How to Improve Creativity

By tk

The first thing you need is the intention to be more creative, then a way of observing how the mind works. True, some people are intuitively creative, but there are ways of augmenting everyones' creative capabilities. I will show you how, but I first need to develop a foundation or a model of how the mind works.

As I said, everyone is creative, whether they are aware of it or not. First of all, do not associate creativity with a specific type of activity like painting or writing music, but rather a way our minds process thought and will to action.

For example, if you are leaving your house and going to work, but when you turn down the street you usually drive to work on, you see construction going on and the street is blocked. What do you do? You think of a new path to get to work. And what if you are attempting to go that new path, and there is an accident with traffic all backed up? You think of another new path to get to work. So this is pretty obvious to almost everyone. But let's look at what the mind is doing before you reorganized with a new path.

Before you created a new path, you first let go of committing yourself to the path you were currently going on. In that example, the circumstances dictated what happened. These were physical things you at the time had no control over, however, if you want to come up with new ideas, then self impose a stop to the conventional path. And continue to do this to each new idea that comes up, but note or write down each new idea. Some of these won't be new ideas, but rather past ways you have dealt with things before, but still continue to make note of what these are. Most of the time we choose the first thing that satisfies the situation, but this does not mean that you optimally satisfied the situation. This process takes practice, a little documentation and also work to make it work for you.

In quantum mechanics, which is a physical theory that does explain how the nature of things do work at the atomic realm, there is a concept that was coined by Nobel Prize physicist named Richard Feynman (he was referring to the path of a particle). He challenged the basic classical assumption that each particle has one particular history or path. Instead, he suggested that particles travel from one location to another along every possible path in space-time. This concept is not just a belief, but part of the physical nature of the Universe; what we have to do as human beings is to be able to challenge the path we are currently going on, which we have followed because of custom or habit, and use the tool I described above. With it, you will start seeing a growth and proliferation of new creative ideas. The challenge is to find the path (or idea) that gives the most optimal outcome. I hope this works to improve your creativity. •

© 2006 tk

8/22/06