Self-reflect

Self-reflection is a critical part of the creative process. It keeps ideas grounded in reality and keeps you focused on what’s truly important. Those that don’t take the time to self-reflect often find themselves overly focused on day-to-day details or perfectionism. When a creator self-reflects, they are mindful of how they are using their mental energy.

Use Stepping Stones

Ideas don’t always pop into a creator’s head fully formed. More often, bits and pieces come in over the course of the creative process. Accept that early versions of an idea or product are often flawed and unworkable. Allow these early ideas to be stepping stones to a new generation of ideas that are both more original and effective than earlier versions.

Play

Allow yourself to play with ideas. Forget about reaching an “end goal” for a moment and just have fun. Play doesn’t require any outcome… It’s worth doing for its own sake. Because there’s no need to force an outcome, ideas that are more radical can be drawn upon and combinations that are counter-intuitive or that seem like long-shots can be used.

Use Dissatisfaction To Motivate Creativity

Dissatisfaction leads to motivation to create solutions. But the type of dissatisfaction you feel will determine what type of creativity you use. When a creative person is dissatisfied with the distance to their goal it motivates forward movement. It accepts the status-quo or “current rules of the game” and seeks to maximize potential within the rules. This is very different than being dissatisfied with the status-quo, which motivates lateral or perpendicular movement. Instead of seeking to maximize potential within an area, this type of dissatisfaction seeks to expand the area altogether.

Get Your Motivation From Within

Those that pursue mastery within art, business, or science do it because they love what they do. Their motivation comes from within. When creative people are internally motivated, they’re more-able to be unique. When creative people are motivated from the outside, such as when they’re engaging in a creative activity simply for money, the resulting product is far less original and unique.

Learn Critical Skills & Knowledge in Your Specific Industry

Learn the skills and knowledge important for conventional success in your industry. Creativity has more to do with how much “very specific” knowledge a creative person has than their general knowledge or IQ. The more specific knowledge a creator has, the greater their potential for understanding critical problems within an industry.

Learn and Use Unconventional Strategies

Being an expert in an industry doesn’t lead to creativity unless that expertise is applied in unconventional ways. It’s the difference between being “really smart” and being a “creative genius.” Creativity skills are different styles of thinking, such as using analogies or lateral thinking, that allow for unconventional solutions.

Believe In Yourself

Highly creative people believe in their own ability to solve problems and effect outcomes. They may not know what problems lie ahead, but they believe in their own abilities enough to be willing to invest time and energy into searching for a solution.

Get Gatekeepers On Your Side

In every industry and business there are key decision-makers who have the ability to support your creativity or push back against it. Oftentimes, it’s more important to please gatekeepers early on before moving to riskier ideas. Gaining a gatekeeper’s trust opens doors for the creative person. Once they prove the value of their creativity, the creator gets more freedom to try riskier ideas.

Stick With Problems Longer

Be willing to stick with a problem longer than your peers. The longer creative people leave problems unsolved, the more original and novel their solutions. The solutions that come to mind the easiest are those most likely to already exist.

Do Something (Slightly) Active

Go for walks, drive your car, take a shower… Do things that require very little mental focus. This type of activity reduces the noise made in the conscious brain by giving your conscious an easy task and allows subconscious thoughts to surface. This quieting of the conscious is why so many great ideas come to creative people when they’re not being creative.

Think “Flexibility”

Flexibility is the ability to think thoughts that are very different from each other. If all your ideas are in a similar “category,” then there’s very little variation in your thinking process. If one idea within the category fails, it’s likely all of them will fail. When generating new ideas, be sure that you cover a wide range of possibilities.

Understand the big picture

It’s very difficult to create anything significant without understanding the big picture. Getting the details right is what makes ideas effective, but understanding the big picture is what reveals opportunities other people missed. Eminent creative people use their understanding of the big picture to explore new ideas.

Know How You Try To Avoid Creativity

Catch yourself when you use avoidance tactics. An avoidance tactic is anything you use to procrastinate or not play “full out” In a creative activity. Common examples include giving excuses, not leaving enough time to be creative, and telling yourself that you need something to happen before you can start. Mindfulness will help you realize when you’re employing an avoidance tactic and can sometimes even break the spell it has over you.

Collaborate

Collaborate with people that are able to build upon your ideas. When your new ideas spark new ideas in your group, creativity emerges from the team in a way that no single member could have predicted. This process is similar to how improvisational comedians can create an entire play on-the-spot from a single audience prompt. No one person needs to carry the burden when the team builds on ideas.

“Yes, and…”

Yes, and… Is a powerful improvisational comedy principle that allows for emergent creativity. But you don’t need to be in a group to use it. “Yes, and…” can be your response to your own ideas. Instead of generating an idea and instantly focusing on “why it can’t work” or it’s weakest point (using “Yes, but…”), tell yourself “yes, and…” and continue building on your idea. Push evaluation down the road… There’s always time for that later.

