How to be more creative

Creativity (…) cannot be explained: it’s like Mozart’s music or Van Gogh’s painting or Saddam Hussein’s propaganda – John Cleese, the creative mind behind Monty Python.

One cannot force creativity. At least, not according to the Monthy Python's Flying Circus writer and performer. Instead, you can make space for it. Put yourself in open mode, a state of mind when you are not anxious to get things done. In open mode, anything goes. There is no deadline. Mistakes are not to be feared. One is relaxed, playful, curious and inclined to humor. Child-like.

To this purpose, you can arrange 90-mins. pondering sessions every week. During this time, contemplate a situation where you need a creative solution, without putting pressure on yourself to solve it. Try a meditation where you gently bring your mind back to the situation over and over. Explore all ideas that come to you, even if they feel like dead ends. They might lead to another idea that brings about a breakthrough. Or chances are the solution will actually come to you in your sleep or under the shower (as your subconscious will continue working on it).

John Cleese's speech on Creativity in Management is a must-see.

When I started doing creative writing, our teacher asked us to keep 3 folders:

• One with characters we imagine
• Another one with situations/actions
• The third one with interesting pieces of dialogue.

He told us to randomly combine notes from each. He said that was how he wrote his most popular short story, of an accountant with a broken heart, during the apocalypse where angels were physically rescuing people. He used a piece of dialogue he heard on the subway.

If I could add a couple of my own tips on how to cultivate creativity:

1. It is difficult to be original anymore. Most good ideas have already been thought of. Sometimes the best we can do is to combine two seemingly unrelated concepts and find new connections between them, as Cleese did with art and political propaganda in the above quote.
2. Write it down! If you have a brilliant idea, write it down somewhere, even if you do not plan to implement it immediately (or ever). I recommend Keep, Google's note-taking app, that synchronizes between your mobile and laptop (app and browser). I like the search function and the fact that I can add pictures to my notes.
3. Define a problem as well as you can before starting to work on it. Oftentimes, people ask for our help and we jump right into problem-solving mode. Whenever I asked her how to do a specific task, one of my mentors used to ask me a couple of times why? or what are you trying to achieve? It used to drive me crazy until I realized she did not want to get stuck in my first idea of a solution. She was helping me gain perspective on the problem before settling on a course of action. Of course, if you are the one asking the question, formulate it better. Instead of How can I do this, go back to I have this issue - how would you go about it?