via CreativityPost
1. You are creative.
The artist is not a special
person, each one of us is a special kind of artist. Every one of us is
born a creative, spontaneous thinker. The only difference between people
who are creative and people who are not is a simple belief. Creative
people believe they are creative. People who believe they are not
creative, are not. Once you have a particular identity and set of
beliefs about yourself, you become interested in seeking out the skills
needed to express your identity and beliefs. This is why people who
believe they are creative become creative. If you believe you are not
creative, then there is no need to learn how to become creative and you
don't. The reality is that believing you are not creative excuses you
from trying or attempting anything new. When someone tells you that they
are not creative, you are talking to someone who has no interest and
will make no effort to be a creative thinker.
2. Creative thinking is work.
You
must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the
process of creating new and different ideas. Then you must have patience
to persevere against all adversity. All creative geniuses work
passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which
are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by the major poets than
by minor poets. Thomas Edison created 3000 different ideas for lighting
systems before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music,
including forty-one symphonies and some forty-odd operas and masses,
during his short creative life. Rembrandt produced around 650 paintings
and 2,000 drawings and Picasso executed more than 20,000 works.
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Some were masterpieces, while others were
no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were
simply bad.
3. You must go through the motions of being creative.
When you are producing ideas, you are replenishing neurotransmitters
linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to what
your brain is doing, which in turn is responding to challenges. When you
go through the motions of trying to come up with new ideas, you are
energizing your brain by increasing the number of contacts between
neurons. The more times you try to get ideas, the more active your brain
becomes and the more creative you become. If you want to become an
artist and all you did was paint a picture every day, you will become an
artist. You may not become another Vincent Van Gogh, but you will
become more of an artist than someone who has never tried.
4. Your brain is not a computer.
Your brain is a
dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than
computes them like a computer. It thrives on the creative energy of
feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can synthesize
experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The human brain
cannot tell the difference between an "actual" experience and an
experience imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what
enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with imaginary
scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas about space and time. One
day, for example, he imagined falling in love. Then he imagined meeting
the woman he fell in love with two weeks after he fell in love. This
led to his theory of acausality. The same process of synthesizing
experience allowed Walt Disney to bring his fantasies to life.
5. There is no one right answer.
Reality is
ambiguous. Aristotle said it is either A or not-A. It cannot be both.
The sky is either blue or not blue. This is black and white thinking as
the sky is a billion different shades of blue. A beam of light is either
a wave or not a wave (A or not-A). Physicists discovered that light can
be either a wave or particle depending on the viewpoint of the
observer. The only certainty in life is uncertainty. When trying to get
ideas, do not censor or evaluate them as they occur. Nothing kills
creativity faster than self-censorship of ideas while generating them.
Think of all your ideas as possibilities and generate as many as you can
before you decide which ones to select. The world is not black or
white. It is grey.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
Always
strive to find a better one and continue until you have one that is
still better. In 1862, Phillip Reis demonstrated his invention which
could transmit music over the wires. He was days away from improving it
into a telephone that could transmit speech. Every communication expert
in Germany dissuaded him from making improvements, as they said the
telegraph is good enough. No one would buy or use a telephone. Ten years
later, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Spencer Silver
developed a new adhesive for 3M that stuck to objects but could easily
be lifted off. It was first marketed as a bulletin board adhesive so the
boards could be moved easily from place to place. There was no market
for it. Silver didn't discard it. One day Arthur Fry, another 3M
employee, was singing in the church's choir when his page marker fell
out of his hymnal. Fry coated his page markers with Silver's adhesive
and discovered the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without
damaging the page. Hence the Post-it Notes were born. Thomas Edison was
always trying to spring board from one idea to another in his work. He
spring boarded his work from the telephone (sounds transmitted) to the
phonograph (sounds recorded) and, finally, to motion pictures (images
recorded).