Kill Squelching

Do not allow squelchers into your creative process. Squelching is any comment used to say “it’s not going to work.” Common examples include saying an idea isn’t feasible before knowing the details or saying an idea won’t work based solely on assuming what customers want. Squelchers harms forward movement on projects and can undermine your creative confidence. Squelchers are most useful when evaluating ideas, but this should take place well into a creative project.

Protect your creative momentum

When you’re creating, spend as much time in a creative flow as possible. Small side-tasks, like checking in on Facebook, can do far more harm to creativity than you’d expect. Shifting focus requires your brain to “reboot.” In that reboot, you lose a lot of the motivation driving your creativity.

Use peak emotions to launch your creativity

Creativity is as much about your emotions as it is how and what you think. Emotions influence how the brain behaves, which drastically changes the type of ideas you’ll have and your reactions to them. When you hit a peak emotion, that is, when you’re fully engaged in doing what you love, motivation increases and creative flow becomes easy to achieve.

Use Your Mood To Your Advantage

Your emotions don’t simply dictate your reaction to ideas… But they influence which ideas you have. Have you ever noticed that when you’re sad or angry it’s much easier to think of memories where you were also sad or angry? Emotions are encoded in the brain along with memories. When your mood changes, you’re able to draw on knowledge and memories that were more difficult to access from other moods. Use these shifts within your creative process.

Don’t compartmentalize creativity

Don’t say “THIS is where I’ll be creative… But I won’t use creativity in other areas of my life.” Creativity isn’t simply an artistic or professional skill… It’s a personal skill as well. Just as creativity can be used to create innovative new products or artwork, it can be used to create new opportunities within your personal life as well.

Find a Mentor

Mentors are valuable assets to creatives. They provide critical knowledge and perspectives as well as a high set of standards. Many of the world’s greatest artists, scientists and innovators began by learning everything they could from a master of their field. People that focus on learning from those ahead of them gain huge advantages down the road.

Optimize constraints

Most people think constraints harm your creativity. This is only true when there are too many constraints. Too many constraints leads to an unwinnable game. Forward progress becomes hard because nothing is good enough. What is less common, but just as harmful to creativity is under-constraints. When you have too many “degrees of freedom” then choosing a direction or making decisions becomes unnecessarily difficult.

Assume there’s an answer

It’s all too easy to briefly look over a few options and dismiss them, especially when a “correct answer” seems impossible. But a “correct answer” might only be impossible from your current position. As your project progresses, new constraints and opportunities emerge that drastically change your options and open up possibilities that were invisible at the beginning. You’ll never see these possibilities if you don’t first assume there’s an answer waiting.

Allow ideas to evolve

Similar to using stepping stones, allowing ideas to evolve means that products aren’t seen as “finished,” even after launch. Stepping stones are what allow you to work through abstract ideas to find something concrete and useable, allowing ideas to evolve is what takes useable ideas and builds off of them.

Aesthetics aren’t just for artists

How a product looks and feels determines how your audience or customers will relate to the product. Simplistic and elegant products tend to be viewed as more friendly and useable and, thus, are more valued.

Find an idea champion

Find an authority figure in your industry that believes in what you’re doing. While gatekeepers help you gain access to end-customers, idea champions are people that “take up the fight for you.” Your battle becomes their battle. This only happens when you’re able to get your champion passionate about your cause.

Network inside your industry

Don’t believe the myth of the “solitary genius.” Creative people optimize their network for success. In addition to gatekeepers and idea champions, creative people are constantly networking with people within their own field to learn about emerging trends. Networks don’t simply connect people, they connect ideas and perspectives as well. Large networks contain many different perspectives within it, allowing creative people to gain access to new ideas and mindsets.

Network outside your industry

An important factor in a creative person’s network is how many people they know that lie outside of the industry. Outside networks provide extremely different perspectives and knowledge sets. The further away the people in a network are from your industry, the less redundancy there is in knowledge, skills, and perspectives.

Become a good decision-maker

Highly creative people are often perfectionists… And that can be a huge problem. The more you require the perfect solution, the more difficulty you’ll have making decisions throughout the creative process. It’s counter-productive because, more often than not, a bad decision today leads to a better outcome than a perfect decision in the future. Poor decisions can be learned from and rectified. Indecision is false progress.

Find a metaphor

Ask yourself “What if X was like Y?” Metaphors have lead to many famous inventions, such as the cotton gin, the telegraph, and Velcro. Metaphors are unique in that they don’t require learning anything new… It simply requires viewing your knowledge in one area in terms of another.

