Managing many projects at once can make it difficult for designers to cultivate the creativity they need. You can wait around for inspiration to strike, or you can get a head start.Learn how to create your best work yet with a mobile-friendly design lifestyle that helps you maximize your creative potential, no matter where you are.

Staying creative on‑the‑go

You may have always dreamed of going on the road and working while you travel, but mobile setups are crucial for those who don’t work in a typical office setting. For mobility to be comfortable, the setup you use must be portable and functional.Graphic designers need durable, reliable hardware that is easy to transport with colour-accurate displays.

Invest in a mobile-friendly workspace designed for you

To give your fullest attention to your creative activities, it’s important not to ignore the administrative tasks, but to embrace them and control the processes.Investing some time upfront to manage the “not-so-fun” work such as client communication, project management, payment collections, and accounting, and you’ll have more creative time later. You will be able to spend more time creating if you automate as many of these processes as possible.

Automate your processes

The importance of relationships, even virtual ones, in these times of disconnect and “remoteness” cannot be underestimated.Connecting with and supporting one another for inspiration, feedback, or simply social interaction is so important for distributed creatives. Online communities can be great facilitators for all of your needs as a creative on the go.

Cultivate your creative community

At the end of the day, the most important thing to do is invest in the tools and resources that will allow you to tap into your full creative potential. Seek out the tools that facilitate your mobile lifestyle, help to make your non-creative processes easier, and allow you to strengthen your creative communities.

Take your creativity wherever you go

Staying creative on-the-go: 3 essential tips for designers

creativity

Creativity

product

Product & Design

Accelerated work experiences or AWEs include any work format that compresses productive activity in time or space to deliver a result much faster than would otherwise be possible. 
Popular methods include pomodoros, hackathons, design sprints, Scrum sprints, rapid prototyping sessions, design thinking crash courses, and Startup Weekends, among others.

Accelerated Work Experiences

As work has become ever more digital, distributed, and asynchronous over the past few decades, we have basked in our newfound freedom. Now we can work anywhere, anytime! And thus we find ourselves working everywhere, all the time. 
The splintering of the experience of work into a million tiny pieces has made us stressed out, frazzled, and distracted. It has robbed us of many of the inherent pleasures of work: the bliss of deep concentration, the satisfaction of starting and finishing something in one sitting, and the fulfillment of working shoulder to shoulder with peers.

The Logic Of AWEs

A MESA is a 5-day, intensive work sprint delivered on behalf of a client, usually a large company or other organization. MESA Co. gathers 12-16 participants (which they have found to be just the right number) in beautiful, often exotic locations around the world, seeking to create the ideal environment to focus on and solve a complex problem that the organization is facing. 
The participants are split more or less evenly between employees of the client company, and outside experts and makers, who offer outside perspectives and hands-on skills.

The MESA Method

Here is the basic premise: the world is only getting more complex. This means there will be fewer and fewer proven solutions to problems. What we need is not a new and better solution, but a method for creating solutions quickly, in response to changing conditions.
At the same time, the most talented people are increasingly mobile, picky, and in demand. It is going to be ever more difficult to tie them down with full-time employment.

The Premise Of MESA

The only way to solve the world’s most complex challenges is by working with the best in the world. 
And the only way to do that is to keep the time commitment short, remove every obstacle to them creating value, and create an environment and a team where they can do the best work of their lives.

The Best In The World

The goal is to create a brief, but very intense working environment where a small group of carefully chosen participants can build something tangible to advance a mission or cause that they care about. 
The method takes advantage of rapid prototyping tools, software-as-a-service, and modular templates to build something real and functional that embodies the knowledge and experience of everyone at the table. This prototype is used not just to demonstrate the viability of a solution, but to build consensus around a new direction for the company.

Blending Man And Machine

The client is a “problem owner” responsible for an important challenge that they can’t solve on their own. Perhaps their main product is no longer resonating with a younger generation of consumers. 
Their marketing channels are outdated and obsolete, but they are afraid to cannibalize them with new ones. They could be tasked with revitalizing a product line in the face of major technological shifts. Or it could be a social mission, meeting the needs of an underserved population under tight budgetary constraints.

