actually 1 year experience multiplied 30 times". While not exactly true (and it is a much longer topic to discuss), it is an important think while thinking about a long term career. One way to make a career is to do one thing and get really good at it (and there is no escape from getting better at something if you want a good career). Key questions if you are a one thing person is: Are you doing that one thing for fear of not exploring other things? And if you are in that one thing are you contemporary on all those things that you need to be upto date in those things? The world is changing rapidly - are you on top of them? Are you in touch with the latest developments? Do you experiment? Do you try out new things (both for yourself and for your team)? Or are you happily claustrophobic in your office? And what i...