Photo Credit: Marco Bellucci

Creativity and inspiration can come from anything. Sometimes you are trying really hard and you don’t get any ideas and other times when you are not even trying, you get tons. While we cannot completely control our creativity, we can definitely use some simple tips and tricks to enhance it:

1. Question your most fundamental assumptions and ask yourself “What if these were not true?”

2. Look at similar problems in different fields and see what elements are common. Try to apply those to your problem.

3. Don’t evaluate an idea instantly. First write all the ideas that come to your mind and then analyze them together.

4. Setup a daily or weekly time to get rid of your mental baggage like writing emails, making phone calls e.t.c. This would free up your mind and make it easy to get more ideas.

5. Look at people that inspire you, study them and see how they do things.

6. Note during what part of the day your creativity is at it’s peak. Structure your day in a way to make the most out of it.

7. Analyze and understand what triggers your creativity; a good conversation, a good meal, a walk e.t.c and try to do that whenever you get a mental block.

8. Don’t force your creativity. If you cannot think, leave it for a while and then come back to it. Spending time unfruitfuly would make you frustrated and create more hurdles.

9. Do it for yourself. Forget about the world and think that you are doing it just to make yourself happy.

10. Don’t think that you are creative! Know it. If you doubt yourself, your mind would try to restrict the flow of thoughts.

11. Redefine your problem. Change the wording of your question or your problem. This often leads our mind to think in a new direction.

12. Engage in creative activities periodically. Play/list to music, do some art or anything else that would engage your mind.

13. Take a nap. Sleeping on an idea sometimes gives you a fresher perspective.

14. Use unlined paper: This will free up your mind from the restriction of writing linear sentences and would open up your brain to different forms of expression.

15. Ask a child how he or she would solve the problem. Sometimes complicated problems require simple solutions that we overlook.

16. Watch videos of some really inspirational talks over at www.TED.com

17. Change your atmosphere! Go to a new and exciting place and interact with people you have never met before.

18. Work through the process of elimination. If you are not getting a good idea, think of all the bad ideas and set them aside. As you keep thinking your mind will try to cut out the bad parts of all these ideas to come up with a good one.

19. Take a brain dump. Take a piece of paper and write down everything that comes to your mind without caring about the order or arrangement. Then take a break and come back to it after a while. Your mind would be fresh and empty and would make more sense of your thoughts.

20. Write it down. Sometimes we get so engaged in thinking that we cannot remember all of it. Writing helps in remembering as well as streamlining your thoughts.

21. Open a random book to a random page! Try to formulate ideas around that topic. This concept works around the statement that “Freedom Inhibits Creativity”.

22. List down all the hurdles/issues you are facing on a piece of paper and try to solve them individually. This would organize your thought process.

23. If you are struggling with writing, use one of the 329 prompts at Creative Writing Prompts to force self to write.

24. Enjoy some great music to get inspired.

25. Change the setting of your office/room. A renewed working space would give you fresh perspectives.

26. Meditate, or just spend sometime alone with yourself, doing nothing. This would help you connect with your inner-self.

27. Exercise! It allows you to harness your energy and be more focused.

28. Break the routine. Take a different route to work or try a totally different kind of food. Breaking your routine allows you to challenge the traditional way of thinking and try something unique.

29. Stimulate your senses of touch, taste, hear and sight.

30. Follow Picasso when he said “If I don’t have red, I use blue.” Don’t worry about what you are lacking, just use the resources you have and challenge yourself to come up with something.

An elementary school teacher gave her first graders a coloring assignment. The sheet of paper contained an outline of different objects like a house, trees, sky e.t..c and the children were asked to color each of the objects with the appropriate color. Patty worked really hard on her assignment but when she got it back, she was surprised to see a big black “X” on it. When she asked the teacher for an explanation, the teacher said “I gave you an “X” because you didn’t follow the instructions. Grass is green not grey. The sky should be blue and not yellow as you have drawn it. Why didn’t you use the normal colors Patty?”

Patty answered, “Because that’s how it looks to me when I get up early to watch the sunrise.”

Similar to what the teacher did, we all start looking for “The Right Answer” when we face a problem. Once we find an answer that we assume to be “The Right Answer” , we stop looking. This right answer myth is a big barrier when we are trying to get good ideas because as soon as we get one good idea, we consider the problem solved. A french philosopher once said:

“Nothing is more dangerous that an idea when it is the only one we have.”

For an effective thought process, we need different point of views. Picking the first answer to a problem, or the first idea that comes to mind is quite risky as it is based on a single point of view. Best practice is not to stop once you have an idea, but to continue and get a lot of ideas so you can compare them with each other and see which one is more applicable to the problem you are facing. Noble prize winner Linus Pauling said:

“The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.”

