Creativity is the key to developing solutions; both to problems you’re trying to solve and to problems you haven’t yet realized exist. Without creativity, we would be tied to processes and simply following what has been done in the past. Nothing new would be created. In fact, nothing would have ever been created.
Realizing this is the key to embracing every creative urge that hits you. It often feels that society values the process-oriented more than the creatives. We frown upon the smart student that decides to pursue a career as a sculptor, sigh at the loss of a brilliant mind when a math whiz takes up ballroom dancing. What we don’t realize is that those minds are putting their creativity to work – and as I said before, creativity is the key (obviously) to creation.
I’ve always been one to lean towards languages, starting with my declaration as a ten year old that I was going to transfer to French Immersion. From there, I was struck with the language bug; I fell in love with poetry in high school, discovered the wonder of linguistics in University. This is not everyone’s calling, but for me, language was how I transformed from defining myself as someone who gets good grades, to someone that seeks creative development, inside and outside of the classroom. Throughout my journeys as an amateur writer, I discovered something significant.
I didn’t understand was creativity really was or how powerful it is.
For the first few years as a writer, I only wrote when inspiration struck. If I was hit with a thought or an idea, I’d scribble it down furiously until a poem or a passage of prose existed. This is how I developed my fear of creation. If creativity was simply left to inspiration, to the lucky occurrence that you were feeling it that day, how could you ever trust what terrible work you might come up with on an off-day? It wasn’t worth the risk to even try to create, for fear or producing something that was worse than what had been devised on an inspired day. This fear lead to weeks without writing that left me feeling stagnant and even more incapable of creativity.
Finally, I laid the smack down and set myself a 30-day challenge: write in my journal every day. No matter how late I got in, no matter what assignments were due the next day, which exams were lurking, or how much fear I had built up when I picked up the pencil, I had to write. No excuses.
I pulled off a few decent poems over the thirty days and a collection of great sentences to mine from in the future. The greatest realization? That some of the best pieces had been written on days when inspiration felt like it had flown out the window. Some nights I sat for an hour before thinking of something to write, wrestling with every word, physically pinning them down to the paper. Sweating until something stared back at me. These were not lucky occurrences. These were products of my creative labour.
This made me realize that there are ways of juicing your brain, even when it feels like you’ve got nothing going on in there. So I’ve begun my mission to determine how to foster creativity, in order to inspire the heart, but also in order to develop problem-solving skills that go well beyond processes. What started as an attempt to drop inspiration as my crutch when writing, became my passion to understand how creativity works. What can we do to make ourselves more prone to creation? How can we develop ways of thinking that help us reach unexpected conclusions, be it a new poem or a solution to a business problem?
Join me on this journey as I leave you with the first of many articles I’ll read in order to build up my repertoire of creative thinking tricks. Once you’ve read them, go out and see what you can create today.
Recommended reading: Warm Showers, Friction, and Failure, Four Simple Ways to Create More and Worry Less