Restoring your creative genius is simple
Restoring, rebuilding, retrieving, renewing your creative genius is really quite simple.
I’m not saying it’s easy, but it is simple.
All it takes is for you to be intentional and I’m guessing you’re pretty good at being intentional—working at what is important to you.
Since 98% of us were born informed with a creative genius—read about NASA’s role in the research that made this determination elsewhere on the site—many folks enjoy immediate success when they intentionally set out to become more creatively entrepreneurial, and most of the nearly 4000 students I’ve been fortunate to work with show significant growth.
Successful creatively entrepreneurial folks tend to see problems as opportunities and have the ability to look at what others are looking at, and see what no one else has seen. So one of our goals should be developing a creative perspective, right?
Wrong.
It’s creative perspectiveS, and it’s a great place to start your practice of intentional creative growth, by reminding yourself that you need to try on many different creative perspectiveS to improve your chances that you’ll find one, or more, that delivers the new views leading to useful insights.
Neuroscientists reinforced the vital importance of many creative perspectiveS with this discovery: by the time the visual information that our eyes detect and input for processing is actually seen by our brain, only 1/3,000 of the original visual data remains. That’s amazing, right? That our brains are continually filtering and replacing subconsciously, blocking what can’t be important because it hasn’t been important before, and adding from our previous experiences and thought patterns what it expects to find.
Does that mean that seeing isn’t believing, but rather believing is seeing?
So how do you overcome this challenge to your creative genius? By intentionally adopting new perspectiveS when solving a problem or developing an opportunity or considering new ideas.
Researchers’ measurements have revealed a bunch of ways to do that. Perhaps you are naturally inclined towards them already.
Walking shows up as a great way to kick into a more effective creative gear, as your brain comes alive when you reach your natural stride. Additionally, taking that walk down a path you’ve not traveled before invites fresh thinking to a mind primed and ready. I take lots of morning hikes with my dog Bo, but more practically, I try to arrive early enough at whatever it is I am attending that I can walk five or ten minutes to the final destination as I consider anew what we’ll be up to.
Intentionally changing a regular habit or a daily pattern is a simple intentional practice. Your status quo behaviors assure you will think as you always have, see the way you’ve always seen. Breaking habits and changing patterns is a bit of a jolt, even if only a mild one, and that can be enough for you to think new thoughts about your challenge as you see what you haven’t seen before.
And with a bit of thought these jolts don’t have to take time. Sleep with your head on the other side of the bed; brush your teeth with the opposite hand; go to bed and wake up each an hour earlier; put away your phone for a day.
What? Put away my phone for a day? Well, few habit breaking activities seem to have as big an impact on my students’ sense of the world around them than a 100% digital sabbatical day.
Finally, get fresh creative perspectiveS by breaking apart what you have been putting together and then trying to find new relationships between the pieces. David Bowie was known to cut up the lyrics to a song as it was coming together, and scattering the pieces on the floor, to see if any interesting new relationships were formed that he should explore before the song was completed.
Intentionally being and becoming creatively entrepreneurial is the first principle to all this content I have discovered and created, stolen and repurposed, lived and taught, and intend to give freely to you as testament to my calling.
If you think that being the most creative and entrepreneurial version of ourselves we can be is key to our future, please practice it intentionally, and if you think this offering is useful, please share it.