Anyone Can Learn To Improve Their Creativity

Some people make coming up with new ideas look easy. They just open their mouths and, as if by magic originality appears. For others, the opposite is true. They think of creativity as something that other people do. They have never had an idea and couldn’t be creative if their lives or jobs depended on it. 

It’s tempting to believe that people are just born creative or non-creative. It’s a commonly held view that having creativity is mysterious and unknowable. Perhaps this is because many make the mistake of concentrating on the “eureka” moment itself and ignoring the creative process that leads up to it. 

New ideas do not appear from nowhere. It’s just that the work needed to produce them tends to be behind the scenes and in the heads of creative people. They follow certain steps and share particular behaviours - anyone can learn enough about them to improve their own creative ability.

Creative People Love Ideas

Creative people love ideas. They collect them. They enjoy ideas from different places and about very diverse subjects. They are curious and passionate about many, many topics. They chat knowledgeably about a range of interests, from sports, world politics, quantum physics and the latest Hollywood gossip to gardening tips, ballet and martial arts. Their curiosity is immense. Creative people also love to play around with the ideas that they collect. For them everything is connected—part of an overall pattern. Old ideas are moved around, combined, squeezed and stretched to make new ideas. It may seem obvious to say so, but the good news is that the creative process has simple steps. Don’t let their obviousness or simplicity stop you from thinking about how treating idea creation as a process can help.

The first step is collecting together old ideas—or existing facts. You need to know as much as possible about the world in general and get a solid, deep working knowledge of the facts that surround the need for a new idea. This may seem daunting or unnecessary but facts are the raw material for innovation.

Everything Is Connected

Everything is connected and there are relationships between all facts. Just accepting this principle will make anyone more creative. Facts stop being walls to stop progress and turn into building blocks to allow progress. They can be rearranged into endless new combinations. The only practical limit is your knowledge of the facts and your ability to see relationships between them.

Seeking insights from old facts is hard work. It requires playfulness but it’s still demanding. The intellectual effort, and time, involved means that some people stop too early. The trick is to continue until there are enough alternatives, enough partial ideas noted down and in memory. Eventually, after consciously wrestling with so many different ways of rearranging ideas around a particular need, or circumstance, things will get confused. No one idea stands out from the rest. 

Nothing is clear

Now is the time to allow your subconscious to make one great idea from all the raw material and unfinished ideas. The best way of doing this is to do something completely different. Put the books away, stop talking about your idea, have a nap, go and enjoy yourself, reintroduce yourself to your friends. There is little to gain by returning to the problem until your mind has cleared. The idea will arrive only after the mind receives space and time. It will seem to have come from nowhere - as a flash of inspiration - but you will know that it is the result of following a deliberate process. This means that idea creation can become repeatable. Knowing that it is repeatable means you can improve.

The final step is to make your great idea practical and profitable. Many ideas stop looking so attractive. They start looking like a lot of hard work with no certain reward. You won’t have all the skills necessary to make your idea happen. You won’t even have all the knowledge needed to create a mass market out of an insight. Your choice will be to try anyway, give up, or share your idea. Since your idea isn’t finished, it will be hard to be confident enough to share. If you don’t share, you risk spending time on something that doesn’t work. You need to subject your idea to criticism and possibly ridicule, so take that final step out of your head and find out if it has what it takes to become an innovation.