#creative insight

Photo by Marietta Varga.

"Art is the big door, but real life is a lot of small doors that you must pass through to create something new." — Jean Giraud

To be creative is to be open to the idea your ideas—your way of understanding the world—are limited by what you have experienced.

A simple way of looking at it is: if you don't open the door, ideas can't get in. I got a good reminder of the importance of being open recently, of how being close minded or restricted by your beliefs can hinder creative thinking.

I was in Indianapolis talking to students about how to life a more creative life. I've been writing about creativity for 10 years, a reasonable amount of time to get my ducks in a row on the matter.

And yet, during the visit I ran into a few people—specifically: adults—who found themselves struggling with the notion of being open as a means of gathering more points from which to form ideas. They wanted to be more creative, they wanted to inspire others to be more creative too, so they asked me how to do it.

My response? I told them what I've learned, about helping students be open to new and different things, to change routine for the sake of changing it, taking the time to think about experiences. I mentioned failure and the importance of having small failures and how to overcome setbacks in order to uncover novel and useful ideas.

When I explained all this, a few of the people I talked to looked at me kind of skeptical, like none of the things I was talking about would make any difference.

I can't blame them for their skepticism, it's hard to hear anything that might stand in the way of your beliefs, or how you've always thought of things.

But I couldn't help but think: maybe that's your problem right there. You aren't willing to consider different perspectives so you end up thinking how you always have. You exist inside a tiny bubble you've created for yourself with your own thinking. So when anything sharp comes along—a different opinion, someone who says you should try the thing you failed once at—you run the other way.

It's no wonder so many people struggle to uncover a really insightful idea, or fail to learn means for overcoming life's setbacks or difficulties. So stuck in their own way, they can't see that the easiest way out of a bind, or routine, or block, is by opening up to new and different perspectives.

The quickest route to thinking creatively isn't protecting your ideas or way of thinking. It's accepting the fact your ideas, your perspectives on the world, are just one small blip in the much larger scheme of things.

You can't be both.

Unfortunately we often pick the lesser of the two when we don't have to. For example, I talk a lot with creatives who don't spend their days doing any sort of creative work.

They instead have day jobs, working for “the man,” slaving away on soul-sucking tasks in order to pay the bills or live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. That's not the rule of course. There are a lot of creatives who have day jobs (or school) that they enjoy doing to some degree or another.

But when I hear them say they don't have time to pursue their craft, I think they have nobody to blame but themselves. If you're not doing creative work, you, have no one to blame but yourself.

Imagine a copywriter saying she doesn't have time to paint, as much as she absolutely loves to paint. Or a sandwich shop employee complaining that “if only there were more time in the day” he could start that novel he's been meaning to write. Or, my favorite, the medical student who says there's no way she could do anything creative because her work relies on her being right – not creative – 90% of the time. Surprisingly these types of complaints often come across on Twitter, or Facebook.

It's surprising because, “You don't have time to put at least five minutes into something you want to do, but you have a few minutes to blast status updates on Twitter or over chat?”

The problem of creative motivation is commonly one of how we decide to spend our time. That's it.

You could be more creative, and you could be a published novelist (if only an independent, self-published one), if there were more time in the day. Sure, but no. Wrong mentality. Right here you should imagine that buzzing sound from TV game shows where contestants do something wrong.

Instead, you could be doing more creative things if you simply made it a priority to do so.

Even if you find yourself in an environment that doesn't fully encourage creativity, like the medical student, you can still find ways to be creative at the job you're doing. You just have to make it a priority to do so. Taking time to sit and ask yourself, “what could I do to make my work more creative?”

Five minutes is all you need.

Five minutes every day to sit down and turn off your phone and ignore your email and maybe try some creative exercises.

Because nobody is going to give you the time to just sit and think. There will never be more hours in the day, the sun just doesn't work on your schedule unfortunately. You have to make the time yourself.

I'm reminded of this great quote from writer and productivity genius Merlin Mann. Merlin wrote:

“I can either be a guy who writes novels, or I can be a guy who answers email. Realizing I cannot be both, I've made the decision, and now I live with it.”

So which are you: someone who is creative, or someone who answers emails?

Gather a lot of varied experiences. Read a lot of books, travel, talk to strangers, anything to open your mind to new ideas and ways of thinking.

Create a frame of topic. Addressing questions like: what is it you're trying to do, and where should your focus be?

Ask a lot of questions. Who, what, where, when, why, how, repeat. What if this was like that? Where would this look out of place? Who would think this was brilliant? When will this not be true? You get the idea.

Use your imagination to answer the questions. How would a laptop work if it were a hat? Who from 1,000 years ago would have read this? What would this look like if it were 10,000x time bigger (or smaller)?

Write down or draw out your ideas. Do something to make the ideas more than just intangible thoughts. Writing them down is powerful, but so is vocally recording them or drawing them.

Filter the ideas down. Look (or listen) through your list of ideas and filter out the ones that are utterly useless or too far-fetched. Keep them around though, you never know when they will inspire something new.

Act! Now figure out the next step. Even if the idea seems radical, there's always a way to move forward.