The Problem Owner: The Client

Day 1 is a “download day” dedicated to getting all the relevant information out of everyone’s heads and “out on the table.” This includes the external participants, who were chosen for their specialized expertise in the industries, markets, and technologies thought to be most relevant.On Day 2, the carefully worded “mission” is unveiled, drawing on the discoveries from the day before to frame the problem owner’s problem as an inspiring, yet feasible challenge. The second half of the day is spent generating a small set of ideas to prototype.

The Structure Of MESA: Download And Mission Day

Day 3 is for prototyping, which includes small groups writing copy, making mockups or landing pages, building demos, or producing short videos or presentations to demonstrate the viability of the ideas from the day before. 
It is on Day 3, once people have to start making real tradeoffs in the making of the product, that the real constraints arise.

Prototyping

Day 4 is focused on more advanced prototyping, taking the most viable prototypes to a basic level of functionality. The leader pushes to bring the fidelity of the prototype as close to reality as possible, including real code and functional backends whenever possible.
The further toward reality it moves, the more hidden constraints and priorities will come to the surface.

Advanced Level Prototyping

Day 5, the final day, is focused on wrapping up loose ends and preparing the final presentation. MESA Co. is adamant that the final deliverable cannot be just a presentation (or a report or briefing), but rather the presentation is a vehicle for delivering and explaining the prototype that was created. 
The presentation is ideally made to senior leaders of the company, or other stakeholders who will demand a high level of rigour. This is what creates a real sense of urgency and meaning around the deadline, and brings out the “productivity magic” of the last two days.

The Finale

Where MESA shines is not in the explicit – the rules, structures, schedule, checklists – but in the tacit, the subtle, and the sublime. 
They have found a way to use these subtle touches not just to create a memorable experience, but to produce results that more heavy-handed methods can only dream of.

The Magic Is In The Details

The table represents the intersection of pleasure and commitment. The pleasure of family and friends sitting together and sharing a meal in the evening. And the commitment of getting down to business, of giving everything you have to the task at hand.Tables and the meals we eat on them are enveloped in rituals. From the way the table is set, to how the food is served, to how people sit and prepare themselves for eating, to how the food is actually eaten. Hundreds of these small rituals give us prescribed behaviours that we know will lead to the outcome we’re after – getting fed.

The Meaning Of MESA: A Table

There is a deeper purpose to these rituals that is easy to miss: they imbue the entire experience with significance. They make the process of getting calories into our bodies much more than the sum of its parts: an affirmation of our values, a time of connection with the people we love most, a reminder of what really matters at the end of a hectic day.

The Purpose Of The Ritual

MESA seeks to reintroduce and translate some of these rituals to the world of work. But not just for nostalgic purposes. It recreates them from the ground up, focusing them like a laser on one thing: producing results. It is a reinvention of the rituals that once bound us together in a shared purpose, working toward a common cause, but adapted to the modern context.

Adopting For The World Of Work

The experience begins with the venue. MESA Co. very carefully chooses locations that support the results they are trying to produce. The venues almost always have a “wow factor” to inspire the participants with an environment that stimulates all the senses. Entering the venue as a group and seeing the meticulously laid out table gives you a sense of the gravity and importance of the mission you are about to undertake.

The Venue

The table is, of course, central. It is laid out with precise measurements down to the centimeter, in order to put people just close enough to work together, while giving them enough space to work. Each place at the table has a name on it, like a wedding where every seating assignment is carefully chosen. The setting includes just the essential materials needed for the week, often including a notebook, pen, and bag. Even the color scheme is chosen with intention, often purposefully clashing with the client’s official colors to avoid the “business as usual” attitude.

The Colours And The Shapes

Every element in the space is chosen with intention: the chairs are comfortable for long hours of sitting and working; bags are collected in a central location so they don’t get in the way; the food is prepared simply and to avoid afternoon crashes; there are no clocks, giving the experience a sense of timelessness. There is a “Leave Me Alone” wall – a grid of pockets with participants’ names on them, where everyone is asked to leave their phones to remove the temptation.

