ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

Dave Erickson 0:00
Every day brings you a new challenge, business challenges, technology challenges. It never ends. But the real question is, how are you going to solve these challenges? On this ScreamingBox podcast, we are going to look at problem solving strategies for business and technology challenges. Please like our podcast and subscribe to our channel to get notified when the next podcast is released.

Dave Erickson 0:46
Business is rarely a stable thing, and technology is always changing and evolving. So how are you going to solve the many business and technology challenges you face every day at work? Welcome to the ScreamingBox technology and business rundown podcast. In this podcast, Botond Seres and I Dave Erickson set out to explore problem solving strategies for business and technology challenges with NIR Bachan, CEO and founder of Creator Mindset Consulting, an executive with extensive experience from years in the creative agency world, NIR started creator mindset consulting in 2016 to help clients harness the power of creativity to improve profitability, increase sales and to find new ways to grow. Creator Mindset Consulting now produces workshops and provides consulting coaching and keynote speaking engagements at conferences and corporate events. Nir’s clients include AT&T, Microsoft, Ace Hardware, NFL Network, EA, sports and JetBlue. Nir is a published author with his first book, “The Creator Mindset”, detailing out his formula to codify creativity, resulting in his book being awarded a top 100 non fiction book of all time by Blinkist. He is releasing his second book,"The Solution Mindset, Mastering the Art of Problem Solving” on December 30, 2025 which is now available for pre sal. Nir welcome to the podcast.

Nir Bashan 2:17
Hey, thanks for having me. Botond, Dave, I'm so excited to be here,

Dave Erickson 2:20
Maybe you can kind of describe the business journey that you, you took that led up to starting your own consulting company.

Nir Bashan 2:29
Sure thing, Dave, there's a ton of consultants out there, as you know, the big three that deal with analytics, right? They are very, very good at analytics. They can knock out all kinds of issues, from supply chain issues to financial, you know, issues to compliance issues and all kinds of really wonderful analytically driven, analytically driven problems that businesses have, different issues, stuff like that. But there are very, very few companies out there and consultants who work at those companies that can actually give you a creative or an innovative problem solving map, roadmap. And that's kind of what I do. So I help people become more creative and more innovative, and less of development, of the analytics and more of the development of creativity.

Dave Erickson 3:22
So creativity could mean a lot to a lot of different people, but in the context of, I guess, solving business challenges or even technology challenges, how would you kind of define creativity, or the application of creativity?

Nir Bashan 3:41
Really, really great question. So for me, creativity is all about problem solving in a new and unique and different way. It's all about harnessing the power of what we're all born with, right? We're all born really, really creative, and somewhere along the line, it kind of goes away. We trade our creativity for a love of analytics, right? We just love numbers. We love measurement. We love things that we can, oh, look at that, that's 10 pounds like and it means something, right? We love it, and that translates to our work lives, right? In, at work and technology, in everything that we do, we love things that can be captured by numbers, terabytes, bandwidth. You know how much throughput is going on, but sometimes these numbers are kind of like an agreement between people who say, Oh yeah, let's call this blah And yeah, everyone kind of agreed with them. They like it, but the blob means nothing other than it's 10 megabits or other than, you know, it's a quarter to report. And it said this, The, the fact is, is that we need to balance out the creative and the innovative part in order to get to the next level. And what I see is a very short and lacking industry wide. All kinds of different industry, embrace of creativity and innovation, and I see an overly reliant embrace of analytics. So Dave for me, creativity is defined as problem solving, different issues that pop up in your work at your business with creative based tools that will enable outcomes that are totally different than solving problems with analytics.

Dave Erickson 5:30
Yeah, some people get locked into their KPIs and their metrics, and they're like, Oh, I'm meeting my KPIs. I have all these numbers, but really they're not able to do much with the business or with technology, because they're just not thinking about innovative ways to solve problems, right?

Nir Bashan 5:48
Exactly, right. So people get stuck and they wonder, like, why am I stuck? I'm doing everything correct. So I have a book coming out at the end of December, like you mentioned earlier. It's called the solution mindset. It's available now for pre sale. Guys go and get it. It's any just enter the solution mindset into Google. You can get it. You can Nir bucha.com. N, I, R, B, A, S, H, A, N.com, you can see it right on the website that book is all about, right? Why these KPIs aren't working? Why, when we're told to do something in a certain way and expect certain results, were often stuck right. We're like, I did everything right. I went to business school and I, my spreadsheet, my you know, you should see my Excel, and here it's like, all the pivots in there, and everything's supposed to be perfect. So why aren't things perfect? And the reason is because we're shutting off our creative problem solving ability, and we're turning on and relying way too heavily on the analytics, and so we're forever out of balance. Dave, Botond, we're like out of balance, and we need to balance ourselves in a better way, in a more robust way, so that we can be happier at work, so that we can solve problems that are happening all over the world and that we can sort of advance in our careers, in our community. I believe very, very strongly that every single problem humanity has gotten ourselves into, we can also get ourselves out of if we choose creativity.

