1. You are creative.
The artist is not a special person, each one of us is a special kind of
artist. Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker. The
only difference between people who are creative and people who are not
is a simple belief. Creative people believe they are creative. People
who believe they are not creative, are not. Once you have a particular identity
and set of beliefs about yourself, you become interested in seeking out
the skills needed to express your identity and beliefs. This is why
people who believe they are creative become creative. If you believe you
are not creative, then there is no need to learn how to become creative
and you don't. The reality is that believing you are not creative
excuses you from trying or attempting anything new. When someone tells
you that they are not creative, you are talking to someone who has no
interest and will make no effort to be a creative thinker.
2. Creative thinking is work. You
must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the
process of creating new and different ideas. Then you must have patience
to persevere against all adversity. All creative geniuses work
passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which
are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by the major poets than
by minor poets. Thomas Edison created 3000 different ideas for lighting
systems before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music,
including forty-one symphonies and some forty-odd operas and masses,
during his short creative life. Rembrandt produced around 650 paintings
and 2,000 drawings and Picasso executed more than 20,000 works.
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Some were masterpieces, while others were
no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were
simply bad.
3. You must go through the motions of being creative. When you are producing ideas, you are replenishing neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to what your brain
is doing, which in turn is responding to challenges. When you go
through the motions of trying to come up with new ideas, you are
energizing your brain by increasing the number of contacts between
neurons. The more times you try to get ideas, the more active your brain
becomes and the more creative you become. If you want to become an
artist and all you did was paint a picture every day, you will become an
artist. You may not become another Vincent Van Gogh, but you will
become more of an artist than someone who has never tried.
4. Your brain is not a computer.
Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity
rather than computes them like a computer. It thrives on the creative
energy of feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can
synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The
human brain cannot tell the difference between an "actual" experience
and an experience imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what
enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with
imaginary scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas about space and
time. One day, for example, he imagined falling in love. Then he
imagined meeting the woman he fell in love with two weeks after he fell
in love. This led to his theory of a causality. The same process of
synthesizing experience allowed Walt Disney to bring his fantasies to life.
5. There is no one right answer.
Reality is ambiguous. Aristotle said it is either A or not-A. It cannot
be both. The sky is either blue or not blue. This is black and white
thinking as the sky is a billion different shades of blue. A beam of
light is either a wave or not a wave (A or not-A). Physicists discovered
that light can be either a wave or particle depending on the viewpoint
of the observer. The only certainty in life is uncertainty. When trying
to get ideas, do not censor or evaluate them as they occur. Nothing
kills creativity
faster than self-censorship of ideas while generating them. Think of
all your ideas as possibilities and generate as many as you can before
you decide which ones to select. The world is not black or white. It is
grey.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
Always strive to find a better one and continue until you have one that
is still better. In 1862, Phillip Reis demonstrated his invention which
could transmit music over the wires. He was days away from improving it
into a telephone that could transmit speech. Every communication expert
in Germany dissuaded him from making improvements, as they said the
telegraph is good enough. No one would buy or use a telephone. Ten years
later, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Spencer Silver
developed a new adhesive for 3M that stuck to objects but could easily
be lifted off. It was first marketed as a bulletin board adhesive so the
boards could be moved easily from place to place. There was no market
for it. Silver didn't discard it. One day Arthur Fry, another 3M
employee, was singing in the church's choir when his page marker fell
out of his hymnal. Fry coated his page markers with Silver's adhesive
and discovered the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without
damaging the page. Hence the Post-it Notes were born. Thomas Edison was
always trying to spring board from one idea to another in his work. He
spring boarded his work from the telephone (sounds transmitted) to the
phonograph (sounds recorded) and, finally, to motion pictures (images
recorded).
7. Expect the experts to be negative.
The more expert and specialized a person becomes, the more their
mindset becomes narrowed and the more fixated they become on confirming
what they believe to be absolute. Consequently, when confronted with new
and different ideas, their focus will be on conformity.
