How do you deal with rude and small minded people at work?

Can creative-minded people be organized and structured at work and/or in their lives?

• People generally assume that if someone is extremely creative that they give up being organized or structured at work or in their lives.  Is it true? Are there any examples either way?

• Answer:

  Goodness! This isn't true at all - especially not for successful artists. I have been an artist; I have worked in the art world for thirty years and I consult to artists worldwide. Almost all successful artists are very organized. They have to be - just like any business person - in order to get anything accomplished. They usually get up early and go right to work. They produce a great many paintings (if painting is what they do). They may have challenges working with their dealers, or with contracts, because linear thinking often isn't their strong suit, and I think it is this characteristic that gives rise to the "disorganzation" canard. Many artists - not all, but many - think in a more non-linear fashion that businesspeople or scientists do, or than conventional logic prescribes.   I call it "bubble thinking". When approaching a problem, a thought will often arise in an artist's head that seems unconnected to the problem. Then another thought will "pop up", and another, and another. This continues, and they kind of bounce around bumping together - not following  one-after-another in the nice railroad-car sequence that we think of as logical thought. But a solution occurs - often an extremely creative, "out of the box" solution. It can be difficult and frustrating for a choo-choo-train thinker to talk with a bubble-thinker sometimes, because they are on such different wavelengths. But both systems work very satisfactorily. Nonetheless, I think it is frustrated choo-choo train folks who have spread most of the rumors about artists being disorganized. Frankly, I think the number of artists and nonartists with messy lives and houses and   careers would probably come out about even if we did any sort of objective study on the matter. Creativity doesn't correlate with disorganization in my experience.....