Botond Seres 7:20
I couldn't agree more, Nir creativity and balance in general are severely underrated, at least in certain spheres. Like many people, think that creativity is something reserved for artists and maybe designers, mostly artists, though, I can't help but wonder, how can some people whose jobs are mainly based around metrics and KPIs, like leaders and technologists, can tap into creativity and use it as a practical tool to strategically solve their problems?

Nir Bashan 7:55
Great question. Botond, yeah, so most of my clients are in the financial sector that shouldn't surprise you, manufacturing, people that have traditionally been very, very heavy on, you know, measurements of certain amounts of time spent on a certain amount of labor equal to certain product or output that you know is predictable, and what has happened time and time again is that the different industries have set up to execute a KPI that is not showing value. It's not showing the correct sort of output that everybody wanted. So it is my life's work, working with people who are not, you know, traditionally creative, like you were saying, but unlike artists or musicians, and that's, that's a wonderful part of creativity, but it's only a small sliver of it. The rest of creativity, as I define it, is problem solving. So there's, there's amazing, amazing things that you can do. My new book "The Solution Mindset” is full of them. It's full of ideas. Literally, every chapter has three ideas about how to take something, you know, a career that is uncreative, quote, unquote, and make it into creativity. One that I like a lot is, that works it with analytic mindset, people and technology. And if people in the financial sector, you know, a equals b, b equals c, that's how they do it, right? That, the pathway. Do not mess with the pathway. One thing that really works for people who have that type of, of mindset is to and it's a wonderful mindset, because we need analytics, right, but we also need to balance it with creativity. If I tell them to imagine the worst, right? Because a lot of people Botond have ideas, right? They're like, hey, you know, I'm an IT specialist. I'm, you know, systems admin, I'm a cyber guy, right? And I have these really good ideas, but like, you know, we just don't do it, because we need to follow these certain pathways every day. So what I advise is for people to imagine the worst, right? And I tell this cyber person, hey, what would happen if, what would What's the worst thing that could happen if you were to try their idea out? And, you know, they tell me, Oh, I'm gonna get fired. Oh, this, the network's gonna crack. Oh, we're gonna be inundated with, you know, breaches and all this stuff. And I say, okay, cool. Tell me more they Oh, yeah, you know, the world's gonna catch fire. It's gonna be awful. That's it. Okay. Now let's work backwards from that, right? What is like a medium thing that can go wrong? And they tell me all the medium stuff. And I say, okay, cool. What's the, like, least likely thing? And they're like, oh, you know, nobody will notice. Blah, blah, blah. I say, Cool. Now let's look at what the potential benefit is. And that's when people just like, Yeah, cool, Do this, that, that, this, that, this, that, and then the bad part doesn't look as scary when we're looking at it clearly. So it encourages people who are traditionally very, very robustly analytic, right? KPI base, to go, Okay, I looked at the bad and it's not that bad. And I looked at the good, and it's way bigger, way bigger of an impact than what could happen if it were to go all wrong. I am going to then, try my idea. And that little shift in mentality, that little shift in mindset, can get people who are otherwise hesitant to take a leap on a creative idea to then jump in.

Botond Seres 11:22
I thought the first step usually is to evaluate the best and worst outcomes. But I guess not. So I do wonder. I mean, sometimes, of course, the bad outweighs the good, but I'm more interested in something specific, where the goods vastly outweigh the bad. Can you give us some real good examples of such scenarios?

