65 Quotes by Alan Philips

The way to create value in the Age of Ideas is to identify, manifest, and share your creativity.

Your creative potential is fully unleashed when you manifest the highest and purest form of your purpose, what you stand for, what you believe in, what you’re best at.

Creativity, like love, is entirely emotional, meaning it doesn’t have a physical presence. That’s what makes it so extraordinary, and yet so difficult for so many to believe in or understand. It makes a lot of very smart people uncomfortable; they have an intense desire for creativity in their lives or businesses, but they can’t just purchase it like a material thing or control it like a process in a factory.

To manifest your creativity you must believe deeply in the emotional elements and patiently invest in them. Once you find your creativity, it must be encouraged and enhanced, not controlled. The best of the best—the Apples, Nikes, Michael Jordans, Andy Warhols, Meryl Streeps of the world—have it; they protect it, believe in it, and as long as they stay true to their essence they’ll continue to reap the benefits that come with creative thinking and living.

The value of creativity is the difference between the branded price and the commodity price of a product, service, idea, or person.

Let’s discuss our Swoosh-less Nike sneaker for a moment. My guess is that if you removed the branding from a pair of Nike Dunk sneakers, they would be worth no more than twenty-five percent of their retail price. That means that at least seventy-five percent of the value of a Nike sneaker is tied up in the emotional elements you can’t see or touch, the intangibles. But just because you can’t see them or touch them doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

While Sweetgreen specializes in serving healthy salads and grain bowls, there are doz- ens of salad and health food restaurant groups that do the same. It is Sweetgreen’s commitment to their higher purpose that sets them apart.

This combination of the internal, intangible emotional jour- ney and the practical skill of making music—the “heartwork and headwork,” as Rubin calls it—is how he’s sustained his craft across genres for so many decades. He taps into something far beyond the type of music or production style, and instead connects to the artist through a first-principle truth: that their greatest work can only come from manifesting and sharing a reflection of their true purpose.

While making inexpensive furniture may be what IKEA does prac- tically, the vision of “creating a better everyday life” for people has emotional resonance we can rally behind. These are the words of a movement, and I would argue that without them, Ikea would be much less successful. Combine commitment to a meaningful purpose with flawless execution and it makes the difference between the world’s largest furniture retailer and a local purveyor of cheap junk.