Creativity

How can you be more creative?

We ALL have the potential for greatness – IF we can learn to tap into our inner creative genius. 

In order to do this – YOU WILL NEED (apparently..)

·      Sleep – boosts our creativity and giving us the ability upon awakening to solve problems.

·      Exercise – Boosts creative thinking. This boost lasts for a few hours.

·      Daydreams – One of the most important things you can do in your life. Daydreaming provides us with the inspiration to think of new ideas, just stop for a moment and look at the world – Imagine. Far from a waste of time. If you do find yourself stuck on a particular problem, think about something else for a while – overthinking the idea will stifle your creativity. 

·      Education- Studying something else (that may be far away from your area of expertise ) will allow you to look at things from a new angle allowing you to think of NEW ideas and maybe even making you look back on previous ideas.

·      Challenges – For example, you can trigger innovative thinking by putting yourself in situations that create fear. 

·      Notebook or PDA – Kept by the side of your bed, or in your pocket, you can note down your inspiration and visions the moment you think of them. 

One famous example of inspiration and creativity was that of Robert Louis Stevenson who said that the idea for his 1886 book “The strange case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde” came to him in a dream.

Where does creativity come from?

Where good Ideas come from – Steven Johnson

From an environmental point of view; where are the spaces that historically led to unusual levels of creativity and innovation? After research it turns out that there are recurring patterns that are crucial to creating environments of unusual levels of innovation.

One pattern- called the “slow hunch”, states that these creative ideas never come straight away in moments of inspiration - they take years to develop and spend a long time just in the background. It isn’t until the idea has had varying amounts of YEARS to mature that it becomes useful and accessible to us. This is generally because good ideas come from the collision of smaller hunches, creating something bigger. There are many examples in the history of innovation of people with half an idea. One great example would be Tim Berners-Lee and the creation of the internet, a creation that took ten years.  When he started however, he didn’t have the finished version of “the internet” in his head. He went along completing small projects, many of which he scrapped and only after ten years did the full vision of “the internet” come into being. This is, more often than not, how ideas “happen”. They need time to “incubate”. 

An important factor though, is that when ideas are in this state of “incubation”, they need to collide with other ideas. In common situations, it is often a hunch in another persons mind that collides with one in yours to create a breakthrough. In order for this though, you need a system to generate these “hunches” into breakthroughs. That is why the coffee houses from ‘The age of Enlightenment’, for example, were such engines for creativity – they allowed a space for ideas to mingle, swap and form into greater forms.

Looking at the problems concerning innovation form a different perspective, it sheds light on an important and current issue – “What influence is the internet having on our brains?”. Are we being overwhelmed by an always connected, multi-task lifestyle? And are these less sophisticated thoughts going to lead us away from more contemplative states such as reading? It is important to remember however that the great drive in scientific and technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity and our ability to reach out and share our ideas with other people, borrow their hunches, combine them with our own and create something new. That has been, in my view, the primary engine in fueling creativity and innovation over the last six or seven hundred years. 

But it is true that we have become more distracted. But the miraculous and recent change is the number of new ways in which we can now connect with other people and find that missing piece of the jigsaw that will complete the idea we are working on. Or stumble unexpectedly upon a piece of information that will generate more ideas, or “hunches, to add to our own.