Nir Bashan 11:44
Yeah. So you know, it's all case dependent, and it all depends on who you are, where you are in your career, where you are in your situation. Most of the time when we imagine the worst, it is not representative of what will really happen, right? I'll give you guys an example. A few years ago, I sent the company financials to, like, a reply, all by mistake. I mean, it happens, right? But, like, what really, that one out of all? Yeah, right. And I, and I, I was like, Okay, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to get fired immediately. This is going to be awful, you know, people are, it's going to be the worst thing ever. And what ended up happening was very interesting, right? There was a lot of coworkers that I was working with at the time that were like, hey, you know, stay away from that guy. He's toxic, right? And there was some people who came to me and said, hey, you know, you have no idea how close I got to doing that so many times, and blah, blah, blah. And then I was like, any minute now, I'm gonna get fired. It's the worst, you know. I'm gonna get kicked off the assignment, the whole deal. And you know what happened? Absolutely nothing. That's what happened. I sent an email out. I said, Hey guys, I'm really sorry. Please delete it. Some people did. Some people spent a week like, going over line, over line, over the financials to get the inside or whatever. But ultimately, nothing happened. Nothing happened. My biggest fear did not come true. Nothing happened. Some people were like, you know, kind of cold shoulder for a while. Then everyone forgot about it. We moved on to the next crisis, and here we are, kind of moving forward. So I encourage your listeners and viewers to understand that it might not be that bad, and it often isn't that bad, and you gotta just jump in. And you got to allow yourself to do what it is that your body and your mind want to do, which is live in harmony with your analytics, allow yourself to take a chance on one of your ideas. You got it. You just got to take a chance on it.

Dave Erickson 13:44
Yeah, I've always found that, you know, thinking about the worst case scenario doesn't mean a lot, on the other hand you know, that's what problem solving, I guess, and creativity is all about. Okay, so the worst case scenario happened, and you're, you got a problem, well, now you got a problem to solve. So right, move on to the next problem. I mean, it seems to me that life, and particularly business, is just one problem after another that needs to be solved, and that's just the way it is. And some people who are entrepreneurs get burnt out because they're just tired of solving problems every day, which is the job of an entrepreneur. And you literally go to some office job where they sit there with their spreadsheet and don't have to solve problems all the time. Yes, that does occur, but there are some people who really love problem solving, entrepreneurs, but in a sense, it's overlooked. Developers, you know, every, every day, a developer is trying to solve some problem, yep, writing code. And usually that code is being written to solve somebody else's business challenge, but they got to sit there, and they got to kind of create. And that kind of brings us to another aspect of creativity, and that is, you know, if you're you're solving problems all the time, and that's your focus. That's kind of your job. Whether you're. An artist, a UX person, a developer. What happens when you kind of get burnt out on having to solve problems, or getting burnt out on having to be creative all the time? How do you kind of get yourself back to that? Or how do you get re-inspired? Or what can you do to solve that kind of roadblock?

Nir Bashan 15:17
Yeah, so burnout is, is a really tough, tough situation, right? A lot of people in the technology sector and others feel that their work is, you know, kind of in a constant hamster wheel, like never going anywhere, and they end up getting burnt out. What I find that really helps with burnout is kind of changing the structure of the question and looking at things in a slightly different way. So I've done a ton of research with the new book, "The Solution Mindset” on pre order now, everywhere you buy books, Amazon, Walmart, everywhere. I found in that book some, some amazing research, right? Amazing. And I've got a great team that does research. And basically, Dave, what they found was that there is this great sort of, hey, I'm burnt out. I'm going to go work at another company, and it's going to be great. And they found out that people who do that are more than likely, I think, 70 or 80% to be unhappy at that new job. Because we all think that, like, Oh, if I were just to go over there, things would be so much better. Or if I would just to quit, it would be like, that much better. But the research has shown that people are unhappy because of burnout and other issues at their current job. They're going to be unhappy and they're going to burn out at the next job. It's really just moving around the burnout. So one thing that I think can really help is changing how you look at burnout. Look at the company that you're working at, look at the assignment that you're on, look at, you know, whatever it is that you're doing, and frame it in a slightly different way, right? Instead of going, my boss is an idiot, right? Go, yes, I got an idiot boss. And you tell me Nir that that makes no sense. Like, what do you mean when we look at things creatively? Dave, Botond, we, we introduce opportunities that were never there before. So I will tell you, I've been working since I was nine years old. I've had great bosses, and I've had the worst bosses ever, right? Currently, you know, I consult, I have some great clients, and I have some maybe not so good one. All my clients are great. That were, all my clients are wonderful. Anyway, so I have good and maybe not so good clients. I have learned more from bad bosses over the years than I have from good ones, right? What do you learn from a bad boss? You learn what not to do. Sometimes it's more powerful to learn what not to do than to learn what to do. And so people are burnt out. People are like, Hey, I've been working on this code this whole time. I'm asking my coworkers, I'm asking the QA people, Hey, how do I, you know, what do I do? And they're awful. Nobody's helping me, right? That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is like, yes, the QA people aren't doing anything, It's time for me to learn some of those skills. It's time for me to use some of these amazing tools out there to check my own work. It's time for me to pick up skills that I've never had before. And that is that shift in development of, hey, it's somebody else's fault to like, what can I be doing better? Always helps with burnout, it always helps people understand how powerful and incredibly influential their work can be. If they just were to change their mindset and look at it in a different way,