7. Expect the experts to be negative.
The more
expert and specialized a person becomes, the more their mindset becomes
narrowed and the more fixated they become on confirming what they
believe to be absolute. Consequently, when confronted with new and
different ideas, their focus will be on conformity. Does it conform
with what I know is right? If not, experts will spend all their time
showing and explaining why it can't be done and why it can't work. They
will not look for ways to make it work or get it done because this might
demonstrate that what they regarded as absolute is not absolute at all.
This is why when Fred Smith created Federal Express, every delivery
expert in the U.S. predicted its certain doom. After all, they said, if
this delivery concept was doable, the Post Office or UPS would have done
it long ago.
8. Trust your instincts.
Don't allow yourself to
get discouraged. Albert Einstein was expelled from school because his
attitude had a negative effect on serious students; he failed his
university entrance exam and had to attend a trade school for one year
before finally being admitted; and was the only one in his graduating
class who did not get a teaching position because no professor would
recommend him. One professor said Einstein was "the laziest dog" the
university ever had. Beethoven's parents were told he was too stupid to
be a music composer. Charles Darwin's colleagues called him a fool and
what he was doing "fool's experiments" when he worked on his theory of
biological evolution. Walt Disney was fired from his first job on a
newspaper because "he lacked imagination." Thomas Edison had only two
years of formal schooling, was totally deaf in one ear and was hard of
hearing in the other, was fired from his first job as a newsboy and
later fired from his job as a telegrapher; and still he became the most
famous inventor in the history of the U.S.
9. There is no such thing as failure.
Whenever
you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail. You have
learned something that does not work. Always ask "What have I learned
about what doesn't work?", "Can this explain something that I didn't set
out to explain?", and "What have I discovered that I didn't set out to
discover?" Whenever someone tells you that they have never made a
mistake, you are talking to someone who has never tried anything new.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral. They have
no meaning. You give them meaning by the way you choose to interpret
them. If you are a priest, you see evidence of God everywhere. If you
are an atheist, you see the absence of God everywhere. IBM observed that
no one in the world had a personal computer. IBM interpreted this to
mean there was no market. College dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs,
looked at the same absence of personal computers and saw a massive
opportunity. Once Thomas Edison was approached by an assistant while
working on the filament for the light bulb. The assistant asked Edison
why he didn't give up. "After all," he said, "you have failed 5000
times." Edison looked at him and told him that he didn't understand what
the assistant meant by failure, because, Edison said, "I have
discovered 5000 things that don't work." You construct your own reality
by how you choose to interpret your experiences.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms.
Do
not trust your first perspective of a problem as it will be too biased
toward your usual way of thinking. Always look at your problem from
multiple perspectives. Always remember that genius is finding a
perspective no one else has taken. Look for different ways to look at
the problem. Write the problem statement several times using different
words. Take another role, for example, how would someone else see it,
how would Jay Leno, Pablo Picasso, George Patton see it? Draw a picture
of the problem, make a model, or mold a sculpture. Take a walk and look
for things that metaphorically represent the problem and force
connections between those things and the problem (How is a broken store
window like my communications problem with my students?) Ask your
friends and strangers how they see the problem. Ask a child. How would a
ten year old solve it? Ask a grandparent. Imagine you are the problem.
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at
change.
12. Learn to think unconventionally.
Creative
geniuses do not think analytically and logically. Conventional, logical,
analytical thinkers are exclusive thinkers which means they exclude all
information that is not related to the problem. They look for ways to
eliminate possibilities. Creative geniuses are inclusive thinkers which
mean they look for ways to include everything, including things that are
dissimilar and totally unrelated. Generating associations and
connections between unrelated or dissimilar subjects is how they provoke
different thinking patterns in their brain. These new patterns lead to
new connections which give them a different way to focus on the
information and different ways to interpret what they are focusing on.
This is how original and truly novel ideas are created. Albert Einstein
once famously remarked "Imagination is more important than knowledge.
For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while
imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to
know and understand."
And, finally, Creativity is paradoxical.
To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must
see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder,
must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates,
must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the
same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire
success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and
must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
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