So you want to be creative?
Creativity is fashionable these days. Many people I know love to fight about new ideas endlessly - or ‘brainstorm’ as they like to call it. It doesn’t bother them that most of those ‘brainstorms’ are nothing like the creative technique referred to here. Being a creative professional myself I feel the urge to share my thoughts on creativity with you:
First of all: what is creativity? According to my favourite dictionary it means ‘the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.’ (source http://dictionary.com). That’s an elaborate way of saying ‘coming up with new combinations of existing things’.
Why would you like to be creative? Because it fuels innovation. Creativity doesn’t help you maintain reality as it is. So if that’s what you want in the first place, don’t be creative (and stop reading here).
If you’re still reading, you might wonder how to be creative? A common misconception is that new ideas just pop up. As I’ve pointed out before the key ingredients for creativity are existing things - that is everything you’ve seen, heard, smelled or tasted before. This means you’ll have to trigger your memory.
Luckily you’re not the first person ever to be creative - there’s a whole lot of tools and techniques available to dig up ideas. Apart from brainstorming there’s also brainsketching, mindmapping, problem reversal, forced fit, etc. (Google for more). All of them have two things in common:
- Less is not more - 99% of all ideas are insane, so in order to come up with one realistic idea you’ll have to generate one hundred
- First you generate ideas, then you judge them - postpone ‘yeah, but…’ until you’ve generated enough ideas to chose from
Many creative techniques require the exact opposite skills of those you’ve been taught at school. If you’re planning to use such techniques, ask somebody experienced to guide you through the process. Don’t think you know it all - watch and learn.
Cristiano Betta http://www.ibbydibby.com/
April 23rd, 2007I like your theory about having to create 100 idea before you might have a good one, I have recently been talking alot with investors, tech people, and just merely interesting people. I really want to create something interesting with OpenID but most ideas I came up with proved to be insane. This story motivates me to continue coming up with maybe 80 more ideas before giving up.