Dave Erickson 18:40
I think you tapped into kind of a little bit of a thing that I feel is pretty important, that is being challenged. People have to kind of change their outlook on something into a more, I would say, positive way, but also a more creative way, and start thinking a little bit outside of the box, but we now have a new tool that everyone is exploring that in a sense, limits creativity because it relieves people the responsibility of having to be creative, and that is AI. So a lot of people are now using AI as kind of a creative crutch I don't need, you know? I'm just going to ask ChatGPT what to do, I'm going to do, you know. So I have a for me. I feel that AI can make people lazy creatively. Yeah? What's your thoughts on that one?

Nir Bashan 19:40
That's funny. Yeah, so Dave, listen, AI is a wonderful tool. It's like any other tool. And listen, I love technology like everyone else, right? I remember. I'm old enough to remember, maybe, maybe way older than Botond. But you know, perhaps, perhaps you remember Dave, Botond looks like he's 17. Here. We go, I remember when the cloud was supposed to be the latest, best thing. You guys remember that? Oh, the cloud Nir Oh, it's gonna take over. Everything, everything's going to the cloud. What did that mean? Oh, it's gonna change life as humans know it. Okay, cool. And you remember before that, but then I was like in elementary school. You remember when it was like, IoT? Oh, you know, my coffee mug will, will be connected to the internet, and it will talk to my pen, and that will talk to my water glass, and it's gonna be really amazing. What's gonna happen? It's gonna change the universe. Everything's gonna be different from here on out. Then like that. Not really, you know, not really the case. AI's kind of similar to that. I think it's the latest hype. I work with a lot of people out of Silicon Valley, and I'm now, I'm happy, so happy that they are the one of the best self congratulatory industries in existence, right? Second only, maybe to Hollywood in how, like, self congratulatory? Oh, yeah, amazing. So AI at best is a captured picture of the past. It can't tell you what's going on in the future. It can only scan the web, do their deep scans, connect all kinds of stuff. And it's impressive. It's really cool, but it can only give you so much of a look into the past. You still need to be creative in your prompts, and you could still be very creative in the way that you use it, right? So if you're a coder or whatever, and you're using its check code, that's really not the best way to use it, right? You need to be creative on how you approach the tools to get the results that you want. And there's still a ton of human ingenuity that needs to be set in that process and set in that workflow. You can't just, hey, you know, put it up there and let it do its thing. It's got to be something that you control. I speak a lot to IT groups, a lot. I just got back from Colorado, spoke at a biIg TT convention, and one of the things was, Hey, you know, we use a lot of AI to kind of augment or staff work, or, you know, it's, it's going to AI now, stuff that used to be human built. And the thing that I helped this group do, is you use AI in a different way? We all say, hey, you know, build us a program for, you know, this type of thing, and enter and it kind of does it, right. But what if we were to use our prompts in a different way? What if we were to tell it, you know, instead of Build me the program, what if we were to say, what are the end user uses of this particular piece of software? Who's going to use it? Why are they going to use it? How are they going to use it on and on and on, and in those changes of the prompt, we can find real creativity. So do I believe that AI is, you know, the best thing ever? It's cool. I, you know, do I think it will go the same way of the cloud and IoT and all of that stuff before it, absolutely. I think it's a game changer, simply because it's so good at at being so smart, but it really does look at the past and the time is ripe right now never been better for human beings to capture and nurture that creative side and allow that to get developed and balance it out with the analytics, no better time than today.

Botond Seres 23:26
Yes, and there is a absolutely vast difference between the quality of AI generated content even, and that’s, I feel I can be put down to the creativity of the original prompts that we're used to generate that content through AI.

