Unlock your creativity

“Always be studious and creative and striving to be ahead of the times”. Toyoda, the inventor of world famous Toyota Company 

Without any argument, one has to accept the above principle. If you are a creative person, you can become a champion. Champions are high achievers. Champions set goals that are neither too easy nor too difficult to attain. They prefer moderately challenging tasks. A champion does not necessarily always win and does not always achieve high goals. Champions are simply worthwhile, resourceful, consistent persons, who follow their inner drive for constant improvement and have a mission in life, no matter how simple or profound it may be.

Champions realize that the skills, knowledge and drive for success are the qualities that are going to make them great. Many people feel that because they have never played a guitar or violin or never invented anything, they are not creative. Consequently they have resigned themselves to a non-creative life. If you have spent your adult life telling yourself you are not creative, you are wrong: You are simply out of practice.

Creative person

Creative people are masters at what they do. Not everything that Albert Einstein or Bill Gates did was brilliant, far from it. But because they worked comparatively harder within their fields than others, they achieved more creative and successful results, even though they also had more failures than most other people.

We know a great deal about creative people but actually not that much about their creativity. Most of us are aware, for example, that Einstein did not do very well at school, or that Leonardo da Vinci had the odd habit of writing backwards. These disparate facts about the individuals themselves do not serve the purpose of getting to know the creative human being. Few of us can lay claim to any deeper insights into creative people. That there has been such intense focus over the years on descriptions and biographies of certain creative people is probably due to the fact that their lives were in fact quite unusual.

Roughly speaking, it has been found that 50 percent of the advances in most fields have come from 10 percent of the population. In other words, the majority, and the greatest, of all creative results have been produced by a small number of people who have been regarded as unique. But researchers agree that creative people have many attributes in common. These characteristics are not in themselves unusual; rather it is the combination of characteristics that is slightly different in creative people. 

Flow of ideas

The first characteristic that creative people have in common with everybody else is that they are not unusually clever. The ‘something other’ that distinguishes creative people is usually termed ‘flow of ideas’ by psychologists. Flow of ideas means in this context the capacity to generate and develop many ideas.

Creative people find it easier than others to generate ideas. The reason for this is another characteristic that creative people share with the rest of us, namely, that they work on something specific. Many people think, however, that it is constraining to work with the same thing for a long time. The myth is that creative people come from outside the field, whereas in fact creative people usually work on the same specific thing for longer than others. They do not come from outside, but rather from inside the field in which they are creative. 

Einstein, for example, lived and breathed physics even during the early period when he worked in the patent office. Da Vinci, with his fantastic machines, was as close to being a madly overworking mechanic as it was possible to be in that period. Thomas Edison, the man behind revolutionary breakthroughs such as the incandescent light bulb, holds more patents than anyone else, but he also did more work on electronics and had more unsuccessful projects than anyone else.

Taking risks

Most people avoid taking risks; it is a part of our self-preserving nature. ‘Why take a chance when I am comfortable with what I do?’ is a common but false piece of reasoning. But creative people take risks. The risk-taking expresses itself in the form of taking many risks, but not big risks. There are no impossible dreams or problems in the world. Most of the people are of the opinion that it cannot be done. Look at these persons. They are always failures. 

Other people are not the only people who are creative. That’s right. As much as you might think that you don’t have a creative bone in your body, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Truth be known, every single human being is a creative creature. Without you even knowing it, you can be creative at doing anything, that means your work, things you do at home and your hobbies. You just need to know how to release that natural creative energy.

Discover creativity

One of the first steps in discovering your creativity is taking yourself out of your comfort zone. You do this by simply trying out new and different things. If you have never done a craft before, pick up something you think you might like and try it. Read something different; go to museums if you don’t usually do that, get involved in a sport. Whatever it is you don’t normally do, try it and keep trying until you find something you really enjoy. 

Another step to discovering the natural creativity we are all born with is to get out of that rut. Change your routine. Stop doing the things you do each day in the same way. Change what you eat for breakfast or where you eat it. Change where you go for a walk. Talk to new people and go to places you’ve never gone to before. Even switch the clothes you wear and how you wear them. 

The third step is to ignore the voice in your head that keeps telling you that you are not a creative person. This includes others voices too who keep you down by not allowing your creativity to emerge. Ignore the negativity, even if it is from someone you love. In fact if the person does not believe you have any talent or creative ideas, simply do not share your ideas with them. 

Give yourself some time to be alone in a private place where you can let your mind wander. Take the quiet time to think without being interrupted by others and their problems and ideas. Allow your mind to make a variety of different connections between things that on the surface do not seem to have any connections.

Doing this allows your mind to explore a variety of different possibilities and become more creative in the way you think on a daily basis. 

Even if the ideas that you come up with seem silly, do not dismiss them. In fact do not even edit them. Write them down on a journal and then come back to them later and see what you think of them at a later date. You might be surprised how much sense they actually make. 

If you seem to be having problems formulating new and creative ideas, there is one perfect place to go where your mind can simply wander and explore and that is nature. This is a place that we are probably most connected to even if we do not realize it at first. After all, many inventions have all had their basis in nature.