Tips for creativity

The world we live in today yearns not just for talented and skilled people but more importantly for creative people. Running through various fields of life such as music, technology, even down yo the least businesses (SMEs) require creativity to achieve excellent results and break boundaries. Thus, the concept of creativity cannot be overemphasized with respect to success in one’s chosen field.

Balder Onarheim once defined creativity as "the ability to take two or more concepts or conceptual understandings and put them together into something new that fulfills being noble(as in new) and also being useful for some kind of context ". From this definition, it’s obvious that creativity isn’t something that just comes whole by itself although everyone is born with some level of creativity.

With these brief insight on what creativity entails ,there are no hard and fast rules to improving one's creativity and so a few tips I believe can improve help in improving one's creative ability should suffice.

• It’s Okay To Start Random

Randomness is really in essence the beginning of creative thinking. The phones we have today started from a random inspiration in the mind of an individual and later evolved as time went on into what we have as our smart phones. Rap artistes are also an example to describe this random thinking, they bring up random words and build up on those things that become the music everyone dances to. Now you don’t stop at random ideas but you build up on those random ideas so that they become huge meaningful and useful ones.

One of my favourite quotes from Mark Zuckerberg says "Ideas don't come out fully formed but they become clearer as you work on them"

• Get Outside The box

One of the major hindrances to creative thinking is the fact that as we grow older we have developed some rules in our subconscious mind that prevents us from being creative. These rules are like boxes that we feel safer in than exploring outside it. Studies have shown that creativity diminishes with increase in age showing that as we are ageing, the ability for us to think randomly and connect things together reduces because as we grow we would have come across situations that are guided by a lot of rules that continuously affect our thinking.

Some of us are quite familiar with the puzzle above... The amazing thing about this puzzle is that kids don't have any problem with this, they can just easily connect each row of 3 dots with one line like the ones below.

The reason is because of the rules we’ve setup in our subconscious that probably the lines shouldn’t go outta the square or that the line shouldn’t be thicker than the dots or whatever it is.
The problem when trying to think outside the box is that we feel it doesn’t make sense to do so, to bring up something different than what everyone else feels is normal, and so there’s a temptation to go back inside the box. The solution is to resist that temptation and spend some more time outside the box. You’d also agree with me that some of the most interesting people to stay around with are those that aren’t strict with rules, they live freely and so they get inspired from just anything that comes up in their mind

• Get Inspiration

Like I mentioned before, creative ideas aren’t birth out in a whole and so there is room for inspiration. Inspiration can come from other people’s works and development can be made on them like the case of our mobile phones. Studies have also shown that the green color inspires creative thinking and so you can just free yourself, take a walk into the woods, take a deep breathe, think a little more. Also check for alternatives (don’t pursue correct answers because there are really no correct answers when i t comes to creative ideas).
It’s also worth noting that creative ideas is really about the environment and the state of the mind.