Dave Erickson 23:43
I believe that, you know, since AI can't be creative and it's not conscious, there is a very definite role for people in the use of AI. I think people right now are kind of fumbling around trying to figure out that relationship between them and AI and businesses are trying to figure out, Okay, what's their relationship with AI? And I think there's a big AI learning curve that's kind of happening, right? And there's a lot of fear. People are afraid of losing jobs, and there will be people who will be, in a sense, lose their job, but that's more because other people used AI to become more productive, and therefore they didn't need as many people around them. I think that will occur. But my advice to people who are fearing that is well now is your opportunity to learn something new or to understand how you can be creative or innovative using the tools. So if you're afraid of AI as a tool, but you don't really know the tool very well, here is an opportunity to go learn. And that brings me, to kind of, another question. Some people have said to me, you know, I'm too old to learn. I've never been creative, I don't know, learning takes a lot of like, you know, you have to kind of be creative a little bit and all that, you know, I don't think I can do it. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that, that, that kind of barrier that people have where they put up their own barriers to being creative because they don't think they're creative.

Nir Bashan 25:20
Yeah, 100% so most people do not think they are creative, right? They think that they're, you know, oh, that's my cousin, or that somebody else. The The fact is, and there's some research that's incredible, incredible that we just found. It's in the new book, “The Solution Mindset”, iIncredible, incredible book. It's coming out, December 30, available anywhere you buy books on pre order right now, there's a study in that book, Dave, that shows something like 28 or 30 chromosomes, I can't remember, of our DNA is literally locked into creativity. It is there so that we could problem solve in a way that makes us innately human. So it turns out that we were born, all born creative and NASA did this incredible study about paper clips. I don't know if you guys heard about it, but it's from the 60s, and it's, how can you come up with creative ways to use a paper clip? Right? It's basically the scenario exists. You're in a capsule. You lose contact with, you know, ground control. You have two things in your hand, and you gotta figure out, like, how to use them, right? One of them is a paper clip, and the other is, like, I don't know, you know, a pencil. Good luck. And so they give this test, and they've started in the in the late 60s. They give the test to, you know, kindergarteners, and they score in like, 90th percentile of genius, right? They give it to high school people, and they, you know, it goes down to like 20% they give it to, God forbid, you know, MBA student, and it goes down to like 5% of, you know, capability and competency. So we have lost that ability to come up with creative ideas. The kindergarteners, the first graders, they look at the paper clips, you know, and they're like, Oh, this is, this can be a spaceship. It's like, how, you know, doesn't even matter. They just have that creative instinct to want to solve different problems. The high schoolers are like, paper clips. Who cares? You know, down with it and whatever. Oh, who can you know, if not, you can't do anything with it. They've already developed that skepticism. So the creativity in that innovation sense, is in every human being on Earth, it's up to us to not be sarcastic about it, to not be negative about it, to not go, oh, it's not us. It's someone else, I'm not a dancer or painter. That's somebody else. It's up to us to reimagine and to relive that old childhood creativity that we all had, that sense of wonder when we approach something and go, You know what? This problem is solvable. We get very much in a sort of rigid mindset at work, we look at a piece of software, the thing is doomed, that's horrible. We look at a relationship with a vendor, ah, or they're the worst, they're so expensive, and they don't respond to me. And instead of going well, maybe the software can be fixed, and maybe this vendor is actually the best. Maybe we're not working with them right? Maybe we're not approaching the, the problem in a correct way. We need to reawaken that ancient and, you know, far buried down sense of problem solving that we all have, and get back to seeing the world in a creative and and wondrous place, because it is, it literally is an amazing place where people's innovation and ideas are the best currency that we have as human beings.

Botond Seres 28:55
Yes, sometimes problems can feel absolutely overwhelming, I think. We also experienced this, including our listeners, of course, and sometimes they might even just seem completely unsolvable or just unsolvable within the constraints of time or budgets or even the legacy of our past decisions or past experience of others. So Nir in such, such dire situations or high pressure moments, how can we unlock new ideas when everything seems impossible?