No Clocks

The real purpose of all these decisions and rituals is to change participants’ behavior, away from the counterproductive habits we’ve developed, and toward a more focused way of working that is rarely possible in a distraction-filled workplace. As you find yourself in an environment purposefully free of the usual triggers and hooks, with a full staff dedicated to protecting you from every distraction or discomfort, your creativity is unleashed. People respect rituals more than rules, because rituals give us something meaningful in return for our compliance.

Rituals Not Rules: Changing The Context

Coming back to the everyday world, I’ve begun to notice a phenomenon everywhere: as soon as one person in a group takes out their phone or computer, everyone else is much more likely to do so as well. It only takes one person to check out for the atmosphere of human presence to start being sucked out of the room, like an airplane cabin with a punctured window. And once that air is gone, it’s very hard to bring people back.A quick glance at your notifications seems so harmless, but it communicates something unmistakable to others: there is somewhere you’d rather be, mentally if not physically.

The Real World: Everyday Problems With Notifications

I believe that people naturally want to focus, but only if that focus will be protected and respected. They want to give their best, but only if that effort will be put to good use. As the idealism of wanting to do a good job collides with the fragmented reality of modern schedules, we become resigned, gradually coming to resent the environment that seemingly won’t allow us to excel. What I see among MESA participants is a sigh of relief, followed by an unbelievable explosion of creative energy.

A Place To Focus

For years I’ve written on this blog about new ways of working that allow people to bend time, space, and the human mind to their advantage. How do I have

productivity

Productivity

career

Career

teamwork

Teamwork

Introducing the MESA Method: Creating the Ideal Work Experience - Forte Labs

The stresses of running any business with even moderate success are pretty much all-consuming. It’s no wonder, therefore, if enterprises sometimes lack the time to stand back and think creatively about innovation – and suffer accordingly down the line.
We can get into the habit of mentally ‘standing back’ – and wondering whether the future of our business could be a bit different, and richer, than its past.

How to spark innovation

It sounds odd but many customers privately harbour hopes of companies that go a long way beyond what these companies are currently offering. A great way to innovate is to tap into these secret hopes and build products and services to meet them. The possibilities for growth can be enormous.
For example, when it comes to money, we have questions about how to deal with envy, worries about what to spend money on, speculations about how to make money and desires for how to teach children about the value of money.

What might your customer secretly be hoping for?

Does the problem that you’re fixing exist somewhere else and would it make sense for you to fix it there?
The designer Giorgio Armani founded his clothing business in 1975 and soon found widespread success. What motivated him was the desire to fix the chaos and clutter of the world – and he did this by giving his audience an experience of simple elegance delivered via clothes. But with time, Armani realised that similar problems – of clutter, chaos, mess, disorder – could be identified in other areas of life. He’d fixed it in one area, could he now move on to addressing it in others?

Are there neighboring problems around the problem?

It’s easy for a company to become fixated on the medium in which it first launched – and therefore to fail to see that its message (which is the really valuable bit) could happily and lucratively transfer. 
This can happen to artists. Andy Warhol began his career making paintings. His values – an ironic, half-critical, half-loving look at the ephemera of American life – seemed ideally and perhaps exclusively suited to canvas. But with time, Warhol stepped back and came to a richer realisation. His message could as happily exist in a book, a film, some photographs or a magazine.

Might you take the same message into a different medium?

Of any current business activity, we can ask ourselves: what is the bigger version of this? One can ask: what is the underlying principle within the business? And what would it look like for the business to apply that principle in larger ways? 
When teasing out the underlying principle of a business, we shouldn’t look at what the business actually does as the move it is making. So the principle of a nut manufacturer isn’t making nuts, it is making healthy snacks. The principle of a phone company isn’t making phones, it is communication.

What is the bigger version of your current activity?

Innovation is the key because – in the sense we’ve been exploring – it is the process of working out business-solutions to problems that are most important to us. 
The products that any company is currently offering might only be a small part of the customer’s real needs in a given area. Creatively re-defining the business area that a company is in can radically alter the sense of what its core tasks might be – and where its future opportunities might lie.

Innovation: The bottomline

The stresses of running any business with even moderate success are pretty much all consuming. 

