3 Ways To Find Creative Insights (Episode 52)

Summary of Episode 52: 3 Ways To Find Creative Insights

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TRANSCRIPT:

I know a lot of times we get ambitious. We want to complete our goals and we get really motivated to do it… and so we end up struggling to find creative solutions, but that’s not always the best way to go about it. That’s not the best strategy for creativity. 

Like so many aspects of creativity, it really requires being able to shift from one extreme to the other. We want that motivation. We want to keep working on this problem until we find a solution. However, we can’t be so motivated that we never actually take a step back and allow our subconscious brain enough time to chime in and give us its input. 

As I’ve talked about before on this podcast, your subconscious brain is amazing when it comes to problem-solving. Your subconscious brain creates these very elegant solutions while your conscious brain tends to create these Frankenstein solutions where you patch things together and then hope it all works together. 

So we definitely want to listen to our subconscious brain. The best way to do that is to be able to flip back and forth between being highly motivated, where we are consciously pushing ourselves forward… and then flipping the switch in going back to this quiet time where we can allow our subconscious brain time to put all the pieces together. If it has found a solution then we need to give it time to make us aware of that solution. 

So before we jump into these strategies, let me tell you the common theme that all of them have… and that is the ability to quiet down your conscious brain. This allows your subconscious to make you aware of the solutions that you already have. 

So the 3 different strategies that will talk about here are…

1. Semi-automatic activity
2. Meditation
3. Dreams

Semi-Automatic Activity

A semi-automatic activity is any activity that requires very little of your focus to complete. So these are activities like walking, light exercising, hiking, showering, swimming… its activities like that where your conscious brain has to work just a little bit to keep you going. 

So let’s take the example of going for a hike. When you’re hiking, your brain still has to think about putting one foot in front of the other. Your conscious brain has to think about where exactly you’re going, which path you’re taking, you’re looking around… So there’s this active aspect of it, but it does not by any stretch of the imagination max out your brain. There’s so much more capacity that your brain is not using. So as we quiet down our conscious brain, you’ll find that these self-conscious ideas start bubbling up to the surface. 

Meditation

Just like with semi-automatic activity here we are quieting down the conscious brain and we’re allowing our subconscious a quiet space where it can make us aware of the solutions we already have. 

As creative people, we get a lot in return for meditation. according to the Harvard Business Review, only 10 minutes of meditation can increase your focus and your problem-solving skills, it can make you better at divergent thinking, and it also increases your resilience. so anytime you have a setback, meditation helps you with that emotional regulation so that you can get over that sat back and then start working again. 

What I love the most about meditation is that it creates this long gap between a stimulus and your reaction to it. So if you’ve ever meditated before, in general (there are many different kinds of mediation), when you meditate, you have an idea or a thought pops into your head… but you don’t instantly react to it like you generally would in normal, everyday life. An idea pops into your head and you think “I need to go and take action on it right now!” (especially if you’re motivated then you REALLY feel like you have to do it). 

However, when you meditate you are allowing yourself to have the thought and allow the thought to be there for some amount of time before you actually take action on it and what’s cool is you’re actually training your brain that you don’t actually have to react instantly to each of the ideas that pop into your head. What’s great about this is that you’re not gonna get stuck going down a path that’s not going to help you so. when you meditate on the ideas or the strategies that you were using that you probably habitually use, you’re gonna have that thought like “maybe I need to try the same strategy again but I need to try harder.” You might still have those habitual thoughts, but with meditation, you’ll be better able to let unproductive thoughts go and take a mindful approach to your unique problem. 

So because you are not so reactive to your own thoughts, you’re gonna be able to let the bad ideas go. You’re gonna be able to put down the tools that aren’t working for you. and in that gap of time, you’re gonna be able to search for some kind of idea that is going to take you where you want to go. 

Now personally I love meditating so I like to go for a while, but you don’t have to go for very long you can go for 10 minutes or you can even take 10 deep breaths and get a lot of the benefits just from that alone and that’s something that we can all do you even with a busy schedule. 

Dreams

Listen and pay attention to your dreams. There’s a lot of really cool examples specifically in the science of these great creative thinkers having a breakthrough that came from some kind of a dream that they had. 

So the most famous example probably comes from James Watson who is the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. Before Watson and Crick were able to make this breakthrough on what the structure of DNA looks like, Watson had this dream of a spiral staircase that dream inspired him to start thinking about well what if instead of just a long strand like a ladder… what if the DNA spiraled around itself sort of like that staircase? and so that dream change the way he was looking at the problem, which eventually led him to the solution. 

Another great example from Neil’s Bohr. Neils Bohr is known for discovering the structure of an atom. He created the Bohr Model of the atom after having a dream about the solar system. He dreamed about the solar system and electrons going around the sun. This created the foundation for how we understood the structure of atoms early on.

So these are 3 really cool and really easy ways of finding your eureka moment. We talk about semi-automatic activity, going for a walk swimming, some kind of light exercise, etc. We talked about meditation… quieting that conscious brain and increasing that gap between a stimulus and your response so you give yourself more time to come up with the best solution before you start acting on it. And finally, we talked about listening and paying attention to your dreams and what your dreams might be telling you.

Links

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