Creativity

Instead of thinking of a cut-and-dry end goal to certain situations, creative people sit back and examine the problem in different ways before beginning to work.

If you find yourself stagnating by focusing on generic problems, try to re-conceptualize the problem by focusing on a more meaningful angle.

For example: Instead of thinking “What would be something cool to paint?” rather ask, “What sort of painting evokes the feeling of loneliness that we all encounter after a break-up?”

Creating “psychological” distance may be useful for breaking through a creative block.

Try to imagine your creative task as being disconnected and distant from your current position/location - this may make the problem more accessible and can encourage higher level thinking.

It means producing something novel or original, evaluating, solving problems, whether on paper, on stage, in a laboratory or even in the shower.

Geniuses know “how” to think, instead of “what” to think.

People who are more creative can simultaneously engage brain networks that don’t typically work together.

In a 1904 study by English physician Havelock Ellis, a list was made of 1030 individuals through extensive research, examining thoroughly the intellectual distinction people had by the various factors like heredity, general health, and social class.

These works established that genius minds are often hereditary.

A body of work of Stanford psychologist Lewis M. Terman, was an in-depth multi-decade study of gifted individuals, and an attempt to improve the measurement of genius and its association with the degradation of mental stability. This also included an enhanced version of the French IQ (Intelligence Quotient) test.

This myth encourages the belief that creativity is a passive process. It suggests you have to wait and hope that you’ll make a breakthrough.

That Eureka moment is actually the last step in a long, involved process and not the only step. For this to happen, your unconscious mind needs material to work with. You have to put in the hard work of studying and mastering your field and exposing yourself to different perspectives.

In reality, creativity is a team sport.

The lone genius myth is a stereotype and it’s unhelpful because it suggests the route to innovation is to cut oneself off from colleagues and collaboration. You need a modest amount of intelligence to be creative, but extremely high IQ is neither sufficient nor necessary for being an innovator.

Creativity becomes a moving, living thing when it is set free, and one has to incorporate multiple perspectives and ideas to foster and nurture the plant, facilitating the blossoming of something unique and truly innovative.

Ignorance is not an enemy, and it helps to shake yourself out of the plan and build something out of a unique flowering, where knowledge can be a hindrance.

When we start something with a preconceived notion, we stifle any creative process. An open-mindedness combined with a willingness to experiment can provide us with a pleasant surprise in the final outcome, as we embrace the unexpected and are open to where the process takes us.

The unknown territory is to be reached in our path towards being creative when our expertise fails to hinder our experiments.

Is the ability to take many pieces of information or data and generate one solution. 

It is largely taught and encouraged in schools and workplaces.

1. The Many Uses Exercise: Pick an ordinary object, set a timer for 5 minutes and try to come up with as many alternative uses for a paperclip as you can.
2. 10 New Ideas: Every day for a week, try to come up with 10 new ideas within a specific topic or category.
3. Daily Headlines: Imagine that your day was a news story in the New York Times. What would the headline be? 
4. Articles on Trial: Challenge the conclusion of articles you read by coming up with one question you’d like to ask the author.
5. Start to notice your automatic thoughts and generate alternatives to them.

Leonardo da Vinci believed you begin by learning how to restructure the problem by looking at it from many different angles.

In order to creatively solve a problem, the thinker should not use the usual approach that is based on past experience. Geniuses use several different perspectives to solve an existing problem and thereby also identify new ones.

_Galileo Galilei revolutionized science by making his idea visible with diagrams, maps, and drawings. Einstein believed that words and numbers as they are spoken did not play a significant role in his thinking process.

Geniuses seem to develop a skill to display information in visual and spatial forms, rather than only mathematical or verbal lines.

The brain’s building blocks are neurons: nerve cells that receive and transmit signals along neural pathways. Certain pathways are forged at birth. Others can be manipulated by learning. 

So when you’re stuck in a rut, your brain’s neurons could literally be stuck on a neural pathway you’ve carved out through your behavior. But you can get unstuck by choosing to make new connections.

When encouraging your team's creativity, you might find it useful to try all the new ideas they provide as soon as these have been introduced.

This way, your employees will feel trusted and appreciated. Moreover, you will most certainly have a nice surprise discovering that, at the very end, all this results also in an increase in productivity.

• Analytical. Before thinking creatively about something, you first have to be able to understand it.
• Open-Minded. Setting aside any assumptions or biases you may have, and look at things in a completely new way.
• Problem Solving. Using your creativity to solve important issues.
• Organization. Being able to structure a plan of action with clear goals and deadlines is vital.
• Communication. Strong written and oral communication skills to communicate your solutions effectively.

• Artistic Creativity. You don't have to be an artist for your work to have an artistic element. For example: Composing a new fundraising script for volunteers or devising a lesson plan that will engage students.
• Creative Problem-Solving. For example: Coming up with new procedures to improve quality or suggesting a way to improve customer service.
• Creativity in STEM. For example: Constructing a research model to test a hypothesis or devising a computer program to automate a billing process.