Your Creative Potential: A Creator's Guide to Nurturing Innovation

Creative people are not aware of their uniqueness—they just are. I am creative. I always have been. It’s hardly noticeable to me, I’m too immersed to recognize it as anything but how the day goes. Like other creatives, it’s essential, part of my DNA, how I wake up each morning. I’ve been encouraged in the past to write more about creativity, but I am no scientific expert on the actual process. I’m just a woman who starts each day curious, driven, and looking for solutions. I work in marketing and communications. I solve difficult business problems. I study art. I write. I design things.

Lately, I've thought a lot about how to nurture “ideal states” of functioning, taking care of yourself, while continuing to push yourself forward. That is, how can we be more productive? Have better ideas? Be better people? I’ll spare everyone the list of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This is more about the messy stuff. The fun stuff. I’ve been thinking about the habits and quirks of creative people, and how others harness what looks like magic to the untrained eye. Creativity is optimism, run rampant and then tamed. It’s a wellspring of hope and promise. For anyone who has worked in or around a formal creative agency environment, you’ve seen the fruits of a team of people who can take the dumbest idea and turn it into gold. An alchemy of ideas. We all need this skill now, how to make gold from garbage. The world is in a collective, globally depressed mental state and creativity will be the currency of the future and a necessity for a while. Creativity teaches you new angles, the ability to get around problems with hyper-speed, those ah-ha moments of adult learning that say, “here are your next steps and wasn’t this so obvious?”

There are foundational things almost all creative people do by nature. I find them helpful as someone who wakes up each day trying to solve problems in interesting ways.

A few of my favorites:

Creatives need space

Space to think and be creative is essential. It’s all about environment. This just isn’t a home office with earbuds, it’s a domain filled with encouraging objects that reflect who you are. It’s a place where your identity can take shape. It could be any place in your house, really, but my setup is a “Creative Room” that does triple time as an office, art/craft studio, and writing area. This is where you keep your toolkit, too, whatever that may be. Even if don’t have creative gear, make sure you have that Virginia Woolf "Room with a View" next to your desk and laptop. Here are a few things I keep in my creative space that reflect my own identity:

• A large dining table painted hot pink as a desk (I love hot pink like I'm still 8 years old).
• A wall hanging with the words from a “core values” test that I took (helpful when you need to remember what's important to you).
• Vintage telephones (just silly and fun)
• Toys and games—including Rubik’s cubes, video games and things that are fun Friday at 5PM
• A big wall TV where I can watch YouTube how-tos for crafts and architecture shows and all that special-interest fun stuff
• Comfortable chairs—splurge on an Aeron chair fit to sit for hours at a time without killing your back

I’ve had a version of this room ever since I can remember, it’s just my childhood bedroom scaled up. It was a natural build for me and something that isn’t widely popular outside of the design community. It can be in the corner of a basement (put up a poster of Figi for your "View"!). It’s just important that it exists. You need a place to think, even if it’s a back patio with decorations that make you feel at home, reminding you that that you are you. Not anyone else in your family, not the kids. Not work. That you are you.

Creatives take nothing for granted

Creativity by definition is the generation of something “new” whether an idea or product. Something novel. The only way this can happen is by dispatching the idea that “it is what it is” (I hate this phrase—it’s a tautology that takes agency away from people so they can't change their condition in life). People think creativity is all splash and big vision, but it’s really rooted in asking questions and probing what’s possible that has not been done before. I tend to generate at least 1-2 solid ideas a week (and they are all answers to questions that are applied to situations they have not been applied to before. Even a relatively boring idea (like launching a restaurant) can be novel in how it’s positioned as a solution (actually having good service post-Covid, which have you been to Taco Bell lately?). Part of this is being irreverent and channeling an inner delinquent that questions systems, but in a “how can we make this better?” sort of optimistic way. Now, this is where true creatives are generally more fearless than the general population. Once you start to question everything, assumptions crumble away, new information is uncovered, and issues beg to be addressed. Creatives are not scared of this. When they see the answer to a problem, they find much more joy in the execution of the end-state rather than fearing what will happen when they tear down the old paradigm. They know it’s going to be better in the long run. Take nothing for granted and be fearless.

Creatives can make something from absolutely nothing

For years, I’ve wanted to do some script writing with my sister—she’s so damned witty and adorable. We made epic puppet shows as children and I was certain we’d end up co-writing some adult animation show geared for stoners when we were adults (or start an all-girl band). I miss that kind of play with her. But she’s a busy Mom with 3 kids who runs a restaurant, and she likely will not be able to collaborate with me on any serious projects (outside of throwing killer Thanksgivings together) for a number of years. We text one another all day long, every day—and I laugh out loud all day. Recently, I realized that I already have plenty of written material that we’ve collected. It’s right here? It’s just tied up in my messages in iOs. I got a utility to export those messages as a foundation for gleaning the best stuff for a script project. You likely have the start of creativity all around you, it’s just recognizing it. What are you doing already that you can just… make better? Twist it to be more purposeful? Steal it and repurpose it?

Creatives learn constantly

There is no path to new solutions for things without an onslaught of new information. I think the easiest way to do this in our modern world, for people without time on their hands—is through podcasts and audiobooks. Do you feel like going back to school? Get on Audible and listen to the Great Courses series, which has university professors covering every topic in the constellation of ideas out there. Participate in culture (not TV). Walk through every museum in your city—then travel to surrounding cities and walk through those. When you travel, make sure you put at least one culturally significant place on your “to visit” list. Get curious. Ask questions when you talk to other people—have more meaningful conversation (no conversations about Netflix shows). Quiz people on what they do, how their lives fit with the rest of the world. We could pretend the phrase “fountain of knowledge” is overused, but being thirsty and having a drink is the basic human condition. We need a whole garden of fountains that are always on—and creatives just do this by nature.

Creatives make time to think?

The most important thing though, is to give yourself time to think. But don’t use that time to worry instead. This is what we usually do, sit down and worry about things. That’s why environment is so important. If you’re surrounded by things you love that encourage you, some of that worry goes away. Instead, it has momentum. Why are we here? What do we want? What problems do we want to solve? How can we solve them? Where have we seen something work before (hey fountain)? How can we apply that solution to our problems? Who can help us with it?

And it works if you’re designing a room

Or coming up with a new business idea.

Writing an essay.

Working on a photography project.

Coming up with a costume for your kid for Halloween.

Dreaming of a menu for a dinner party.

Or, solving a tough problem at work.

(It works, if you try and believe.)

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