FLEX: the modern woman’s handbook. Annie Auerbach
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patterns. When we prioritize the wrong things – like long working hours over friendships; exams over mental agility; climbing the established career ladder over cutting our own paths – we diminish and inhibit ourselves and our possibilities. Similarly, when we ignore our bodies’ moods and cycles, going against the grain of how we feel or what we really want, then we can only really feel like we’re failing, living half-lives.
Flex is a creative, rebellious, badass way to live, because it means looking at routines like the nine-to-five, and social norms like women bearing the brunt of the emotional load at home, and bending and re-shaping them. When you flex, you invent your own template, according to your own ambitions and your family’s needs, often without precedent on a truly blank slate.
So to flex we need to be brave. We need to take a long look within and ask, ‘How can I work to the best of my abilities at work, while being the mum or partner or friend I want to be at home?’ And once we’ve figured out what exactly flex means for us as individuals, we have to find the confidence go out there and ask for it. Even when it goes against our current climate of pointless meetings, presenteeism, the strictures of nine-to-five and even society’s expectations on us as women. And I want to show you how. The five chapters of this book ask what the concept of flex looks like through different lenses: work, yes, but also our minds, our homes, our bodies and finally our futures.
We know that the world is changing fast. Rigidity in a world of change means something is going to break, and that thing could be you. And think about it: many of the jobs we were trained for in school won’t exist in a decade. The more robotic our behaviour, the more vulnerable we are to the robots taking our place. So flex has to be, for all of us, a movement built on creativity, bravery, anti-convention and innovation.
When we learn to flex, we reinvent the rules for a new future, and it’s one in which we can all thrive.
‘Think left and think right, and think low and think high. Oh, the Thinks you can think up if only you try.’
DR SEUSS
My day job is coming up with fresh thinking and new ideas for brands. I love ideas. I love the first sniff of one, the gut feeling we’re onto something. The hunt for more evidence and the inevitable period of doubt and being ‘lost in the forest’. The joy of getting it down on paper. I love all of it.
Flex is about inventing new answers to old problems and picking at the threads of handed-down wisdom to see what unravels. It means having a low boredom threshold for the ‘same old, same old’. It makes us challenge the status quo and ask difficult questions, like: is this the way we should be living and working? Are the norms we’ve all bought into making us happy? This is opposite of dogma and rigidity. It is a sort of cognitive yoga; an exercise for the mind that stretches our horizons and challenges our biases. It requires bravery, leaps of faith and empathy. And, annoyingly, it’s not easy . . .
SKILL OF THE FUTURE
The World Economic Forum predicts that creativity is one of the top three skills workers will need in the future. The other two are complex problem-solving and critical-thinking. The more we flex our creativity muscles, they say, the more we future-proof our skills.
Some days at work, my partner Adam and I are creative ninjas. Other days, we talk about last night’s telly and what we’re going to have for lunch. Creativity isn’t effortless, there’s no app for it, but it’s vital if we are to find new and exciting ways to change the things that are restricting us. In this chapter, I’ll dig into the key ingredients for creativity, so that we can unlock it in ourselves. I will look at how our environments have conspired against us to make us inflexible and I’ll show how we can foster the right conditions for creativity to thrive.
Today, whether you’re a coffee barista or a CEO, everyone hungers to be creative. The New Yorker dubs it ‘Creativity Creep’ saying: ‘Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative – how else, we think, can we become fully realized people?’1
Part of this is because we have more time to spend on being creative. As Walter Pitkin observed back in 1932, thanks to medical breakthroughs and time-saving devices like washing machines, ‘Men and women alike turn from the ancient task of making a living to the strange new task of living.’ And living these days is a creative endeavour. Social media has fetishized visually beautiful lives. Even if we’re making a packed lunch for our children, it’s got to be inventive, stylish, Instagrammable.
Instagram is full of creativity quotes from smart people. ‘Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.’ ‘Creativity is intelligence having fun!’ ‘You can mimic a result. But not the creativity.’ These all sound nice and inspiring. You can imagine the fist pumps, the head nods.
But what does creative thinking actually mean?
EVOLUTION & DAD JOKES: WHAT IS CREATIVITY?
I want to start by looking at a classic case of creativity, a leap in thinking which for ever changed the conversation for humankind: the Theory of Evolution. The fascinating thing about this idea is that it occurred to two different people, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, independently. For two separate thinkers to reach the same place at the same time is a real rarity.
So what did they do in order to get to their big idea? In an essay published in 1959, American sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov looked at what their creative processes had in common to try to find the key to creativity.2
Firstly, they travelled. Darwin took a five-year, round-the-world trip aboard HMS Beagle in 1831. Wallace went to the Amazon and Rio Negro river basins in 1848, and then, in 1854, to the Malay Archipelago.
Secondly, both observed unfamiliar species of plants and animals and how they varied from place to place. Darwin famously went to the Galápagos Islands to study finches, tortoises and mockingbirds. During his travels in what is modern-day Indonesia, Wallace collected more than 100,000 insect, bird and animal specimens, which he donated to British museums.
Thirdly, both read Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, which predicted that the human population would grow faster than its ability to feed itself. This proved to unlock the puzzle for both men. Reading about overpopulation in human beings sparked their ideas on evolution by natural selection. That’s how Wallace and Darwin made their creative leap: by connecting two seemingly unconnected concepts.
Cross-connection may be the key to creativity. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of creativity is ‘the use of imagination or original ideas to create something’, but this seems like quite a stretch. Is there really such a thing as pure originality, an idea that has never been thought of before? But smashing together two existing ideas which have never been connected – that is a breakthrough. That is what makes creative friction and sparks something fresh.
‘Smashing together two existing ideas which have never been connected – that is a breakthrough.
That is what makes creative friction and sparks something fresh.’
As the psychologist Steven Pinker has observed, that is how jokes work. In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler says we laugh when one idea, or frame of reference, sits next to a second, which doesn’t initially seem to make sense in the context of the first. So here’s a joke: Lady Astor supposedly said to Winston Churchill, ‘If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your tea.’ He replied, ‘If you were my wife, I’d drink it.’
Why is this funny? Well, clearly no one wants to be murdered. But when we gear-shift to suicide as a welcome escape from poor old Lady Astor, it becomes funny.
This slamming together of two unexpected frames, where the latter is surprising and causes you to reconsider the former, is called a paraprosdokian (from the Greek ‘against expectation’).