The how-to’s of creativity
So, you have read many popular guides on awakening your creativity and found that nothing seems to work. Even if you haven’t, let us see if that will work.
But, why doesn’t reading work? Most people read and forget. At the most they bookmark it to read it the second time. And most importantly, we do not test what we have read. If you read something and have a complete understanding of what it means, is there a need to read it again?
Whether you pop-in a ‘creativity pill’ or find a place that inspires creation, you are limiting your potential – you always have to do something out of the ordinary to be creative.
Demystifying creativity
To understand creativity we need to understand how our thought works – that is the only fundamental tool using which the man-made creation around us seems to have happened.
Creativity is often dubbed as divine or grace, more so by the artists. If you accept this, there’s no point in reading any further – there’s nothing you can ‘do’.
Is one born creative? Although there are exceptions to validate this – the child prodigies, this cannot be a fact. People born in unthinkable and unimaginable social situations have turned out to be creative in their later life.
How does thought work? There’s this fact which seems hard to swallow: We can really think of what we already know. Even in our films the aliens look like distorted humans – long head, long fingers. Most of what passes around as creativity is twisted facts. The same thing presented in different forms. “But that is creativity. Isn’t it?” Let us now delve deep into what is creativity.
If there’s something creative, if at all there is, it has to be new, fresh. Most of what we humans have done is apply what we see around us, in nature, to the problem at hand. So there’s thought involved i.e. translating everything into what we already know. In other words, it is analogical. So there’s no ‘newness’, just modification. This can’t be called creative, can it?
“That may be your thought. Is it so in the real world?” It seems so – Thomas A. Edison, the man who had 1093 patents to his credit, invented the light bulb in his 10,000th try.
The thought follows, “So it seems to me that I cannot ‘do’ anything to be creative.” That’s really a great discovery, although a bit sad. “Where do I go from here? I really want to understand creativity.” Stay with this post.
Unplug
All our problem solving or careers involve learning the core skills and applying them to search a situation. So it happens from the domain of the ’known’. To be creative we must learn to stop the chatter of ‘doing’ something creative.
Today technology is involved in every quantum of our life. But are ‘you’ using technology or is it the other way? Introspection is the first step involved in understanding creativity – it is not something philosophical, but the most practical.
And Create
Possibly you have understood why less people are really creating everyday or have made a career out of their creativity – the rest are going on modifying what they did yesterday, ‘thinking’ today is just another yesterday.
Creativity happens when we aren’t worrying about the results. After all, we can think and do only on what we know beforehand – let’s work on it. Why vex about something we cannot ‘do’?
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