How to Become Creative
How to Be Creative
Don Allen
How to become creative? We identify two main types of creativity. Many types associated with a topic, e.g. art and science, have detailed interpretations. We look here at more of a foundational level, as in what’s common with all. Assume there is some problem at hand about which you want to find a solution or an explanation. Very rarely, if ever, does the creative process work spontaneously, rendering up some solution to something about which you are substantially unknowledgeable or unaware. Sometimes, though, it happens when you notice something unusual that you cannot explain. But this creates a problem, upon which you focus.
Creativity is not for amateurs, even though folks, me included, are always firing off wild ideas. Practice is essential.
Associative creativity. Here we associate two or more seemingly disjoint ideas to bear on the problem. Think of this as jumping from one sandbox to another and using the resources of both to build a new idea, i.e. solution. You have this ability, probably noticing it years ago, when you saw how effective combinations of ideas can be. People may say, “How ever did you come up with that?” Most people who have associative creative abilities are avid readers, interested in many things, and notice everyday similarities between different phenomena across subjects. Even though you may notice a similarity, it may require considerable work to make it into a solution to the problem at hand.
Here you will find thinking for problem-solving, divergent thinking which is thinking broadly, and convergent thinking, often used in decision-making and critical thinking. As well, collaborative thinking is included, as the whole team creates an associative atmosphere. All of these require serious focus.
Associative creativity is by far the most common, not to say it’s easy. You can associate memories, experiences, people, subjects, and even other ideas. For most, this is the best we can do, and we’re lucky if we can. Nonetheless, if you can, you are virtually assured success.
Out-of-the-Blue creativity. Sometimes, we’ve all heard, a brilliant idea comes from out of the blue. Many of us think of Einstein and his relativity theory in this way. However, at the time there had arisen serious problems with classical physics. Einstein’s insight was not from the blue. He knew the literature and embarked on “thought experiments” for a great while exploring how to fix them. Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin (1793) was knowledgeable about cotton farming but a genius with machinery. Marie Curie noticed some anomaly with a photographic plate stashed in a drawer with some metal. It took a three years of tireless work to consider the possibility and then isolate just 1/10 gram of radium, a new element. In art, breakthroughs came with perspective images and then with more abstract forms.
Out-of-the-blue discoveries and creative acts are surely that. They are wild ideas that came true. One could think of them as arising from an egg, a gestation, and a birth. They are the output of our geniuses. But they are associated with long hard work to make them genuine solutions, innovations, and insights. Acceptance is another matter altogether. Einstein did not receive his 1921 Nobel Prize for relativity, still controversial, but for his work on the law of the photoelectric effect.