I recently read the book, “The Book of Doing and Being: Rediscovering Creativity in Life, Love, and Work” by Barnet Bain and totally loved it.
Not only did it inspire me to blow the cobwebs off my personal creative projects but it was also laden with practical exercises to help tone my creativity muscles. So this post will capture my synthesis on the topic.
So What is Creativity?
The best definition of creativity I found is this: the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules and patterns to create meaningful new ideas.
One of the very important things about creativity is that the new idea, the creative idea must have value. Far too many people who believe they are creative think that just being different for the sake of being different is creative. It is not, and that is what gets creativity a bad name.
So if you look at a door and you say, doors are normally rectangular–let’s make a triangle a door. Now unless you can show value for that, that is not creativity.
Edward de Bono
That is just being different for the sake of being different.
You Can Be More Creative In Any Pursuit
It’s very easy to believe that creativity is reserved for the talented few: specifically those in the arts. But creativity is a skill that can be built with practice, and it can also be injected into every area of your life: a business, a novel, an art form, a relationship, parenting.
Understand the Interplay of Forces Necessary for Creation
The process of creation usually combines two forces; being and doing, or inspiration and action.
Inspiration
Inspiration can come from anywhere.
I’ve always been the type of kid who lived in two worlds – there’s the real world there’s another one in my head. I might have written about this before but my favorite pastime was staging stories starring my stuffed bunny toy that I called Bugs Bunny from Hell.
I also have a great tendency to see things that don’t exist – which, depending on how you want to look at it, could make me either a visionary or a psycho.
It’s also why I take photographs even though all my friends will attest I’m not much of a photographer. What I try to capture is not exactly what’s there as much as it is what’s not there.
Take this picture for example [excuse the quality as this was taken back in 2010 when phone cameras were not the way they are today]
I took this picture one day as I was walking in Al Rahba Park not because I loved the bench too much but because I saw a young woman seated there with tears rolling down her cheeks.
There was a girl playing at her knees with a balloon, oblivious to the fact that her mother was crying.
At some point, the woman says, “Let’s go,” and something about her tone makes the girl lose her grip with the balloon and it starts to float away.
What was her story?
I don’t know.
Moments that Evoke Powerful Emotions
While I don’t know how normal this is, if you’re not naturally wired this way, and you’re trying to become more creative, look for moments that evoke powerful emotions as those are the gateway to creativity.
What catches your attention?
What makes you stop and wonder?
What resonates with you?
What moves your heart?
The underlying current of creativity is having the capacity to perceive, feel and imagine all possibilities – “the possibility to act, the possibility to make things, the possibility to build, to write business proposals and books, to have friendships, to create anything at all.”
But inspiration is never enough.
The next step is action.
Capture Your Ideas
Creatives are known to keep a notebook with them as they never know when inspiration would strike. Famous examples are Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and Richard Branson.
I think, our generation is more comfortable capturing our ideas on the Notes application of our phones, but there’s something magical about putting pen to paper and seeing ideas come to life through spilled ink.
Work With Your Ideas
Here you try to answer the question, what will you do with your ideas?
What thing of value can you turn it into? Can it be shared or sold?
This is the manifestation of the idea into something that would make some sort of impact in the world. This is the book, the blog post, the painting, the engineering design…etc.
Keep up with the momentum
This is the part where most of us fail. Many people have a great idea and want to complete a creative project but don’t have enough self-discipline to take an idea to completion.
In a previous post, I spoke about the crest and trough of the creative process as depicted by this graph (it’s so obvious how I was procrastinating on my blog when I was supposed to be working on my PhD).
The trick is to find enough motivation to get you through the trough.
It sounds simple, but it’s not…
And while I would love to go through the practical details on how to maintain momentum, I’d rather be procrastinating on something else…
So until the next post…