CREATIVITY AND EFFICIENT LEARNING

(Being a lecture delivered on 29th March, 2021 at the WECANISM ONLINE CONFERENCEe)

I welcome us to today's lecture. I commend us for taking the hard and lonely road of taking active part in such avenues like these, a platform that allows us to build and develop ourselves.

We are in a world where many youth are increasingly finding it difficult to focus on the things that are most relevant, we are at a crossroad, torn apart in our mind by the many distractions that pervade our generation. So if you always take time out to listen, learn and also interact on platforms like ours, I commend you! You are indeed doing well! Today's lecture is a very important one. I was provoked to deep thoughts when the organizers gave me the topic. It is a topic that directly speaks to the urgent need of our time and age.

You see, many business owners and employers of labour today are no longer concerned and interested in our certifications and long list of academic awards. Education no longer solely sits on the exalted height of Mount Olympus, creativity and intuitive intelligence has climbed the height and they all sit together in an embrace.

What I am saying is that the idea that an excellent academic degree guarantees success, employment and a place on the top echelon of life, is increasingly becoming archaic and generally unrealistic. More than ever before, there is a necessity to combine your education with some doses of creativity and personal development through efficient learning. Companies and businesses today are much more concerned about how much value you can add to their business, and how you can creatively solve difficult problems than they are with your first class or fine looks. You must know that there are many enemies of creativity in our generation, chief of them are dogmatism and unrelenting docility.

When we speak of creativity, we speak of the ability to perceive the world in a totally new way, being able to find hidden patterns and make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Recognizing and generating ideas, and finding alternative ways of solving reoccurring problems.

Dogmatic people follow some set of rules and abide by stipulated traditions whose definition of how things ought to be done. This is the major challenge forestalling creativity. Anytime you fail to think for yourself, anytime you blindly follow rules and allow other people to dictate how things are done to you without logically evaluating them, know that you are killing your creativity with your own hands.

The American futurist, writer and businessman Alvin Toffler once said;

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Creativity is one of those things that cannot be imitated, it is rather birthed by a means of awakening into consciousness; the consciousness of wanting to create a path for oneself in a world where many are stuck on a old worn out road.

Maria Popova said about creativity that it a;

"combinatorial force: our ability to tap into our ‘inner’ pool of resources – knowledge, insight, information, inspiration and all the fragments populating our minds – that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world and to combine them in extraordinary new ways.”

In no other century has the process of learning efficiently been made more effective than in our generation. There are a lot of avenues ONLINE for every single one of us to familiarize ourselves with new, improved and creative ways of doing things. None of us have any excuse not to be productive in all we do any more. The internet has taken away all our excuses; knowledge is no longer the preserve of the rich, high and mighty. KNOWLEDGE TODAY IS AT YOUR FINGER TIPS.

I will encourage us to make good use of the vast resources at our disposal on the internet... It is the greatest gift our ages has bestowed on us. In getting creative few things you need to take note of;

You must learn by reading: Reading is something many of us never really like doing, but it is really inevitable if we truly desire to break the wheel of retrogression and impact our world creatively. What reading does is that it open your horizons and help you to get into the minds of other people. It is also essential you get out of your comfort zone and see what others are doing and how they're doing them. In these hangouts, you must be intuitive and ask the right questions. Recall the Bible says 'He who walks with wise men will be wise...' Proverbs 13:20

Sometimes, we do things the same way because that is all we know; the best way to learn efficiently and internalize creative ideas most times is to walk and hangout with individuals who are known for their creativeness. Creativity is not a cold you catch, neither is it a virus that jumps on you. It is rather a result of positive practice... Constant positive practices.

Lastly, I'll end my talk tonight with a short story, a story you probably are familiar with:

A gentleman was walking through an elephant camp, and he spotted that the elephants weren’t being kept in cages or held by the use of chains. All that was holding them back from escaping the camp, was a small piece of rope tied to one of their legs. As the man gazed upon the elephants, he was completely confused as to why the elephants didn’t just use their strength to break the rope and escape the camp. They could easily have done so, but instead, they didn’t try to at all. Curious and wanting to know the answer, he asked a trainer nearby why the elephants were just standing there and never tried to escape.

The trainer replied;

“When they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”

The only reason that the elephants weren’t breaking free and escaping from the camp was that over time they adopted the belief that it just wasn’t possible.

That's it for me. Don't allow anything to limit you. Thank you for having me.