Can I Be Creative?

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Pexels

We often imagine that creativity is this tremendous capability to develop enormous ideas that will change the world. A magical talent that shines its light on a privileged few.

It need not be. It is a gift we all have since the moment we start thinking.

Creativity is simply the ability to come up with new and novel ideas. It means that you either come up with something new or come up with an existing idea, but your interpretation leverages it in a way that no one has thought of before. Or, you think about the world in a way that is new and novel.

And it is not limited to coming up in moments of wonder and awe — although that happens too.

I would even go as far as to say that anything you do that alters the world in a small way is creative.

Creativity is a process. A simple process defined by Graham Wallas is this one:

• Preparation: This stage is about researching as much as you can. Read many different books on many topics. Attend online classes on various issues, whether it falls in your field of interest or not. Talk to interesting people. Be curious and actively seek new learning. If you are planning to solve a problem, find out as much about that problem as you can. Read books, do internet research, talk to people. See how others have approached this problem or similar problems. I set out an hour a day to just read.
• Incubation: The second stage is about taking a break and allowing the unconscious mind to “stew” on all the information gathered, resulting in the involuntary integration of knowledge crucial for idea generation.
• Illumination: The third stage is waiting for the flashes of insight that leads to ideas. Wallas knew that several trains of thought would culminate into flashes of insight, some of which would be unsuccessful and some of which would be successful. He accepted that several unsuccessful insights would often precede successful insights. It was part of the process.
• Verification: The last stage was about the conscious and deliberate testing and finetuning of ideas to create a better world.

The ripe and fertile earth on which creativity grows is your curiosity. Be interested in everything. Never dismiss anything as uninteresting until you have investigated it with an open mind. As your curiosity leads to a voracious interest in everything, you can read, explore, and ask questions about the world. With all this information and your thoughts about how the world works, it will not be long until ideas start appearing.

One of the best creative practices I learnt is carrying a small notebook to record all of your ideas as it comes up. It is easy to think of an idea, have an insight, and lose it because you did not write it down.

One of my great teachers, Win Wenger, gave me the following exercise many years ago. Every day to record in my little notebook the following:

1. Three ideas — an idea is something new and novel that occurred to me. It can be big or small. Tiny ideas often lead to big ideas over time, so they are as important as big ideas.
2. Six new insights — an insight is something that I understand about the world.
3. Nine new observations — an observation is something that I notice about the world.

If you do this every day for a thirty-day month, you will have ninety new ideas, a hundred and eighty insights, and two hundred and seventy observations.

This WILL change your world!

You don’t have to start with three ideas, six insights, or nine observations. You may start with noting down just one idea, two insights and three observations. Keep at it and notice how your world expands and begin to offer more and more.

Good luck with your creative journey. Be curious!

Note. A version of this article appears on Quora.

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