This week I am super pumped to be chatting with George Siosi Samuels: Melbourne-based creative entrepreneur, business consultant and cultural animator.
He has been identified by Adobe as a Key Person of Influence, and has featured in the “Top 50 Young & Extraordinary” by the Foundation for Young Australians.
He is also passionate about sharing the stories and culture of his maternal homeland, Tuvalu, through his beautiful animations.
I reached out to George because I love how creative he is, yet he’s also super smart when it comes to business. We met at co-working space HUB Melbourne to talk creativity, storytelling, flow, and how he helps business people be more creative, and creatives be better at business.
Click here to listen to the episode.
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Notes from this episode:
- Entrepreneurs ARE creative - just not in the way people think they are
- People are often ignorant to the skills they have that they can apply to business.
- How George learned his business skills through hanging out with the Key Persons of Influence group.
- Why storytelling in business is so important
- His first time ‘hustling’ - promoted his animation work to anyone he could
- Through the KPI program, he started learning the skills of pitching - and began targeting small and medium businesses.
- Why the video I sent to George was so effective:
As Community Manager at Hub Melbourne, there are always people pitching to me and...trying to capture my attention. But very few actually take the time to do a little bit of research on myself…the most important thing was that you told a really good story and you did it in a way that I had never seen before.
- We also talk about co-working space HUB Melbourne and what George does in his role as Community Manager.
- What’s the difference between an incubator, an accelerator and a co-work space, and what differentiates HUB Melbourne from other co-work spaces.
- George is also a certified 'Talent Dynamics' trainer.
- What is ‘flow’ with other people? The ability to harmonise with your surrounds - other people. Allows you to be more conscious of how you work and communicate with other people, which helps you to work better with them.
- For example, if you’re a bear, you’d speak bear. But if you don’t know that you’re a bear, you’re going to try and speak all different languages to be understood. Once you find out what your ‘animal' (your language) is, you can look an commonalities of other ‘animals' and change your language to communicate with them.
- How George helps people be more creative: "I’m always looking [for] two disparate areas [of skills] that you can’t think of how they work well together - that’s usually where the creativity happens."
The video I sent to George:
Your challenge this week:
Want to be more creative? Do this:
What do people say you did well as a child? Or what fun things did you enjoy doing? This is a real clue as to where your true passion and skills lie. Did you enjoy running around in the rain? Or dancing like a lunatic? Or cooking for your invisible friends?
Then think about an activity you could do more of now, that’s an extension of that activity. So, it could be going on hikes, or taking dance classes, or cooking for real friends. Feeding your creative side by giving yourself permission to do these fun things will get your right brain nice and activated.
Then you can connect the dots, as George said, and start to feed these other activities into your work. You never know what cool ideas you may come up with!