The best judge of your ideas isn’t your boss–it’s your co-workers
While creators aren’t much better at judging their own ideas (they tend to overvalue them), they are good at evaluating the ideas of their peers. Berg hypothesizes this is because creators are more likely to engage in both divergent thinking—coming up with new ideas—as well as convergent thinking—evaluating them based on prior experience. Managers tend to do mostly convergent thinking. Interestingly, employees Berg calls “hybrids,” creators with some managerial responsibility, scored in between the pure creators and pure bosses. Essentially, as the job requires more convergent thinking, employees lose their ability to predict success.
This might explain why I’ve also felt much less creative in life as well.