Nir Bashan 29:36
Super, great idea Botond, so in the new book “The Solution Mindset”, I talk about, The first story is about a friend of mine named Tito Vennecott, and he's in Tahiti, and he's been surfing the same spot, the same spot his whole life, right? He gets out there one day he's 16, his buddies all pitch in. They bought a boat. I mean. It like a boat, like, in quotes, right? The thing with, like, you know, barely floating or whatever, but enable them to get to their surf spot. They get over there, there's no surf. So he dives down and he looks in the reef is like, kind of bleach. It's kind of gone, right? The The reef is where the waves kind of hit, the the current hit, turn it into waves and and this and that. So he could have looked at it Botond like most people, right? Most people would be like, Oh, this is not a problem that I can solve. This is greater than anything. Oh, I'm just gonna bury my hand head in the sand, literally, and, and that's it, right? He goes home, he searches on the computer. And, you know, he gets excited, what if we do this? What if we do that? Full of 16 year old enthusiasm, he goes and talks to these Marines, biologists, right? Scientists? And they're like, Dude, you're 16. Like, you need to go to MBA school. You need to go he's like, no, no, I got some really great ideas. What if we do this? What if we do that? They're like, Dude, you need a PhD in marine biology. You need a dissertation. You need a graduate degree. You need an undergraduate degree, dude. You need to finish high school, high school, to even start solving those types of problems. And he's like, guys, I love you, absolutely not. I'm going to go and do it. And today, he owns the largest reef restoration company on Earth. And those same scientists are part of his staff. It just takes the ability to believe in a creative and innovative mindset and go and do it. And the first chapter of the book, literally, is just start, and it's Tito's story about how he just started. And Botond, like, it wasn't great, right? He got a rope. He got some stuff. It didn't work. He tweaked it, he threw it out. He got a thinner rope. He'd got, like, a different type of rope. And then slowly but surely, like you started regrowing a reef. And he started talking to these people, and they, Oh, what? Why would it grow on reefs? None of our models showed that. You know, we studied this in a lab. It's like, No, this ain't a lab. This is the ocean, right? This is how you do it. And it works. Come on, let's help, help out. And he grew this thing into the largest restoration company on Earth. It just takes the will to want to do it, and the ability to learn from your mistakes and go, You know what, I don't have it all solved, but I have the will to change, and that's how people are changing the world right now, just going out there and doing it and going and solving problems that people say is too hard, it's too overwhelming, it's too crazy. And I bet your listeners right now who are hearing me and listening to the story, are going, you know, what, I got that same problem at work, or I got that same problem in my community or my church or my synagogue, or, you know, with the in the city that I'm working in, or the town or the state or the country. What if we were to do this? And if I can inspire just one of them, Botond, just one person that's listening right now, to go, you know what, I'm going to get a piece of rope, you know, like Tito did, and jump in there and do something to help solve this problem. This world is going to be a much better place to live. It is literally anchored in our ability to be more creative and innovative and not to listen to all the negativity that's out there, which is, by the way, 95, 96 97% of all the news and the media and everything that we hear, it's all negative. And if we were instead to look at the positive and look at our incredible ability as human beings to fix things, then we will be handing out this earth and in our, you know, to the next generation in a much better way.

Dave Erickson 33:59
I think you hit on a very interesting point. You know, you may be creative, or you may have an idea, but you're surrounded with a lot of people who won't see it or don't want to see it or can't see it. There's, there, you know, a lot, and you're always most people are working in some kind of environment, surrounded by people, whether it's a small workplace or whether it's a government where it's your entire country, or whatever. What are some of the things that a person can do where they have an idea that's different, something creative, and they need to communicate that to people around them, and communicate it in a way that helps motivate the people to support it?

Nir Bashan 34:45
Great question. So Dave, I highly recommend that you do not make friends at work. Okay, I have one of the most viral articles ever on Psychology Today, which deals with not making friends at work. This article has been translated into, I don't know, seven or eight different languages. It's gone all over the world. I wrote it last year on an airplane on the way to a client site, right? Because somebody asked me the same question. You said, hey, well, you know, your coworkers, they're kind of negative, and how do you do this? Blah, blah, blah. Don't ever make friends with them. Don't ever, ever make friends with the people that you work with. Work is, is a place where you're supposed to engage in commerce, solve problems, you know, move forward in that way. Join a community center if you want to make friends, you know, call your friends from high school or college, right? Keep work and your friendship separate, and it's, somehow I get emails from all over the world. You know, hey, Nir you're crazy. I met my best friend at work. But here's the thing, like, what would you, what would happen if that best friend were to be fired tomorrow, right? Or if that best friend were to go somewhere else, would they still be your best friend? I doubt it. I've been working since I was nine. I talked to maybe one person. I've worked with, in all of those years. I've worked at dozens of agencies, advertising agencies, dozens of different companies. I worked in manufacturing at one point, I talked to one person, maybe out of that whole, that whole chain. So it's not about making friends and going out there and getting everyone to like you and all of this stuff you're focusing on the wrong thing. Leave the negativity alone. Transcend the negativity with the power of IDEA, the power of innovation. People tell me Nir but my boss is an idiot and I can't get ahead at work. Blah, blah, blah, if you keep plant, you know, planting these ideas out there, eventually one of them will take hold, and sometimes maybe you're not at the right place. So you're, you're really good ideas. You'll notice, hey, this competitor keeps calling me for some reason, or the vendors that we use to hire, I get along really well with them. Yeah, maybe that's where you need to be, and not at your current spot, but we need to constantly generate ideas and, and be positive about them in order to get ahead. The thing that I recommend that everyone do immediately is not make friends at work. Do not make a work bestie, no work husband or work wife that you know all of this stuff, leave work and friendships in a completely separate bucket and use work to drive home different creative and innovative ideas. Balance that with analytics, and you will be much, much happier.

