Creativity > Edition 5 - Food for your brain

Hi and welcome to Day 5 of the Cultivating Creativity pop-up newsletter - 31 days of ideas about creativity and then it's gone!

To be creative, we need to feed our brain good food.

There is no right or wrong here. I hear people say that TV is a bad food for your brain - that's their preference for brain-food sources. It all depends on what you watch and how open your mind is to new ideas and patterns.

I often get more creative ideas about leadership from watching re-runs of Seinfeld, than I do reading one of the 2,000,000 books on leadership.

We're all different and we're all inspired differently and we're all probably creating something different too, and hence open to different things also.

Books, podcasts, videos, magazines, blogs, everyday conversations - anything can be food for your brain, but the best food will be in-line with what you are trying to create. Read widely, watch widely and be critical in your consumption - and take what you need from it. Or choose a few good sources and truly digest them.

You need to open your mind to ideas. Kind of like a magnet - just pulling anything of interest towards you. It's worth creating a commonplace book for all of the observations, snippets, conversations, people, ideas, quotes and anything else that you feel is good for your brain. Being able to come back to this input is essential.

Creativity is often about thinking broadly, spatially and widely to piece together seemingly disparate ideas. Being able to take in ideas from different food sources is a great way to be more creative. By bringing sporadic and wide ideas together you can often create something new from it, something that has never existed before.

If you get no inspiration from digesting some brain-food, you should ask – “did I enjoy it?” There’s value in that too.

But if you’re keen to create……..choose good brain-food sources, read widely or extremely deeply, consume what inspires you and be sure it’s feeding you wisely.

I’ve found that the quality of my creative output is directly linked to the quality of the food I give my brain.

And here’s a top-tip – I've found the best brain food to come from studying and observing the people and world around me.

You’d be surprised at reality when you study it deeply. You’d be surprised at the richness of ideas that are literally next to you. You’d be surprised at how truly bizarre reality can be. My best ideas come from simply observing people around me - they rarely fail to inspire and feed my brain.

“The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”

Possibly Mark Twain – possibly not.

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