How New Ideas and Connections Fuel My Creativity and Success

“One connection can change your life”- Kaley Chu

That motto comes from my good friend, Kaley which forms the basis of her initiative – 100 Lunches With Strangers.

We just had our 100 Lunches With Strangers Event in Sydney for the first time on the weekend just past. It was a resounding success - The opportunity to connect with new people, catch up with old friends and have insightfully deep conversations made the event one of the best days of 2022 for me.

That quote of Kaley’s on a connection being able to change your life stuck me ever since I’ve known her because it resonates with my passion on the power of creativity.

When I say Creativity - I come from the perspective of being resourceful in problem solving and being able to drive innovation and find new ideas from our inspiration.

Our inspiration can be sparked from anything. Anything that entices our brain on potential and the possibilities that align with our values and what we want to achieve in life. Through inspiration we collect the seeds for ideas, and in good time, with enough ideas, a connection forms. The connection of ideas is just like the connection we make with people as Kaley would say, and that in itself is life-changing.

It's these connections that drives innovation and action being taken to bring our dreams into reality. Whether it's a tech giant like Apple or Samsung driving the latest products, an artist creating a masterpiece for the ages, or an athlete doing something unbelievable and never seen before. These are all acts of creativity.

This principle applies in our day-to-day life too. For example, in my last article where I described how I project managed this Sydney event and the Melbourne event in September, the creativity was drawn from the inspiration I have from the project managers I have in my corporate role. I learnt their best practices, reverse-engineered their creativity and success in their role to use for my own success too.

If a connection can change our life, how does a connection apply to creativity and success?

Creativity looks at everything we know - All the facts, the fiction, new ideas, old knowledge, and how we personally view and feel about these concepts which are all stored in our mind to blend them and create something new.

Our minds are like a funnel. The top of the funnel is like a wide net to capture new ideas from what we learn and experience in our day to day lives. If we don’t have this funnel, the bottom part dries up without anything new trigger inspiration and fuel our imagination. The more we feed this funnel, the more potential we have. These ideas sit steady in our mind until we’re ready to utilise them.

Fundamentally, we need to be open to new ideas by being curious. Whether or not we’re directly interested in it, being open might lead to a new discovery. One of the simplest ways to expand our mind to let in new ideas is by becoming a beginner again.

There is research to say that the more we become experts, we become less open to new ideas and alternative opinions due to the creation of an assumption bias which prevents us from taking in new information. By becoming a beginner again, we allow ourselves the opportunity to see things as if it was the first time again. Do you remember that feeling when things felt fresh and exciting? That feeling is a moment of growth. We experience our minds expanding as our senses become excitable at fresh new information being taken in.

We can expand our mind through various ways. The obvious way is taking the opportunity to learn something new by reading or watching content, but there are other ways to spark our imaginations -

• Questioning ourselves - Are we following the status quo? Why do we believe and think in a certain way? Have we made any assumptions?
• Challenging our defaults by changing our daily routines - Trying a different route to work, preparing a recipe in a different way or following a different interview script.
• Adopting an experimental mindset - Have an objective or hypothesis to test. This allows you to learn as you go and be open to new paths.

When we do new things, we force our brain to create new connections to allow us to make creative leaps in our life.

This feeling of taking in new ideas and processing them is our imagination at work. Much of creativity comes from our imaginations, but it needs something to work with. Therefore - We need to feed our imagination in preparation for that “eureka!” moment; that moment when we’ll need to call upon all the ideas we collected, and from our imagination, we create a connection to lead us to success.

The potential output is when our imagination gets inspired to take the next action - Whether it’s the next action in problem solving a day-to-day corporate dilemma, the next masterful stroke by a painter, the next word we say in a meeting, the next sentence of this article I’m writing right now and so on.

Creativity drives our results, and it was all formed by a connection that started as our mind as an idea and created by our imagination that drives action. And as we know, action drives success.

"One connection can change your life", Kaley tells me.

It really does. Damn right it does.

Stay creative. Always.

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