Botond Seres 37:37
I mean, that's, that's a good tip. That's id. That's some really good tips there to not make friends at work. But I do suppose you, you would agree that it, you can be nice at work with people, right?

Dave Erickson 37:52
I mean, entrepreneurs kind of learn this a little bit because it's really hard to fire your friend, right? And yeah, as an entrepreneur, you may have to be in that situation, or you have to lay off people, and if they're, quote, your friend, makes things really emotionally very difficult, but also it skews your decision, right? What's the best course for the business versus what's the best course for your friends? Right? And so it's a really difficult line to balance, because you want to like the people you work with, and you want to kind of be nice to them and friendly with them. But there's a difference between, you know, a friendship versus a workmate, and you may need to find that balance of emotion, of how you feel towards someone. Because, yeah, I think you're right. You know, friendship does kind of skew relationships, and if you're in business or running a business, but even if you're working, you know, and you have to work with people, and it's okay, I have to give this bad news, this person, but he's my friend. I don't really want to tell him this or something like that, where he screwed up and I have to report him to my boss, but he's my friend, I don't want to and, yeah, I can understand that, that concept, but Botan, to your point, I do think you need to be respectful people around you. You need to be friendly without being a quote friend, you know. So there is that kind of balance that's, that's a very interesting concept.

Nir Bashan 39:23
Yeah, I think it's good to make connections. I think it's good to make contact. I think it's good to build your network, right? But you don't want to spend real friend, friendships are built on mutual trust. They're built outside of some financial agreement. You know, I've been so fortunate in life to have friends that I can call for anything, right, anything I need money deposited in my account, you know, heaven forbid, or, you know, I need something done or help me out, blah, blah, blah. It's not connected to kind of, you know, a workplace where, you know, you, you work together, and there's, that’s thrown in. Just those are the types of real relationships and friendships that you want when you go to work, you want to be there, you want to execute the job, and you want to go home. You know, you want to build a business as an entrepreneur, you want to go in there. You want to kind of tweak everything, not hire your friends and do the best that you can with what you have, which is often not a lot, right? And so why would you want to cloud that vision with some extra responsibility? You don't, it's just a debt that you have to to maintain, and the debt goes nowhere good.

Botond Seres 40:37
Honestly, I feel like we can take this even one step further. Just don't hire your friends, if you can help it.

Nir Bashan 40:45
It's my next article, Botond, nice my next article. Don't hire any friend. That's good.

Dave Erickson 40:53
A question is kind of, you know, new agey, because everyone's dealing with a lot of these, these, these things, I can't be creative or I want to be creative. What exercises can I do? What food can I eat that makes me more creative? I mean, are there, is it really an internal journey, or are there things that people can do to help motivate them to be creative, or to sharpen their creativity, or help them be a little bit more creative that are outside of them just learning something?