Does it conform with what I know is right? If not, experts will spend
all their time showing and explaining why it can't be done and why it
can't work. They will not look for ways to make it work or get it done
because this might demonstrate that what they regarded as absolute is
not absolute at all. This is why when Fred Smith created Federal
Express, every delivery expert in the U.S. predicted its certain doom.
After all, they said, if this delivery concept was doable, the Post
Office or UPS would have done it long ago.
8. Trust your instincts.
Don't allow yourself to get discouraged. Albert Einstein was expelled
from school because his attitude had a negative effect on serious
students; he failed his university entrance exam and had to attend a
trade school for one year before finally being admitted; and was the
only one in his graduating class who did not get a teaching position
because no professor would recommend him. One professor said Einstein
was "the laziest dog" the university ever had. Beethoven's parents
were told he was too stupid to be a music composer. Charles Darwin's
colleagues called him a fool and what he was doing "fool's experiments"
when he worked on his theory of biological evolution. Walt Disney was
fired from his first job on a newspaper because "he lacked imagination."
Thomas Edison had only two years of formal schooling, was totally deaf
in one ear and was hard of hearing in the other, was fired from his
first job as a newsboy and later fired from his job as a telegrapher;
and still he became the most famous inventor in the history of the U.S.
9. There is no such thing as failure. Whenever
you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail. You have
learned something that does not work. Always ask "What have I learned
about what doesn't work?", "Can this explain something that I didn't set
out to explain?", and "What have I discovered that I didn't set out to
discover?" Whenever someone tells you that they have never made a
mistake, you are talking to someone who has never tried anything new.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral. They have
no meaning. You give them meaning by the way you choose to interpret
them. If you are a priest, you see evidence of God everywhere. If you
are an atheist, you see the absence of God everywhere. IBM observed that
no one in the world had a personal computer. IBM interpreted this to
mean there was no market. College dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs,
looked at the same absence of personal computers and saw a massive
opportunity. Once Thomas Edison was approached by an assistant while
working on the filament for the light bulb. The assistant asked Edison
why he didn't give up. "After all," he said, "you have failed 5000
times." Edison looked at him and told him that he didn't understand what
the assistant meant by failure, because, Edison said, "I have
discovered 5000 things that don't work." You construct your own reality
by how you choose to interpret your experiences.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms. Do not trust your first perspective of a problem as it will be too biased
toward your usual way of thinking. Always look at your problem from
multiple perspectives. Always remember that genius is finding a
perspective no one else has taken. Look for different ways to look at
the problem. Write the problem statement several times using different
words. Take another role, for example, how would someone else see it,
how would Jay Leno, Pablo Picasso, George Patton see it? Draw a picture
of the problem, make a model, or mold a sculpture. Take a walk and look
for things that metaphorically represent the problem and force
connections between those things and the problem (How is a broken store
window like my communications problem with my students?) Ask your
friends and strangers how they see the problem. Ask a child. How would a
ten year old solve it? Ask a grandparent. Imagine you are the problem.
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at
change.
12. Learn to think unconventionally.
Creative geniuses do not think analytically and logically. Conventional,
logical, analytical thinkers are exclusive thinkers which means they
exclude all information that is not related to the problem. They look
for ways to eliminate possibilities. Creative geniuses are inclusive
thinkers which mean they look for ways to include everything, including
things that are dissimilar and totally unrelated. Generating
associations and connections between unrelated or dissimilar subjects is
how they provoke different thinking patterns in their brain.
These new patterns lead to new connections which give them a different
way to focus on the information and different ways to interpret what
they are focusing on. This is how original and truly novel ideas are
created. Albert Einstein once famously remarked "Imagination is more
important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know
and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all
there ever will be to know and understand."
And, finally, Creativity is paradoxical.
To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must
see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder,
must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates,
must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the
same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire
success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and
must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
Peace and Love
