Creativity Squared: Why Creativity Is Like a Massive Filing Cabinet with Sarah Sherman

Sarah is a creative director with a strategist mentality and deep experience across storytelling mediums. At SpecialGuest, she leads teams of creatives in developing global campaigns for innovative technology clients, including Bumble, Meta, and IBM. Prior to that, she built the video team at The Atlantic magazine's award-winning brand studio and produced documentary series for CNN, Al Jazeera America, and CMT - as well as independent films available on Netflix and PBS. She has also developed brand, content, and creative marketing strategies for start-ups and legacy brands, including Playboy, Oatly, and Foundation, the premiere NFT marketplace. She attended Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in history, and currently lives in the Bay Area with her husband, son, and two beloved pitbulls. 

Person

I’m a type-A hyper-empath. It’s a classic case of personality flaws (i.e. neuroticism and enmeshment) fuelling my effectiveness with creative work. I’m intense and impassioned - there are very few things about which I don’t have an opinion. But I’m also a pretty good hang. I like to see the world with humour and a half-caff Americano.

I think there are both innate and learned elements to creativity. I think of creativity kind of like a massive filing cabinet. You can learn to fill it with inspiration and life experience and knowledge. You can replicate other people’s organisational systems. But being able to instantly pull single sentences from pages in different folders and bring them together as something that clicks - that feels like the untrainable magic that even ultra-creative people can’t really explain.

People see me as an extravert, but at some point I learned that the essential difference between these two types is whether you derive energy from other people or from time with yourself. I am the latter. I’m a social person, a talker. The spotlight is fun. But when I need grounding, I do it in a quiet house with my dogs Jerry and Elaine. 

I have a cyclical relationship with routine. I need it, but then at a certain point, I feel suffocated and bored and have to blow it up.

Product 

When assessing whether an idea or piece of work is truly creative, it’s easier for me to think about this in the context of movies and shows. I have a lot of respect for work that breaks formats and genres. It’s one thing to tell a story in a really skilled way, but to actually take an altogether new approach requires original thinking. Whether or not you like him, Tim Robinson is sort of doing this with comedy, which isn’t something you’d think could be fundamentally reinvented. He kind of wrote new rules. That makes me excited at a moment when it’s easy to feel like everything has been done before. 

Early on I think I was distracted by beauty. If things looked really cool and beautiful, then they must be good. Now I know that concept is everything.

I’m extremely critical of my work and tend to forget the circumstances that led to this or that creative sacrifice. But some of the work I’m proudest of actually stands out in my mind because of the challenges we overcame in the making of it. 

The Bumble 'Finally' campaign is a good example of this. Summer 2021 was an absolutely insane moment for an industry built on pinpointing the cultural mood and showing up in a relevant way. Was Covid over? Could we celebrate yet? Despite that, we were able to make a joyful, visceral campaign that made people feel something and set the dating app apart. I’m also super proud of what we did for Beat Saber to launch the Lizzo Music Pack at a moment of major transition for Meta Reality Labs. We were able to make a campaign that approached the game through a mainstream cultural lens and helped define Beat Saber as an immersive music brand. Working with a VMA-winning music video director and choreographer was also a major highlight.

Process

I like to start a campaign or project totally by myself. After I’ve read all the material (brief, brand guidelines, etc.), I have to just swim around in my own head for a while. The best is when I can be doing something with my body while I think. I’ll often go for a walk or a run and jot down or record notes while I’m moving. Sometimes I’ll even run water over my feet in the bathtub (this is a weird one that started in college when I wrote entire papers perched on the edge of the tub). Often the worst thing for me at the beginning is a brainstorm with other people.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I started taking notes in a physical notebook as part of a larger analogue lean, and it totally changed the way I consolidate ideas and remember things. Techniques that don’t work for me are whiteboarding. I deeply do not get it. Unclear why.

When it comes to starting a project, I believe there is no such thing as a blank sheet. You know when you learn a new word and then suddenly see it everywhere? That happens to me a lot with work inspiration. I’ll read something extraordinarily random and then the next day, it will manifest as the perfect early reference for an idea. It’s kind of all about passive absorption for me.

I prefer to work alone at the beginning for purely generative thinking. But then collaboratively to hone in on the idea. And then alone to refine/tweak/kill. Stepping away from the vehicle is best when it comes to the hard bits of a project. There is truly no replacement for getting a tiny bit of space from something and unclenching my brain. 

Press

I grew up in New York City, which is a firehose of stimuli. My mom was a costume designer and my dad was a set designer. Watching them in their creative flow states and seeing them trust their own subconscious process without fully understanding it themselves was foundational.

I honed my craft by working alongside really talented people, like Jeremy Elias at The Atlantic (now global head of editorial at Oatly) and Aaron Duffy, our ECD at SpecialGuest. Also learning how to hear and appreciate constructive feedback—not something that comes naturally to me (anyone?).

When it comes to my own creativity, I have to change environments a lot because I can wear out the vibes of a space. Moving shakes up new thinking for me. Also music and clatter in a busy coffee shop. And Caffeine. Stress and deadlines are motivating in the articulating and refinement stage, but the bigger thinking requires marination if I want something good.

Creative burnout is real. Before you start an engagement, do your absolute best to make sure the brief is as solid as possible and that you know which stakeholders need to get involved and when. Mid/late stage redirects come with a morale tax that can go unacknowledged and impact the quality of work. 

The best way to facilitate creativity is to ask people to communicate their personal work styles and the kinds of collaboration that allow them to be their most creative. Listen to those answers and try to honour them as much as possible throughout projects.