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

problemsolving

Problem Solving

business

Business

Four Questions to Spark Innovation

<ul>
<li>Creative individuals tend to operate at the extremes.</li>
<li>The creative process is recursive, not linear. Mental meandering to allow the commingling of ideas is an essential process.</li>
<li>Creativity comes from the heart. There is no other motivation other than the joy of discovering something new.</li>
<li>One cannot be exceptional and normal at the same time.</li>
<li>Stay curious. Try new things. Make time for reflection and relaxation.</li>
</ul>

Creativity: Now You Know!

Creativity does not happen inside people’s heads but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.Criteria For An Idea to Be Considered “Creative”:<ul><li>Be couched in terms that are understandable to others.</li><li>Pass muster with the experts of the field.</li><li>Be included in the cultural domain to which it belongs.</li></ul>

Defining Creativity

Creative people have complex personalities. They have the ability to move from one extreme to the other as needed. Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time.They are both playful and disciplined; responsible and irresponsible.Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.Creative people seem to be both introverted and extroverted.

Traits Of A Creative Person

<ul><li>Preparation: Immersing oneself in the problem and sparking curiosity</li><li>Incubation: Time to allow the ideas to church around in the subconscious where unusual connections can be made</li><li>Insight: The “Aha!” moment</li><li>Evaluation: Deciding whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing</li><li>Elaboration: The hard work of implementing and realizing the solution</li></ul>

Five Steps Of The Creative Process

One of the values in walking to work is mental meandering. Or if driving, not to have the car radio on…Mental meandering, mind wandering and so on, is an essential process. If you are allowing that mentation to be driven by the radio or the television or other people’s conversations, you are just cutting down on your exploratory, your intellectual exploratory time.

<ul><li>Creative people all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or making money that drives them; rather, it is the opportunity to do the work that they enjoy doing.</li><li>Most people enjoy “designing or discovering something new.”</li><li>We are also motivated by the force of entropy. It gives us pleasure when we are comfortable, when we relax, or when we can get away with feeling good without expending energy.</li><li>Even the most creative person must overcome the barrier of entropy. It is impossible to accomplish something that is truly new and worthwhile without struggling with it.</li></ul>

Motivating Creativity

<ul><li>There are clear goals every step of the way.</li><li>There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.</li><li>There is a balance between challenges and skills.</li><li>Actions and awareness are merged.</li><li>Distractions are excluded from consciousness.</li><li>There is no worry of failure.</li><li>Self-consciousness disappears.</li><li>The sense of time becomes distorted.</li><li>The activity becomes autotelic. You do it just for the sake of the activity itself.</li></ul>

Elements Of Finding Flow

One must be in a position to access the domain in which one plans to work. Information is not distributed evenly in space but is clumped in different geographical nodes.Novel stimulation is not evenly distributed. Some environments have a greater density of interaction and provide more excitement and a greater effervescence of ideas.Access to the field is not evenly distributed in space. The centres that facilitate the realization of novel ideas are not necessarily the ones where the information is stored or where the stimulation is greatest.

A Creative Surrounding

<ul><li>The evidence suggests that unusual and beautiful surroundings may in face help us see situations more holistically and from novel viewpoints.</li><li>How one spends time in a beautiful natural setting seems to matter as well. Just sitting and watching is fine, but taking a leisurely walk seems to be even better.</li><li>Devoting full attention to a problem is not the best recipe for having creative thoughts.</li><li>Homes rich in meaningful symbols make it easier for their owners to know who they are and therefore what they should do.</li></ul>

Ideas for Creating an Inspiring Environment

<ul><li>Creative people are curious</li><li>Parental support is instrumental in helping children succeed amidst a poor or socially marginal background.</li><li>Creative people seem to come from exceptionally supportive childhoods or very deprived and challenging ones. Very few come from middle-class comfort.</li><li>One cannot be exceptional and normal at the same time.</li><li>Focus, or drive, is the second quality behind curiosity that sets creative individuals apart from their peers.</li><li>Creative individuals don’t have a career. They create their career.</li></ul>

The Ways Of Creative People

You must always have an obsession. You must always have too little time instead of too much

