How I built my creativity to get good ideas
Ideas while a dime a dozen can be either simple or innovative, let's see some ways to get innovative ideas
But first, what is creativity?
What is creativity?
“Creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness.”
We’ve all created something before, either when we cooked food or made our beds or cleaned our rooms or delivered a task at work. And so this means we all have some creativity in us, we just don’t tap into it consciously.
How can we build this creativity?
I’ll share some of the steps I have taken to do this.
1. Build your confidence in your creative skills
David Kelley one of the key pioneers of Design Thinking said we opt out of being creative because of fear of judgement and because we don’t stick with the process.
I have felt this first hand. I love food, and so this love has led me to design new combinations of meals like making pancakes that left me feeling energised and not worn out. I shared one of these pancakes and my process on my IG story a while back and a friend replied with words saying that was irritating and she would never eat something like that.
I felt judged, I became afraid that I had been rejected by this friend and I was irritating. That led me to delete the story and stop working on this new pancake flavour I loved. I only stopped for a short time though until I opted back into being creative after I realised what my friend said was about her and not about me. I was no longer bothered by what she or any other person thought about my awesome pancakes.
That is an old post showing my progress on those pancakes, right now they are even much better 🙂.
2. Build your imaginative skills
I love cartoons, from DoDo, The Kid from Outer Space on NTA and Ed, Edd n Eddy on Cartoon Network to Naruto, Samurai Jack and Rick and Morty. I still watch cartoons. I loved them because they fed my ability to dream up worlds when I was alone, they stretched my imagination.
I built my imagination by watching things that stretched my imagination and showed me new ways of doing things.
3. Learn from others with good ideas
An experience they say is the best teacher, not a specific person’s experience or my experience, just experience. This means I can learn from my experience as well as the experience of others. But how?
For me, I found out that by watching smart people or people with good ideas and seeing how they do what they do and replicating it, I come up with good ideas too!
I did this in University were to improve my grades, I hung around the smart people in the class and studied them, replicating their process until I made it. This worked for me because I ended up graduating with a really good result after starting out with a carry-over course.
These days I watch documentaries to help me find new processes to learn and copy from, just like how Sylar in Heroes studied other superhumans to take or steal their powers. Sylar real power was Intuitive Aptitude which allowed him to understand how things worked. And in understanding how things worked, he was able to take those things like lego bricks and fit them into himself to give him those abilities.
Interestingly, you can learn this skill of Intuitive Aptitude by building your Intuition or your ability to understand how things work or your ability to tap into your inner genius.
Contemplate on it.😉
4. Practice, practice, practice.
The title is self-explanatory 😅
5. Extra
I’ll end with this video by Mark Rober a former NASA and Apple engineer, he is someone I learn a lot from by watching his process, he shares this process in this TEDx video on how he comes up with good ideas.
In summary, he says:
Be curious; I call this being observant
Work hard; I look at this as launching early, testing continuously and keeping at it
Get lucky; I see this as building your good karma through practice and service