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.
Take a risk, be creative |
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. |