<ul><li>When we live creativity, we banish boredom.</li><li>Stop wasting energy on selfish goals. Explore the world around you for its own sake. Be curious.</li><li>Try to be surprised by something every day.</li><li>Try to surprise at least one person every day.</li><li>Keep a journal and write these things down.</li><li>Wake up with a specific goal to look forward to.</li><li>Review your day the night before and choose a particular task that is relatively interesting and exciting.</li><li>Things become more fun the better we get at them.</li><li>Have clear goals and expectations, focus on the consequences of your actions, concentrate without distractions.</li></ul>

Enhance your Creativity

Intentionally develop your weaker character traits.Practice shifting from operating with an open mind and receptive to new ideas, to closed focus and concentration.Aim for a complex personality. Allow yourself to become more and experience more.Find problems that move you emotionally.Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible. Do not rush to define a cause.Experiment with many alternate solutions. Keep your options open.Produce many different, unlikely and divergent ideas.Too many people assume that most of the world is off-limits to them.

Explore Yourself

<ul><li>We are exhausted by too many demands.</li><li>We are easily distracted.</li><li>We are lazy and lack discipline for controlling the flow of energy.</li><li>We do not know what to do with the energy we do have.</li></ul>

Obstacles to Creativity

Professor Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to explain a theory on how we can achieve a mental state of peak performance and happiness. Now he uses that same theory and applies it to help us understand the creative process. Drawing upon nearly one hundred interviews with creative people in every field, this book explores the traits of creative people and helps us identify ways to encourage our own originality.

Creativity is about capturing those moments that make life worth living. The author's objective is to offer an understanding of what leads to these moments, be it the excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab, so that knowledge can be used to enrich people's lives. Drawing on 100 interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists to politicians and business leaders, poets and artists, as well as his 30 years of research on the subject, Csikszentmihalyi uses his famous theory to explore the creative process. He discusses such ideas as why creative individuals are often seen as selfish and arrogant, and why the tortured genius is largely a myth. Most important, he clearly explains why creativity needs to be cultivated and is necessary for the future of our country, if not the world.

books

Books

“Although the benefits of this study to scholars are obvious, this thought-provoking mixture of scholarly and colloquial will enlighten inquisitive general readers, too.” —  Library Journal (starred review)The classic study of the creative process from the bestselling author of Flow.Creativity is about capturing those moments that make life worth living. Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (“The leading researcher into ‘flow states.’”  — Newsweek) reveals what leads to these moments—be it the excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab—so that this knowledge can be used to enrich people's lives. Drawing on nearly one hundred interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists, to politicians and business leaders, to poets and artists, as well as his thirty years of research on the subject, Csikszentmihalyi uses his famous flow theory to explore the creative process. He discusses such ideas as why creative individuals are often seen as selfish and arrogant, and why the "tortured genius" is largely a myth. Most important, he explains why creativity needs to be cultivated and is necessary for the future of our country, if not the world.

Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi was a Hungarian-American psychologist. He recognized and named the psychological concept of "flow", a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. He was the Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In the age of Internet everyone creates content while the important work gets done though is in knowing exactly what’s important and how it fits together into one cohesive concept. Content creation is inevitable, content curation is invaluable.

We produce 2.5 quintillion bits of data every day. 90% of data is created in the past 2 years.

Curation is how to tell a story with just a bunch of things.

If everything is important then nothing is important.

Why Louvre Is The Example Of Curation 

If your mind is focused on the accumulation of stuff. Be it data art or money you tend to end up being aimless whatever your output is.

Without a specific place for our stuff and way of organising information such that there is no way to utilise it in a helpful way, we’re gonna have no understanding of what we’re looking at.Only if we learn to curate like at the Louvre Museum and organise that information in a way that makes sense to us:<ol><li>We’ll lose the need to always be inventing ideas to creating that content because we’re repacking concepts that exist.</li><li>We organically create a concept for a common theme se which we can refer back to when we need it.</li></ol>

There’s no lack of skill in accumulating 

Want to become a master curator of information? Take a lesson from the Louvre.

