These 6 areas get to the heart of what it means to be a creative person. Change any one of these areas and it’ll significantly effect your creativity for the better. These aren’t simply tactics or creativity techniques. They’re areas where you can make a few small changes for a huge impact.

Increase Your Creative Potential

You can increase your creative potential by increasing any of these three components of creativity…

1. Your domain-specific knowledge (I.e. The knowledge and skills important for your specific industry, job, etc.)
2. Your creativity-relevant skills (your ability to think in unconvential ways)
3. Your motivation (your ability to take action consistently over time)

 

All three of these areas can be increased through effort and strategy. You can always acquire more knowledge and skills by reading books and applying what you’ve learned. Creativity skills can be broken down into actionable (and repeatable) steps. By increasing the skills required to think in unconventional ways, you increase your overall creative potential. Motivation is increased when you develop goals that have at least 3 qualities: the goal is clear, it’s emotional, and you feel able to achieve it.

Everyone has creative potential. Most people think they need a really high IQ to be creative, but this simply isn’t the case. Research suggests that any acceptable level of IQ works for creativity (I.e. You need to be “smart enough to understand what’s going on… But not a genius).

Research into “practice effects” analyzes how the brain reacts to learning and skill development. The research shows that, within reason, whatever one brain can do another brain can do as well.

There are small exceptions to the rule, such as people who are genetically predisposed to having great hearing going into a music career. However, even in this case, an average person would have a better musical ear through practicing than someone genetically predisposed but who didn’t practice as much.

 

Align Your Creative Personality

You can increase your creativity by aligning your creative process and
environment to fit with your personality. There is no “best personality” for creativity. There’s not even a best personality within specific industries. The best personality depends on the type of problem being solved.

For example, introverts excel at activities which require working in solitude, such as acquiring knowledge and skills and spending significant time working on a specific problem. Extroverts tend to be very good at drawing on ideas from other people. They have access to a wide variety of ideas through their network that don’t exist in an introvert’s network. They also have a big advantage when it comes time to launch a creative idea and persuade others of its value.

What’s important is that you use your personality to its fullest potential. Introverts shouldn’t try to beat extroverts at their own games vice versa. Steve Jobs and Steve Woz are great examples. Jobs was a creative extrovert while Woz is a creative introvert. Neither of them could have made Apple by themselves.

Csikszentmihalyi found a number of paradoxes in the creative personality. Creative people tend to bounce between the extremes of personality traits. For example, they go from introverted to extroverted and back again, spending very little time in the middle. They are also passionate, but objective, realistic but imaginative, smart yet naive, as well as rational and irrational. Bouncing between extremes essentially doubles a creative person’s ability to generate ideas, allowing them to have the best of both worlds. .

Allowing yourself to go from one extreme to another can do wonders to increase your creativity. Most people wouldn’t allow themselves to act in such an inconsistent way. But once you realize that it’s not only acceptable, but beneficial, it gives you a creative license to do so.

 

Change Your Creative Environment

Changing your environment often leads to creative insights. For that to happen, the creative person must be working on the problem for a significant amount of time (long enough to teach the subconscious brain what to look for). At that point, the subconscious works on autopilot.

When the environment shifts, it shifts your mental/emotional state, giving your brain access to different ideas (ideas are emotionally-coded in the brain). This is why so many people find that they’re intensely creative in the shower or while driving.

Early on in the creative process, loud environments are generally better because it makes it easier to spot a problem (as opposed to sitting at your computer and thinking “ok… What problem should I try to solve?). After finding an appropriate problem, it’s best to switch to a quiet environment to work with your ideas, do research, etc. Then shift again to a loud/high energy environment to get feedback from others before once again retreating into solitude. The end of the creative process requires some form of persuasion (buy my product/art etc., follow my leadership, believe my ideas, etc.)

So maximizing your creativity using the environment comes down to finding the appropriate environment for where you are in the creative process. When the environment is too quiet, it’s difficult to find highly original ideas, but when it’s too loud it’s difficult to work with the ideas you have. Great creativity balances both.

 

Hone Your Creative Process

Most people think creativity cannot be taught because they view creativity as a single activity. The creative process is actually many different skills and activities, some of which are completely the opposite of other skills. When you break creativity down, you’re left with actionable steps that can be practiced and honed.

In a very general way, the creative process is a continual expansion and contraction of ideas. Creative people generate a wide variety of ideas (high quantity ideas that are both different from each other and different from what others have already made) and then use analytical skills to evaluate each one. Some ideas are edited out while others are expanded upon. Then the process repeats itself.

The skills most important to the creative process are analytical skills (breaking down ideas and abstracting them), synthetic skills (I.e. Combining ideas together), and practical skills (used for persuasion). Using these 3 skills alone, you can create anything. Furthermore, these are all skills that you can get better at using. Research shows that giving explicit directions to students to generate original ideas increased the overall creativeness of what they make.

Process is what most people think of when they think of becoming more creative. Process is only a small fraction of creativity though. In fact, if you get personality and environment right, process generally takes care of itself.

Click here to watch The Creative Process in 5 Minutes or Less

 

Don’t Focus On Only One Type of Creative Product

Creative products are generally placed in 2 different categories: paradigm-acceptance and paradigm-rejection. A paradigm is simply a system of though or a combination of what’s accepted or commonly done in an industry).

Paradigm-acceptance is when a creative product impacts the industry by moving the industry forward in a direction it was already going. An example would be Nintendo going from 8 bit, to 16 bit, to 32, etc.

Paradigm-rejection is when a creative person breaks the rules. The Nintendo Wii is a great example of this. While X-Box and PlayStation were fighting over having the highest graphics, the Nintendo Wii came out with low graphics but added a handheld joystick.

One way of increasing your creativity is to shift between searching for paradigm-acceptance products and paradigm-rejection products. LIke other areas of creativity, they’re complimentary. When progress becomes difficult in one strategy you can shift to the other.

 

Become More Persuasive

Persuasion is often left to chance to creative people. There’s a false assumption that creative products speak for themselves. I wrote a blog about this topic called “Does Building a Better Mousetrap Actually Work?”

Creativity is about the fit between a product and its audience… But it’s a “perceived” fit, not a real one. What persuasion does is frame the product in a way that bridges the gap between what a product does and what it does “for me.” Many highly creative ideas fail simply because persuasion is left to chance. When a product doesn’t instantly become successful, they assume it’s a problem with either the product or with themselves. Neither is true. It’s a problem translating the product into understandable terms.

Just like the other areas, persuasion can be learned. When I was getting my master’s, I wrote a paper on how Steve Jobs evolved as a marketer. There was a clear learning curve that developed over his career as he applied more and more skills.