Everyone likes to think they're creative. And in a general sense, most people are. Give them a blank canvas or a writing prompt, and they’ll surprise you. However, creativity in business is a different league of its own. You have to be creative while being accountable. That’s much harder. I’m not talking about creativity in the form of changing button colours or optimising copy on a landing page. That’s important, but it’s optimisation, not invention. I’m talking about directional shifts—bets on things that are anecdotally true but haven’t yet been proven with a lot of data. These are the kind of bets that early-stage startups are built on when there’s no actual data to back anything yet.
Creativity requires the freedom to be wrong. But in business, being wrong has a cost—sometimes reputational, sometimes financial, sometimes existential. When your job or company’s survival depends on getting things right, you naturally hedge your bets. You favour safety over surprise. Over time, your creativity atrophies—not because you don’t have ideas, but because you stop risking them.
This is why the most creative people in business also share something else: courage. Not recklessness. Not charisma. Just the quiet, stubborn willingness to propose something that might not work. They’re willing to go out on a limb—again and again—even when the last one snapped. And in business, that's rare. Because it’s not rewarded in the short term. The safe answer gets nodded through. The bold one gets questioned, scoped, and watered down.
Repeated willingness to bet on an idea that might fail, knowing the consequences fully well, is most striking. The ability to keep showing up with boldness, even when you’ve been burned—that’s what separates merely creative people from those who move the needle in complex environments.
Most importantly, the brave ones are willing to be wrong for a good reason. Because if you want to build something that moves the needle substantially, you’ll get it wrong before you get it right. The only way through is creative courage.