Creativity does not happen inside people’s heads but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.
Creativity: Now You Know!
- Creative individuals tend to operate at the extremes.
- The creative process is recursive, not linear. Mental meandering to allow the commingling of ideas is an essential process.
- Creativity comes from the heart. There is no other motivation other than the joy of discovering something new.
- One cannot be exceptional and normal at the same time.
- Stay curious. Try new things. Make time for reflection and relaxation.
One of the values in walking to work is mental meandering. Or if driving, not to have the car radio on…Mental meandering, mind wandering and so on, is an essential process. If you are allowing that mentation to be driven by the radio or the television or other people’s conversations, you are just cutting down on your intellectual exploratory time.
Elements Of Finding Flow
- There are clear goals every step of the way.
- There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.
- There is a balance between challenges and skills.
- Actions and awareness are merged.
- Distractions are excluded from consciousness.
- There is no worry of failure.
- Self-consciousness disappears.
- The sense of time becomes distorted.
- The activity becomes autotelic. You do it just for the sake of the activity itself.
The Ways Of Creative People
- Creative people are curious
- Parental support is instrumental in helping children succeed amidst a poor or socially marginal background.
- Creative people seem to come from exceptionally supportive childhoods or very deprived and challenging ones.
- Focus, or drive, is the second quality behind curiosity that sets creative individuals apart from their peers.
- Creative individuals don’t have a career. They create their own career.
Traits Of A Creative Person
- Creative people have complex personalities. They have the ability to move from one extreme to the other as needed.
- Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.
- Creative individuals tend to be smart yet also naive at the same time.
- They are both playful and disciplined; responsible and irresponsible.
- Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.
- Creative people seem to be both introverted and extroverted.
You must always have an obsession. You must always have too little time instead of too much
Five Steps Of The Creative Process
- Preparation: Immersing oneself in the problem and sparking curiosity
- Incubation: Time to allow the ideas to church around in the subconscious where unusual connections can be made
- Insight: The “Aha!” moment
- Evaluation: Deciding whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing
- Elaboration: The hard work of implementing and realizing the solution
Motivating Creativity
Creative people all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or making money that drives them; rather, it is the opportunity to do the work that they enjoy doing.
Most people enjoy “designing or discovering something new.”
We are also motivated by the force of entropy. It gives us pleasure when we are comfortable, when we relax, or when we can get away with feeling good without expending energy.
Even the most creative person must overcome the barrier of entropy. It is impossible to accomplish something that is truly new and worthwhile without struggling with it.
Enhance your Creativity
- When we live with creativity, we banish boredom.
- Stop wasting energy on selfish goals. Explore the world around you for its own sake. Be curious.
- Try to be surprised by something every day.
- Try to surprise at least one person every day.
- Keep a journal and write these things down.
- Wake up with a specific goal to look forward to.
- Review your day the night before and choose a particular task that is relatively interesting and exciting.
- Things become more fun the better we get at them.
- Have clear goals and expectations, focus on the consequences of your actions, concentrate without distractions.
How Creative Is Our Idea
Criteria For An Idea to Be Considered “Creative”:
- Be couched in terms that are understandable to others.
- Pass muster with the experts in the field.
- Be included in the cultural domain to which it belongs.
A Creative Surrounding
One must be in a position to access the domain in which one plans to work. Information is not distributed evenly in space but is clumped in different geographical nodes.
Novel stimulation is not evenly distributed. Some environments have a greater density of interaction and provide more excitement and a greater effervescence of ideas.
Ideas for Creating an Inspiring Environment
The evidence suggests that unusual and beautiful surroundings may in face help us see situations more holistically and from novel viewpoints.
How one spends time in a beautiful natural setting seems to matter as well. Just sitting and watching is fine, but taking a leisurely walk seems to be even better.