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Lessons from the Louvre and becoming the master of curation

Innovation is making existing things better. It’s taking an existing piece of innovation and improving it. Invention on the other hand is creating something entirely new. Something which has never existed before.

Innovation ≠  Invention 

<ol><li>Make existing content more real. You want to captivate an audience? You don’t need to find new material you just need to work on your expression of it. </li><li>Make existing content more emotional, when we feel emotionally connected to something, we’re more likely to remember it. That’s why character development is important in movies.</li><li>Make existing content more approachable. You don’t need to be over the top in your presentation, instead make it more casual, more everyday to make it more inviting.</li></ol>

Giotto’s 3 Rules For Innovating Inside The Box 

Giotto’s rules for innovating inside the box.

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philosophy

Philosophy

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

communication

Communication

podcasts

Podcasts

Giotto and Innovating inside the box 📦

“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.”

If we want to do things that haven’t been done or learn things that have never been learned — in short, be more creative — we must learn to ask the right questions, ones so good that they’re half-answered in the asking. And to do that, it might help to understand the process.
Warren Berger proposes a simple method in his book A More Beautiful Question; an interesting three-part system to help (partially) solve the problem of inquiry. He calls it The Why, What If, and How of Innovative Questioning. Each stage of the problem-solving process has distinct challenges and issues–requiring a different mindset, along with different types of questions.

Asking The Right Questions

Expertise is helpful at certain points, not so helpful at others; wide-open, unfettered divergent thinking is critical at one stage, discipline and focus is called for at another. 
By thinking of questioning and problem solving in a more structured way, we can remind ourselves to shift approaches, change tools, and adjust our questions according to which stage we’re entering.

Expertise

A good Why? seeks true understanding. Why are things the way they are currently? Why do we do it that way? Why do we believe what we believe?
This start is essential because it gives us permission to continue down a line of inquiry fully equipped. Although we may think we have a brilliant idea in our heads for a new product, or a new answer to an old question, or a new way of doing an old thing, unless we understand why things are the way they are, we’re not yet on solid ground. We never want to operate from a position of ignorance, wasting our time on an idea that is half-baked.

Why? Questioning

The truth is that a really good Why? type question tends to be threatening. That’s also what makes it useful. It challenges us to step back and stop thinking on autopilot.
It also requires a step back from knowing — that recognizable feeling of knowing something but not knowing how you know it. This forced perspective is, of course, as valuable a thing as you can do.

The Why Is Threatening

All great ideas tend to be, almost by definition — by asking What If…?Berger illustrates this one well with the story of Pandora Music. The founder Tim Westergren wanted to know why good music wasn’t making it out to the masses. His search didn’t lead to a satisfactory answer, so he eventually asked himself, What if we could map the DNA of music? The Pandora story started with someone’s wondering about an unmet need. It concluded with the questioner, Westergren, figuring out a way to bring a fully realized version of the answer into the world.

What If? Questioning

Smart recombinations are all around us. Pandora, for example, is a combination of a radio station and search engine; it also takes the biological method of genetic coding and transfers it to the domain of music. In today’s tech world, many of the most successful products–Apple’s iPhone being just one notable example–are hybrids, melding functions and features in new ways.

Smart Blends And Recombinations

Once we think we’ve hit on a brilliant new idea, it’s time to see if the thing actually works. Usually and most frequently, the answer is no. But enough times to make it worth our while, we discover that the new idea has legs.The most common problem here is that we try to perfect a new idea all at once, leading to stagnation and paralysis. That’s usually the wrong approach.Another, often better, way is to try the idea quickly and start getting feedback.

How? Questioning

The point is to move along the axis of Why?–What If–How? without too much self-censoring in the last phase. Being afraid to fail can often mean a great What If? proposition gets stuck there forever. Analysis paralysis, as it’s sometimes called. But if you can instead enter the testing of the How? stage quickly, even by showing that an idea won’t work, then you can start the loop over again, either asking a new Why? or proposing a new What If? to an existing Why?Thus moving your creative engine forward.

Avoiding An Analysis Paralysis

Solve creativity problems with these three questions

How do we ask better questions, and why does it matter? Warren Berger helps us with his book "A More Beautiful Question," proposing a three-part system.

