Creativity

While being creative isn't easy, nearly all great ideas follow a similar 5 step creative process.

1. Gather new material directly related to your task as well as learning general material by becoming fascinated with a wide range of concepts.
2. Thoroughly work over the materials in your mind.  Examine what you have learned by looking at the facts from different angles and experimenting with fitting various ideas together.
3. Step away from the problem. Next, you put the problem completely out of your mind and go do something else that excites you and energizes you.
4. Let your idea return to you. After you have stopped thinking about it, your idea will come back to you with a flash of insight and renewed energy.
5. Shape and develop your idea based on feedback. For any idea to succeed, you must release it out into the world, submit it to criticism, and adapt it as needed.

Some people are primed to be more creative than others.

However, nearly every person is born with some level of creative skill and the majority of our creative thinking abilities are trainable.

1. Give yourself permission to create junk.
2. Create on a schedule. Genius arrives when you show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way.
3. Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work.
4. Stop judging your own work. Laugh off your mistakes and continue to produce the thing you love.
5. Hold yourself accountable. Share your work publicly. It will hold you accountable for creating your best work. 

Finding your creative genius is easy: 

• do the work, 
• finish something, 
• get feedback, 
• find ways to improve, 
• show up again tomorrow. 
• Repeat for ten years. Or twenty. Or thirty.

Inspiration only reveals itself after perspiration.