1. Know your audience.

Who are you talking to?  Who is this message for?  It’s very rare that a certain topic or message is for everyone.  If your target is everyone, you will very rarely make an impact.  If you choose certain topics/subjects to hit a certain subset of people and continually move that target to speak to many subsets, you’ll have tremendously more impact.  1. Know your audience.

2. Know what you’re specifically wanting to communicate and why.

“General” means generally bad.  “One Size Fits All” sounds really great, but let’s be honest; ONE SIZE FITS NO ONE.  If you don’t know specifically what you want to communicate, then no one else does either.  If you don’t know “Why” you want to communicate it, I guarantee you, nobody else does.

3. Define what success looks like.

If you don’t define what success looks like ahead of time, you will never know if you’re being successful or not.  By defining what your success will look like, you now have a goal that you are shooting for.  You can then measure if you hit it or not.  By doing so, you should then be able to determine what helped you attain your goal/success or what kept you from it.

These are by no means all of my rules for creativity but they are definitely 3 of the most important.  They serve as a great starting point.  If you can master these 3 in all of your creative projects, service, event, or message planning you will be well on your way to being more productive as well as being able to measure the success of what you’re doing.