Warren Berger's Three-Part Method for More Creativity - Farnam Street

Instead of trying to brainstorm startup ideas, look at your own life for a problem that needs solving. Chesky says he learned the best ideas often comes from finding a solution for a personal problem.

Solve a problem

Know your industry's laws and regulations. Airbnb has run into problems with local and national hospitality laws. Part of that comes from starting a tech company that must work with laws that don't consider the sharing economy - people as businesses. They didn't know whether to view Airbnb as a person or business. The best solution is knowledge and an open mind.

Get informed

Chesky says that it's better to have a hundred people that love your company than a million that sort of like it. A hundred people that like you will tell ten people. It is also easier to focus on the needs of a smaller core of customers.

Prioritise your core customers

Chesky considers about 20 to 30 entrepreneurs as his mentors. Every time you don't know how to do something, there's someone else who does.

Find role models

Startups can be daunting, but when it comes to getting your business off the ground, Brian Chesky has some tips to help you make your mark. Get social with Inc. on: Facebook: http://on.inc.com/ilqUryJ Twitter: http://on.inc.com/8FGInRj LinkedIn: http://on.inc.com/gt7KsIn Instagram: http://on.inc.com/wLObvE2 Pinterest: http://on.inc.com/8lPoT0r

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

Startups can be daunting, but when it comes to getting your business off the ground, Brian Chesky has some tips to help you make your mark.

Get social with Inc. on:
Facebook: http://on.inc.com/ilqUryJ
Twitter: http://on.inc.com/8FGInRj
LinkedIn: http://on.inc.com/gt7KsIn
Instagram: http://on.inc.com/wLObvE2
Pinterest: http://on.inc.com/8lPoT0r

Inc. Magazine delivers advice, tools, and services to help business owners and CEOs grow their businesses more successfully. You'll find information and advice covering virtually every business and management task including marketing, sales, finding capital, managing people, and much more.  Visit Inc.com for the latest!

Inc.

Airbnb Co-Founder Brian Chesky Shares His Top Tips For Disrupting an Industry | Inc.

Despair not. Creativity, while it is challenging to teach explicitly, can be fostered in your students. Check out these ways to help your students develop their creativity.

Creativity and Students; Let's Bridge the Gap

Creativity is a vital skill students need to be successful in school and life. It helps with problem-solving, contributes to our satisfaction in life, and gives us a sense of purpose. Being creative helps us relax and brings enjoyment to our lives.

Why it Matters

Encourage imagination and out of the box thinking in your students. Teach students to visualize. Encourage students to think beyond apparent answers and to ask the question ‘What if…?’

Imagination

Kids need to play; it is not a mere luxury.Not just games with rules, but kids need long, unstructured blocks of time to play.Pretend play is one of the best ways for kids to develop their creativity.Encourage outdoor play. You can even have students make up their own games.

It's Play On

It’s important to let kids struggle and figure it out on their own. Don’t always give kids a set of instructions to figure out. Give them a project and let them figure out a way to complete it on their own.

The Struggle is Real

Give students each a small journal for jotting down their ideas. Creativity strikes at any moment, but sometimes it is fleeting. Writing down, or drawing, thoughts can help retain them and help kids pay attention to their thinking, encouraging further creativity.

Let'em have the Pencils

Working in groups is another great way to encourage creativity. Students can feed off each other. The concept of synergy, when a group has its own energy, can fuel further creativity.

United We Stand

When they use their creativity, praise it in specific ways.

Don't Forget to Praise Them

The child who is ‘left behind’ most is the one who leaves school without transition readiness.

Creativity isn’t something that students learn overnight, but it is something you can help students develop. Make your classroom a creativity workshop by giving students opportunities to think for themselves and solve problems. They will use this skill for the rest of their lives.

It's a Life Skill

Nowadays creativity in kids is dying out. The craze to do something new is now quite unlikely to be found in our youngsters. They are now just programmed machines; not ready to try something new. 

While many of us aren't born with a wild imagination, creativity is an important life skill for everyone. Here's why - plus tips to nourish it in students.

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Parenting

How to Help Students Develop it and Why It's Important

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