Are you creative?
Do you have what it takes not just to live well, but to produce work innovative and original enough to change the world?
Maybe your jaw clenched after that last line.
I don’t blame you.
Creativity is confusing, intimidating, and downright scary. It’s nothing if not a loaded subject.
We’ve developed preconceived notions about what it takes to be creative. Many of us – myself included – like to distance ourselves off from this very human process. Creativity is reserved for “creative people.” It comes easy for them. But not for squares like us!
Which brings us to the heart of the issue: is creativity innate, or something we can develop?
It takes some digging to get to the truth.
Dissecting The Creative State of Mind
You’re probably well aware of how useful creativity is. Coming up with groundbreaking ideas on command can help you regardless of what kind of life you’re trying to live.
Not to mention being creative is just fun…
Most of us spend too much time plodding around in the carefully-constructed boxes society creates for us. It’s only natural that we get tired of paying that game. Sometimes we just want to flip over the board and try something new.
Assuming, just for a moment, that creativity can be developed, how would you do it?
It’s a mental skill. That’s what makes it tricky. It’s way easier to break down physical skills into manageable, trainable tasks.
Say you’re training for your first marathon. An intimidating thought, for sure. But breaking it down into smaller elements – proper stride, pacing, finding the right running shoe, nutrition, etc. – make it less so. Books arrange those topics into formulas you can follow.
But trying to train creativity?
That sounds tricky for even the staunchest control freak. Ask 100 people how they’d do, and you’d get just as many answers.
So much of creativity seems individual. In our best experiences, we feel more like receivers than active participants. The challenge is to capture all the creativity bursting through us in those moments – like radios tuned to the right frequency before the transmission inevitably turns back to static.
With that said, just because creativity is mental doesn’t mean we can’t train it.
How to Train Your Creativity
How did famous creatives become that way?
I decided to dig into their habits, and am incorporating eight of them to be more creative in my life:
1. Make Generating Ideas a Habit
As children, we’re creative all the time. Because we’re just responding to the way we’re wired naturally without fear of criticism, being creative becomes a habit we do every day.
It’s easy to fall out of that creative habit when we’re older, though. Decades of being told to sit down, shut up, and follow the rules will do that to even the most stubborn individual.
That’s why I’m working consciously now to rebuild the creative habit. The incredible blogger James Altucher gave me the idea of how to do this.
Altucher’s prescription is simple. All you have to do is write down 10 ideas a day. They can be about anything. Pet names, business ideas, things that scare you. Whatever. The key is to force yourself to come up with 10 every day.
This flexes your idea muscle. Writing them down is important too because it sends a signal to your brain to pay better attention. Simply knowing you’ll have to write down ideas today makes you more observant of details you would have missed.
2. Give Your Ideas Time to Incubate
Time is creativity’s greatest ally.
Forcing yourself to generate a lot of ideas is a great skill to develop. But learning to let those ideas marinate and choose the best one is just as important.
You have to give your mind time to breathe. If you come to a roadblock thinking of a problem, one of the most productive things you can do is to step away and engage in a different task.
This explains why over 70 percent of us have creative ideas in the shower! Our subconscious minds are incredibly powerful; they just need time and space to work.
Breaking the routine, stepping away, and sleeping give your ideas time to incubate. This is tough for me to follow because I get so impatient. I want to fill those plot holes in the novel I’m writing now. But the answer is usually to chill out and let my brain work behind the scenes.
3. Surround Yourself with Beauty, Creativity, and Inspiration
We are products of our environment. We can’t escape its influence. So we might as well make it a good one!
For many of us, our environment means a drab cubicle and a computer monitor. Shuffling through papers and dealing with the same coworker drama every single week. When everything around you is sucking our your soul, how could you feel inspired?
That’s why I’m working on tweaking my environment (wherever I can) to inspire me to be creative. My apartment walls are still pretty bare, but I’ve at least hung up a few cool art posters and found a home for my record player.
Some people love keeping toys on their desks. What you choose isn’t important – as long as it inspires you. Wherever you can, alter your environment to feed your creativity instead of drain it.
“Environment” also includes the people you hang around and the media you consume. Who do you think will feel more inspired: Suzie after a reality TV marathon with her negative friends? Or Bob after a trip to the art museum with his college professor?
Nurture your creativity like you’d nurture a delicate plant. Water it, and make sure it gets enough sunlight to grow healthy and strong.
4. Collect Experiences
Creativity isn’t coming up with novel ideas; it’s combining different ideas in novel ways.
That’s why it’s vital to open ourselves up to as many different experiences as possible!
The more experiences we have, the more raw materials our minds have to work with. Then, tomorrow or 10 years from now, a creative idea bursts forth. Often when we least expect it.
If you follow the exact same routine every day, you’re limiting your ability to be creative. At the very least, you can change aspects of how you get through your days without abandoning structure entirely.
You might work at the same time every day, but what if you tried a different route there? What if you ate different ethnic cuisine for a whole week straight? Seemingly small tweaks are often enough to spur different levels of thinking.
Creative geniuses all have one thing in common: a willingness for different experiences.
Take eastern mysticism, a love for typography, and LSD, and you get a Steve Jobs.
Get out there and travel. Go to the other side of the tracks. Build up your raw creative material, and don’t be afraid of being labeled unconventional or eccentric.
5. Ask Different Questions
Some of the best creative insights aren’t solutions; they’re simply different questions.
Take Henry Ford. While his engineers puzzled how to make car assembly more efficient (the current process was for people to gather around each car as they assembled it), he asked a different question: What if we moved the car parts instead of the workers? The assembly line was born.
