How Dissatisfaction Guides Our Creativity

Creativity leads to change. Innovators change the way the world works. In recent years, they’ve radically changed how we connect with others, how we purchase things, how we find entertainment, and more.

Long before these innovations hit the market… long before the creative insight occurs, you’ll find a creative person who not happy with the way things are being done. Dissatisfaction is a major driving force when it comes to creativity.

There are many reasons why dissatisfaction is important to creative work. The biggest reason is that its difficult to do anything that changes an industry when you’re satisfied with what’s going on in that industry. The invention of the television can be seen as a response to being dissatisfied with radio.

Underneath every innovation, there’s a “Why can’t…?” Question that is either implied or explicit. For the television, it was “If we can transmit audio over long distances, why can’t we transmit video?” If radio were good enough, there’d be no reason to push forward. Dissatisfactions can have many solutions, as well. Being unsatisfied with the radio eventually lead to the television, but it also lead to websites like Spotify and Pandora. These companies we’re dissatisfied with radio for entirely different reasons. Their Why Can’t Question was “Why can’t the radio be fined-tuned for each listener?” They asked different questions and get different answers.

Since industries are always evolving, these Why Can’t Questions never go away, they just change into different questions that better reflect the industry today. Whatever innovation comes out tomorrow, next year, or 10 years from now, will be inspired by some type of dissatisfaction with the status quo.

This is one reason why creative people tend to be more dissatisfied then the general population. Before you can solve a problem, you must recognize that there is one. Creative people tend to be more finely-tuned when it comes to problem discovery. The main difference is that non-creatives tend to ignore or complain about the status quo while creative people tend to respond to it as a chance to create something better. It’s not that we actively choose dissatisfaction, but as long as its there, you might as well use it. Like the ancient alchemists’ goal of turning lead into gold, our goal as creatives is to convert dissatisfaction into a greater good.

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