Tag: Creative Thinking

Being Creative

Success

The act of being creative is essentially to take existing things and ideas and to create something new out of them. We write with words and we paint with paint. These are the typical things we think of as being creative, but there are many ways to be creative.

However, the things we create end up creating us too, because the act of creating them changes us. We are a different person after each act of creating through what we learn about ourselves and the world via the creative process.

Many people think of the thing they create as their baby. It is not a baby, it is a thing that exists because of you, but it is not a human being.

The human being in the creation process is the creator. If you want to use the Parent Child analogy then the creator is more like the Child, because the process of creating changes us and contributes to creating who we are.

Be Unmistakably You

Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Doing something for the first time is scary, more so for some and less so for others, but it is still scary. So what we often do is settle for copying how it has been done before. We feel safe on this already trodden ground. But doing the same thing as others have done, or are doing, is rarely of significant use of our time; it does not often improve the lives of others, or ourselves.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took the idea of using a mouse and being able to move things around on a computer screen and put an Apple personal computer that almost anyone can use into people’s homes, where before in order to use a computer you had to learn to code or use the keyboard to navigate through endless DOS menus by picking option 4, then option 23, and so on.

This changed the world. It is not that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were special people, it was that they pushed their thinking until they got to the boundary of what was deemed as possible and stepped beyond it, because it is beyond this boundary that things of use are created. If we do things as they have always been done we never find a better of doing them. I am not saying that you need to be a Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, what I am saying is that what they decided to do was a choice, a choice that we all have.

We often fear the embarrassment and the risk of going first, but those we hold up as exceptional did something new, whether it be Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or the painter Jackson Pollack or the author Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, they had not done what they did before they did it. They were unmistakably themselves, and what I am inviting you to do is to be unmistakably yourself. Not similar to those you wish to fit in with or different from the people around you that you disapprove of. It is to be unmistakably you.

There Are No Boxes

Quick Thoughts

Recently, I was watching the first episode of the series Strictly Come Dancing and while one of the contestants, Tom Fletcher, from band McFly, was introduced they showed his wife, Giovanna Fletcher, in the audience. Nothing special about that, but for me two worlds collided.

Giovanna Fletcher presents a Cbeebies (BBC children’s channel) program The Baby Club, which I am very familiar with, having a toddler in my life. McFly is a band I associate with the music of my youth. As a result I put Tom Fletcher in the Pop music box in my head and Giovanna Fletcher in the Cbeebies box in my head.

This was a wake up call for me, that reminded me that in truth there are no boxes in life, everything is interconnected with everything else. This provides an opportunity to remove the barriers that get in the way of creativity.

Nature is more abundant at the edge of one natural space to another, where the jungle meets an open plain, where a river meets the sea, the number of variety of life goes up. When we cross-pollinate areas in our mind our creative output will be more like a rainforest, life abundant.