If you don’t like the answers your mind is giving you, it’s time to ask some different questions.
This is why Sherlock Holmes is silent when first investigating a mystery. His sidekick Watson jumps to conclusions quickly. But Holmes doesn’t make any snap judgments; he coolly, carefully considers the possibilities.
We can’t be afraid to turn the problem on its head. What if the problem wasn’t a problem at all, but an asset? What if instead of “either or” the question was how to do “both?”
6. Get Moving
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Creativity doesn’t happen within the comfy walls of your home. It happens out there, in the real world where things get messy.
The mind and body are inextricably linked. Watch a kid create something, and there’s usually a flurry of activity. They’re running around, making voices and acting out the whims of their imagination.
This explains why some of the most prolific geniuses loved walking and other physical activities. An active body supports an active mind. It also gives your ideas time to incubate as you mull over a problem or brainstorm a creative solution.
7. Let Yourself Be Bored
I firmly believe that we get creative ideas all day long. The problem is the voices are so soft most of us don’t hear them.
It’s easy to figure out why. From the moment we get up until we’re asleep, we’re swimming in a torrent of music, social media feeds, and conversations. The external stimuli drown out the creative voices.
The answer, then, is to pull away from those things and listen closer to the creative voices.
When’s the last time you sat quietly and just… allowed yourself to be bored?
I’m serious. Most of us haven’t done this for years. Not today, when hopping online or checking your texts is within arm’s reach.
It’s time to practice being bored. It sounds lame. But it might be just what you need to get into a receptive state and hear what your creativity is already telling you.
Try this for five minutes a day. Shut off all the electronics. Get away from the crowd and just allow yourself to be in isolation. If you find yourself getting bored, awesome! That happens right before your creativity steps in to entertain you.
8. Become Prolific
The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work… It is only by going through a volume of work that… the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. – Ira Glass
The last suggestion I have for you is the most important one.
The best way to become more creative is to… keep creating.
Shocking, I know. But it’s amazing how easy it is to overlook this. It’s easier to agonize for years over creating something perfect instead of getting to work, finishing, then starting again.
The more time you spend creating, the better your skills become. The easier it is for you to slip into that judgment-free creative “zone” where there is only you and your unfiltered thoughts.
You can’t force yourself to become more creative on command. But you can force yourself to create more work.
The more ideas you work through, the better your chances of finding something revolutionary. This also keeps you from developing weird emotional attachments to a single work. It’s easier to move past bad feedback when your mind is already on the next project.
Picasso made more than 50,000 works of art. Mozart composed more then 600 musical pieces. Jimi Hendrix made around 70 albums – and he died at age 27!
If you want to become someone legendary – someone whose works echo through eternity – your best bet is to keep swinging.
I Have to Believe It (or I’d Be Miserable)
The techniques above give me solid reasons to believe I can train my creativity (and so can you). They’ve worked for some of the world’s great creative geniuses; they can work for us too.
But my strongest reason runs deeper than that: faith.
Here’s how I see this. I’m propelled to create. It is my compulsion. I’ve seen what kind of person I become when I bottle it up and refuse to give in. I don’t want any part of that again.
So I’m going to create regardless.
If I take the fixed view on creativity – that some people are just naturally creative while others aren’t – I’m resigning myself to a lifetime of disappointment. Every creative moment becomes another opportunity to beat myself up about not being more creative, or getting jealous of the artists whom I admire.
But if I take the dynamic view – that it’s something we can develop over time – every day becomes an opportunity to explore. Failures sting less. I know that, if I keep pushing, I’ll eventually find one of those ideas that makes everyone stand back and go hmm.
Creativity isn’t so much an act of learning as it is forgetting and remembering. Forgetting past failures and the fear of what people think. And remembering those feelings we had as children, when someone handed us some crayons and we just went wild.
The more creative work you do, the easier it is to get lost in the process. The easier it is to reclaim that sheer exhilaration.
Everyone Can Be More Creative
Every child is an artist; the problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. – Pablo Picasso
I don’t think being more creative is like becoming a professional athlete or Nobel prize-winning physicist.
For top performers like those, it takes the perfect combination of genetics and experience. A guy who is hardly five feet tall and 100 pounds just isn’t going to become the next NFL sensation. No matter how hard he works.
It’s like role-playing games too. A priest or rogue with maxed out experience points won’t ever be as strong as a barbarian with the same experience points. The classes are built differently.
Creativity is different.
We were all children once. There was a beautiful time when we were impervious to self-doubt. An era when we followed our ideas with reckless abandon without stressing about looking foolish. We were massively creative.
That means we have all the “genetics” required to reclaim creativity in adulthood. To create is to be human.
If we all have the parts required, what separates the earth-shakers from the rest is the effort they put in to reclaiming that creativity. There’s nothing holding us back other than our own mental hangups about looking silly or failure.
Will those things happen in a creative life?
Absolutely!
But they’re all part of the process. Keep at it, and you’ll realize you’re still okay. Even after all the bumps and bruises.
The World Needs Your Unique Contribution
The world needs nothing more than your unique contribution.
Roll your eyes and scoff all you want, but deep down you know it’s true.
Inside each one of us lives a crackling radio – one dying to be tuned to the right creative frequency.
Will you do just that, and face the self-doubt and criticism head on?
Or will you die with the song still inside you, unheard of except in your dreams?
The choice, as always, is yours.
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With thanks, Ample posts.