Be More Creative

This article explores three strategies to be more creative. For starters, you should probably ask a child to be your mentor.

Remember when you were a kid and creativity flowed freely through everything you did? It was a time when your ability to design the world’s best blanket fort/spaceship/tree house/fairy tree was limited only by your imagination and the materials in your backyard. As a kid you had no concept of creativity, it was all just part of what you did and the fun you had doing it.

Fast forward to adulthood, and for some reason we start believing that we’re intrinsically not creative, and that creativity is something best left to the people who wear purple shirts to work and have interesting facial hair. But it doesn’t have to be that way – creativity is something we’ve all got, and something that we can all use in our lives.

Whether you’re stuck in a creative rut or you think you’re just not the creative type, here are three habits of creative people worth learning from.

1. Back yourself

One of my favourite stories about creativity comes from Sir Ken Robinson’s excellent book The Element: how finding your passion changes everything. Robinson talks about a six-year-old girl in a classroom who decides to draw a picture of God. When her teacher suggests that nobody knows what God looks like, the little girl replies “they will in a minute”.

You need to be willing to back yourself up when pressed. Remove the words ‘I’m not creative’ from your vocabulary, and create without the interruption of self-limitation. We often don’t get a lot of time in adult life to practice creativity without boundaries, the way we did when we were kids. So make a conscious effort to create without limitations, even when others are imposing limitations on you. Get your own version of Steve Jobs’s ‘reality distortion field’. Have the guts to draw God.

2. Embrace bad ideas

Once you’re willing to back yourself, you also need to be willing to embrace the fact that, sometimes, your ideas are going to suck.

My manager at work is a true creative leader – he is renowned as the go-to person when someone needs a big idea, a creative spin, a clever pitch or some sharp words. I spent a lot of time in awe of his intrinsic ability to consistently deliver great ideas, until I collaborated with him on a brainstorming session for a big PR campaign.

While I sat virtually silently, not wanting to suggest something in case it sounded stupid/wrong/crazy/impossible, he spent two hours pitching some of the most floridly bizarre ideas I have ever heard. But eventually, the crazy ideas started to turn into clever ideas, and by the end of the session we had an awesome campaign.

We often think about creative people as creating one masterpiece after another, when in actual fact creativity is a numbers game, and the misses generally far outnumber the hits. To truly embrace creativity, you need to be willing to own all your ideas, even the bad ones. If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’re not prepared to be original.

3. Connect the dots

In his uber-famous Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs talks about how creative people generate ideas by finding the connections between facts. Once you can connect the dots between things that seem unrelated, you’ve got an idea. Creativity isn’t often about coming up with something out of thin air, it’s about the spark that ignites when two unrelated ideas collide.

The key for being able to connect the dots is to have a broad range of experiences to draw on. Things like travelling, joining new communities, playing sports, talking to interesting people all have an impact on the way your creative mind works. The more you’ve experienced, the more you can draw on those experiences to generate ideas. Like everything, creativity is a skill that can be developed.