Make room for new ideas

Making room for new ideas is about suspending your belief about how a problem should be solved. It’s consciously deciding to reject “best practice” in the industry for a period of time to make way for something new. Best practice works well to make your ideas effective, but they do not (and cannot) differentiate your ideas in an meaningful way. When you create a vacuum, you allow new and unique ideas to come in.

Ask new questions

New questions lead to new answers. When you dramatically shift the questions you’ve been asking yourself, you change how you go about solving problems. The best questions lead you in different directions and highlight different paths.

Shape your workspace

Your workspace should be an extension of your creative mind. It should be a place where you can find quiet when needed and allow for unpredictable ideas to emerge.

Take a break

Take a step back from your creative project periodically. When your focus shifts away from the problem you’re trying to solve and onto something else, your subconscious has a chance to work with the ideas it already has (instead of taking in more).

Use your intuition

Listen to your emotions. Emotions are the subconscious’ way of communicating. Listening to your emotions allows you to tap your unconscious, which is far more powerful than the conscious brain. Ideas born out of intuition tend to be much higher quality than those that creative people “consciously push through.”

Never mix convergent thinking and divergent thinking

Throughout the creative process, you’ll shift from moments of convergent thinking to divergent thinking and back. These two processes are meant to be kept separate. When you try to generate and evaluate ideas at the same time, all creative momentum is lost.

Evaluate your ideas with respect

Your brain is a massive feedback loop. When you tear yourself down for “a bad idea” then you’re also sending a signal to your brain that “your not good at this.” One of two outcomes is likely. Either you’ll feel a desire to procrastinate on starting projects or you’ll jump into project without being fully invested.

Be (Ir)rational

There’s a time for being a logical, rational thinker… And there’s a time for trying unique, crazy, fun ideas that don’t seem good on paper. These are polar opposites, yet their complementary. Rational thinking makes your creativity more effective while irrational thinking breaks through norms and differentiates your ideas from your peers. Together, they form a very powerful combination.

Play YOUR game

As artists, entrepreneurs, and businessmen, our job isn’t to rack up points playing somebody else’s game. Our job is to create our own game with our own set of rules that makes our audience and customers want to join us. Your fans will gladly trade in the status-quo if you can show them a new game that’s equally fun.

Take risks

Never be afraid to take smart risks. When you make smart risks you open up new possibilities while having very little to lose. When you win, you win big… When you lose, you lose small. The odds are always stacked in the favor of those willing to try something new.

Court serendipity

Fortune favors the prepared. There are many examples of “chance events” that spurred creativity and innovation. When you look closer, you see that the creator put the odd in his favor simply by exploring and risk-taking… Eventually the “chance event” had to happen.

Don’t jump to conclusions

Resist the urge to come to a conclusion too early. When information is beginning to point to a conclusion, it’s very tempting to fill in the blanks or connect dots that aren’t there. Spend a little more time evaluating your idea before you draw any conclusions.

Don’t depend on the outcome

Free yourself from the belief that if nothing significant results from a creativity session that it was somehow a loss. Depending on the outcome of a creative activity places too much stress on you. It’s also inaccurate. The creative process works in the background and doesn’t always show up as tangible progress on any given day. Sometimes “low productivity” days can be your best because they redefine the problem or set you on a better long-term path. The outcome of any single creativity session has nothing to do with the creator or what might result in the end.

Use creativity techniques sparingly

Sometimes brainstorming and lateral thinking exercises can help you get a new perspective on a problem, but more often than not they lead to lower levels of creativity. It’s far better to understand what tactics are trying to do and then take action on “the how,” not “the what.”

Alternate between easy & difficult activities

You only have so much mental energy to put into a project on a given day. For the highest creative productivity, mix low-mental energy activities between activities that require high-mental energy. This gives your brain time to rebuild its energy reserve and run more effectively throughout the day.

Check your assumptions

Assumptions limit where you’ll explore. It’s like having an answer before you ask the question. This is a reason why so many people think “Why didn’t I think of that?” after seeing a new innovation. Assumptions are so harmful to creativity because they work in the background. Once assumptions are questioned, their faulty nature is revealed and the “obvious” answer becomes clear.

Make your goal bigger than yourself

Altruistic goals provide motivation that is both stronger and less susceptible to setbacks. People tend to be willing to do far more for other people than they are willing to do for themselves. Also, it’s much easier to enroll other people’s help when your goals are altruistic.

Don’t try to do it all yourself

Creative people love autonomy… But there’s a time for being independent and a time for drawing on other people’s resources or specializations. Trying to do everything yourself means spending less time doing what you love and are good at and more time figuring out skills that somebody else already has.

Stop focusing on what’s been done and start asking yourself “What’s possible now?”

Creativity builds upon itself. When one person innovates it makes room for another innovation to come next. Stop focusing on what other’s have already done and start figuring out how to build on past successes.