It is important that once we get an idea, we try to think of other ideas to solve the same problem. One way to do it is to look for “the second best idea” or ” the wrong idea” e.t.c. Even if you end up chosing the first idea you thought of, rest of the ideas would give you a good point of comparison and would help you improve your original idea. You might be able to pick a couple of things from the “second best idea” or eliminate some details that you now realize are “wrong”.

Photo Credit: Javi

In the following video, Tim Brown, CEO of “innovation and design” firm Ideo talks about the powerful link between Creativity and play.

This also reminds me of what Howard Thurman once said:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

We all get these. We keep thinking about something and even though we realize we are not getting anywhere, we continue to stress our mind in the same direction, with no use. For times like these Doug King said

“Learn to pause…or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you.”

One of the best strategies to get out of a mental block is to pause and get away from the problem for sometime. It may be a few minutes, a few hours or few days. Taking a break and getting involved in some other mentally stimulating thing actually recharges your mind and allows you to get back to the problem with a fresher perspective. The thing that works for me in most of the cases is playing small silly games available on the Internet; games that even 6 year old can play. But that’s me, for some people its taking a walk in the park, for some people its a good conversation, for some people its listening to music.

The reason why this works is because when we re-approach the problem after a break, we look at it with somewhat different set of assumptions. This allows you to back off a little bit and look at the big picture again which you might be completely missing since you were so engrossed in the details.

Here are a couple of examples to explain this better:

• In mid-1960’s, the Japanese resort town of Atami made great effort to build a high-speed train between Atami and Tokyo, which was three hours away at that time. After the railway was completed, tourism declined – in part because a lot of people wanted to take that drive to get away from the hustling world, which isn’t as charming if you can reach the place in fifty minutes.

VIII

Right, its the roman numeral 8

Now how would you read this?

IX

Right again, its the roman numeral 9.

Now how would you make “IX” a 6 by just adding a single line?

Think!

Now how many of you said by adding an “S” in front of it? There is a good chance very few of you thought of this. The reason? When you read about roman numerals your mind entered into a world of roman numerals. You didn’t even think that there is a possibility to do this outside of roman numerals.

To improve our analytical thinking, we need to think outside the “current view”. We need to see the world outside the little world that our mind gets trapped in.

“There’s a classic story about a bicycle manufacturer who sent two marketing  scouts to opposite ends of a remote corner of Africa to assess the prospects for expanding its business into this unexplored region. The first scout sends back a telegram stating: Situation worthless, no one rides bikes. The other telegram excitedly proclaims: Incredible business opportunity, no one rides bikes.”

This is a very good example of different ways people think in; one of which is “possiblity Thinking”. As the name suggests, possibility thinkers believe that anything is possible even when things don’t look favorable and your mind suggests otherwise. They  try to keep an overly positive attitude about things and try to work towards achieving their dreams instead of thinking that it is not practical/possible to make those dreams a reality.

There are a lot of articles suggesting that possibility thinking is the right attitude to adopt if you want to get things done. I don’t know if it is or if it isn’t. May be its both. May be some people get better results with the “everything is possible” thinking, while some people do better when they think “analytically”. 

Whatever way of thinking you utilize, I think its very important to identify it and work towards improving it. The sooner you know how you think, the better analysis you would do of your weaknesses and strengths. This would give you a good chance to identify and overcome your weaknesses.

Henry Ford suggested: “I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.” Some more good quotes here.

• Break out of self-imposed limitations.
• Look for wider solutions. ‘think outside the box’.
• Think sideways; explore the least likely directions; abandon step-by-step approach and thinking ‘to one side’ and master the ‘lateral thinking’ approach.
• Sharpen your brain – communicate and exchange ideas with other creative people as often as you can. This is useful not only for stimulating idea generation but also for giving you an opportunity to validate your ideas through professional colleagues.
• If you are thinking along a certain line and nothing happens, stop. Step out of your shoes, analyze the problem again and see if you can come up with a new approach.
• If you are working on a problem and getting nowhere, leave it for a while and let your subconscious – your depth mind – to take over. Soon, new ideas and facts will inspire new associations and innovative combinations.

These come from Vadim Kotelnikov, Inventor and Founder of Ten3 Business e-Coach – Inspiration and Innovation Unlimited!

To be honest, the book is turning out to be great so far. He uses a very nice approach to illustrate several mental blocks that people get and explain how to try removing them so one can think outside the box.

I will definitely keep sharing interesting stuff from his book but i’ll also recommend you to get a copy. You can get a used copy from Amazon for less than 5 bucks including shipping.