Nir Bashan 41:28
Yeah, so, great question. It's a, it's a practice that we need to do, right? There's things that we need to practice to become more creative. You're absolutely right. It's full, in my new book, “The Solution Mindset”, full of things that you can practice. The thing that I really like Dave, that anybody can do, and your listeners can do right now, is to choose their words better. In order to become more creative. Choose your words better. So I did a study. The English language has a six to one ratio of negative words to positive words, isn't that nuts? So for every like, terrible, there is or for every good there is terrible, horrible, bad, crappy, you know, there's six more bad negative words than there are positive. And so I thought to myself, Well, why is that, right? Why are there more negative ways to describe something than positive? And it's got to do something with, you know, I don't know. Maybe because our English language is from England, and, you know, England is kind of a miserable place, right? It rains all the time. The food's kind of gross, right? Everything's over fried. I'm just kidding, but kind of, right. And so I was like, oh, maybe it's just kind of from that old thing. And it turns out that this is a survival method, right? It's from our 20, 30, 40, 50,000, year ago ancestors who were like, don't eat that red berry because it's going to kill you. Don't drink that water, it's horrible, terrible, right? There was a use for more negative words than there are positive. Fast forward to today, you and I and Baton are emailing people and texting, and we're still carrying on like we're about to drink that poison, you know, river, you know, or use positivity, it generates creativity. Choose in your language the best and most positive words that you can choose. Take a minute before you send a text. Hey Charlie, get me the, the invoice by two o'clock. Hi, Charlie, hope you're well. Is everything going good? How are your kids doing? You know, the baseball camp workout. Good, cool. When you get a chance, please send that invoice, because then Charlie will look at that text or that email and go to you. You know what? Botond, yeah. Baseball camp went great. You know the coach? Yeah, yeah, of course. I know the coach. He's got that thing. Maybe you guys should talk to him, because he's got an investor. He's launching this whole new business, and all of a sudden you're in a conversation that is 10 times better than just get me the dang invoice, right? So we choose better language. Dave, it's one of the things I have, I don't know, something like 70 of them in this new book called “The Solution Mindset”, but this is something that you guys can do right away, right choose better language in your communication. Choose better language in the way that you engage with each other. Now, the research showed the country with the most negative to positive words is, of course, Hungary.

Botond Seres 44:41
Yeah, that's, that's a big surprise.

Nir Bashan 44:43
No, I'm kidding, but it's something like 10 to one in Hungary. Just Hungarian, pretty negative language, just in general.

Dave Erickson 44:50
I kind of remember that, Botond, I think you're, you're more of an expert in Hungarian than I am. I forgot some vocabulary.

Botond Seres 44:57
Oh. I mean, to be honest, in my personal experience, it's not too bad, but maybe I just hang around different kinds of people.

Nir Bashan 45:06
There we go. Nice.

Dave Erickson 45:08
Nir, maybe you can tell us a little bit about Creative Mindset Consulting. What are the type of clients you work with and the type of people you prefer to work with?

Nir Bashan 45:20
Yep. Thanks, Dave, so the, the business is really about consulting with financial services companies, IT services companies, the traditional analytic based businesses, manufacturing. We have a small but mighty team that goes out and helps people with different projects, whatever, whatever it is that pops up. I also do a lot of keynote speaking, a lot. That's my, I love speaking to different groups, figuring out what 2,3,4, main issues are going on in the industry, and offering from the stage some solution that people can use right away, actionable items that people can go out there and use right away to become more innovative and more creative. So that's really the scope of the business, and it's something that I enjoy doing. It to my, my life's calling.

Botond Seres 46:12
In your opinion, what is the future of creativity?

Nir Bashan 46:18
So for me, the future of creativity is yet to be discovered, right? It is something that is innately human. There's no AI, there's no machine learning. There's nothing in the world that can replace a human being looking at a problem and solving it in a way that is novel, interesting and amazing. And I am, and have been, never been, more excited about the future of what we have today than ever, and the potential that we have to go and solve these problems that are happening around the world. My book is full of them. It takes on everything from education problem solving to the criminal court system and jails all the way to Norwegian jails. I went to Norwegian jails to look at what they're doing different that the world can adopt, and how we can get more creative about it. But then there's no better time to be alive than now. There's no better way to solve different problems that we have than there is now. This is the best time, literally, to be alive. And I can't wait to hear feedback from your listeners. And you know, very easy to get a hold of NIR Bucha on N, I, R, B, A, S, H, A, N.com, enter “The Solution Mindset" into Google. The book will come up. I can't wait to hear what you guys think of what you're hearing and what you're seeing on this podcast, there is no better time than now to be creative and solve problems.

Dave Erickson 47:47
Nir, thank you so much for being on our podcast and discussing problem solving strategies for business and technology challenges.

Botond Seres 47:55
Well, we're at the end of the episode today, but before you go, we want you to think about this important question: which problem solving strategy are you going to try to work on next?

Dave Erickson 48:07
For our listeners, please subscribe and click the notifications to join us for our next GreenBox technology and business rundown podcast. And until then, get creative and solve some problems.

Dave Erickson 48:20
Thank you very much for taking this journey with us. Join us for our next exciting exploration of technology and business in the first week of every month. Please help us by subscribing, liking and following us on whichever platform you're listening to or watching us on. We hope you enjoyed this podcast, and please let us know any subjects or topics you would like us to discuss in our next podcast by leaving a message for us in the comment sections or sending us a Twitter DM till next month. Please stay happy and healthy.