Let us be more creative in the new year

What are the most common things in these gifted amateurs as heroic innovators are one of the great American myths. Stories about Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and even Steve Jobs conveniently overlook their unique brilliance and years of experience. If anyone could do it, they would. We learn by doing and all learning is developmental. The same holds true for creative brainstorming. Research on creative thinking gives us three simple suggestions that will greatly aid in generating great ideas in a short period of time.

Whoever said that one good idea is better than a thousand mediocre ones probably never invented anything. More is better. One of the inhibitors of creative thinking is your voice of judgment that kicks in when you think too long about the viability of your idea. The key is to generate ideas faster than you can evaluate them. This will produce some unusual and impractical ideas that will serve as triggers for novel ideas that work.

Steve Jobs remarked, “Creativity is just connecting things.” Creating a breakthrough idea may simply be a matter of reapplying an idea from one situation to another. For example, to improve their patients’ hospital stay experience, a medical center sent their doctors to live in a posh hotel one week and their own hospital the next. The center simply applied the practices of the hotel to the hospital to completely transform the patient experience.

Most of us have experienced a feeling of effortlessness and timelessness when doing something creative like painting. Researchers call this our flow state: when we are the most creative and “in the zone.” Some people are creative in the morning, while others are more so at night. Some people are most creative when listening to music while others need contemplative silence. The key is to find a time and a place where you typically enter this flow state. We first recognize that you are creative—we all are. I’m a big believer in asking questions, but one question to stop asking is, Am I creative? The answer is yes, so you can stop asking.

The better question is, how might I tap into that creativity o a regular basis? I believe creativity is a mindset and a way of looking at the world around you—you must try to do so with openness, curiosity, and wonder. Children look at the world around them this way, and it’s one reason why they’re so creative. We can train ourselves to adopt that “beginner’s mind” way of looking at the world. It’s really about taking the time and having the interest to pay attention and inquire about what is all around us. Look at something familiar and ask, What might notice if I were encountering this for the first time?

If you ever find yourself asking, Where will I ever find an original idea?, well, you can stop asking that question, too. The raw material for your next big idea is all around you; it’s in the things you’re reading on social media, what you see on the way to work, it’s at the museums and in the bookstores. The real secret is to find ideas and influences that inspire you—and then think about how you might add your own vision or twist, in order to express something new.

As you go through your daily life, ask yourself questions like, What stirs me? And also ask, What bugs me? The things that move you in either a positive or negative way may present creative opportunities. Look for problems that you can take ownership of and go to work on. And make sure you give yourself enough time, in your everyday life, to just think creatively as well as to do creative work. I am a big believer in using what essayist Paul Graham calls a “maker’s schedule” wherein you block off large chunks of time (at least 2 to 3 hours) for deep thinking and creative work. I also recommend going off-line when you do this; interruptions are the enemy of this kind of thinking and work.

Be a sort of 'self-anthropologist' and keep track of your life for a couple weeks. Pay attention to where and when you are most creative and the people you are most creative with. That will tell you how to be more creative. I don’t think there’s one way to become “creative” in our everyday lives I would say be open to what’s ahead of you, be attentive to the the answers in life but be even more obsessed with the questions because it’ll always bring you to understand people like yourself and who are very different. Cheers!