The same concept applies to our mental space: Articulate a controversial, thoughtful or offensive message towards someone, and you’ll cross that line through his mental comfort-zone. This will garner a reaction, spoken or unspoken, and a memory of the confrontation.

If you approach this space — tiptoeing to the delicate edge of unease without crossing over — people sense it. This is an optimal line to constantly approach with ideas. It’s how people remember them.

I had just gotten off of the phone with the seasoned CEO and founder of a startup I was doing a gig for a little less than a year ago. I loved what the company was attempting to accomplish, but I believed the legal fees necessary to scale the company would absorb their cash reserves before a marketable product was ready to ship. The ecstatic screaming about the income statement was in response to my worrisome, while less experienced, remarks about their business model.

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The CEO was analyzing the accounting documents of public companies with similar business models and infrastructure. He realized, and I would also eventually, that just because the legal fees had the potential to barricade the company’s goal and marketability in the short run, it didn’t mean they couldn’t generate revenue concurrently by bootstrapping what they did have, rather than what they planned to have in the future.

It’s important to consider that businesses often appear as if they generate one revenue stream, but actually generate numerous, concurrent revenue streams behind the public eye. For example, UPS isn’t just a shipping company and Amazon isn’t just a retailer. Some of these unique practices are so obscure you’d never know the company was profiting from them unless you looked at their financial statements.

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When the phone call winded down, the CEO spit out a few examples from the complimentary companies he was analyzing. I remember the example he provided dealt with one of the few successful music startups at the time. The company was not only providing a consumer subscription service, but behind the scenes was licensing music to other platforms, selling ring tones and even providing anonymous user data to advertisers.

Consider these two models of concurrent revenue streams:

1. Moby has the best selling electronica album of all time, Play. While the album dominated the charts for a few years, Moby found success by commercializing his creativity to less obvious (at least in 1999) markets: licensing. According to Wired, the tracks on Play have been “sold hundreds of times for commercials, movies, and TV shows – a licensing venture so staggeringly lucrative that the album was a financial success months before it reached its multi-platinum sales total.” Listen to the album. Even if you’ve never heard of Moby, you will probably recognize a handful of tracks just from being alive during its prominence.

2. Google is now hiring bond traders. While most major corporations utilize financial analysts to hedge foreign cash flows, it’s rumored Google may be using their vast data sets to build and run a hedge fund. Legalities aside, they have the valuable data to pull it off, as would a company like Facebook

These are examples of concurrent engineering applied to sales and marketing. It’s similar to flipping the stick, except you aren’t flipping anything; you’re just being resourceful with your stick. Moby is a musician, but he’s also a brand and advertiser. Google is a search engine, but they are also a hedge fund and hundreds of other things.

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Since the original phone call, I’ve dispersed the concurrent engineering advice to not only my own company, but to numerous artists, musicians and brands. Just because the thing you eventually want to sell isn’t ready, it doesn’t mean what you do have, right now, isn’t marketable.

Creativity falls into a category of traits often claimed but rarely defined. My observations tell me this happens for three reasons:

One, the word has sex appeal. Similar to “entrepreneur,” it’s become marketable and desirable for someone to claim he is a “creative,” even if he’s not. The second, most authentically, is communicated by someone who creates things while lacking the acuteness to articulate what he is creating. The third is communicated by someone who claims a creative philosophy, but is ignorant to communicating his reasoning.

The distinctions play a role in the unique war occurring between the opposing poles of popular culture: art and marketing. I categorize art as original work derived from the hands and minds of the second and third distinctions. Historically, art has generated new cultural movements. The subsequent mass marketing is a collection of messages recycled from the original art, often developed by individuals in the first distinction.

Both art and marketing can, and do, stand on their own, but are more effective when combined. For instance, for a painting to reach mass appeal and commercial success, it needs to be created by the artist, while most effectively marketed by a second party, such as a museum. Likewise, a marketing campaign will prove influential when its guts have been created by the unique work of an artist.

Today’s original art is reflective of today’s mass marketing and media, rather than the other way around. Consider the following two examples:

The Banksy-influenced street artist Mr. Brainwash currently has an exhibit displaying colorful pop portraits in a spacious New York warehouse reminiscent in style of Andy Warhol, including quirky prints of Obama, Kate Moss, Keith Haring, a taxi cab in a toy box and broken record outlines of pop figures Slash, Jay-Z, David Bowie and Sid Vicious. Mr. Brainwash leveraged existing, pre-marketed trends, repackaged them and resold his art to an existing culture and new audience.

Or, take the Significant Objects project, where writers develop original stories around insignificant objects, crowning them significant, subsequently selling the items on eBay for more then they are “worth.” The objects, often just everyday items, increase in value because of the original narrative wrapped around them. Similar to the Mr. Brainwash exhibit, an existing culture has been repackaged, redesigned and recycled for a likely new audience.

Art has become so recycled and repetitive that one meme’s high quickly fades until the next hit. Today’s artist isn’t an individual; he’s been reduced to another, for lack of a better word, remixer.

Present culture is faced with a cyclical dilemma: Artists aren’t starting trends, they are repackaging them. Mass marketing, to its benefit, has become so relevant that it’s viewed as inspiration by today’s creatives. With any period of inflection–a loophole exists. There is a rare opportunity to lead a wave of artists that create the culture, rather than simply reflect it.

Who will be part of it?