What is the Easiest Way to Being Creative?
What is the Easiest Way to Being Creative?
Develop Tools for Healthy Defiance
“The lion’s ferocious chrysanthemum head.”
Poet Marianne Moore exudes creativity with 5 words that inspire a slew of images and stories.
The Key Element - creativity is a novel construction not a reproduction. A person engages in a creative act by going beyond his or her knowledge. With a unique background, and a willingness to challenge existing patterns and norms, new territory emerges.
The path of least resistance to being creative is mixing ingredients in unusual patterns. It is this path that allows us to say - anyone can be creative (for at least a moment). Marianne Moore mixes the mindset of a lion, the emotion of anger, and the image of a flower. With this mixture, the intrigue continues even after several re-readings.
Provocation: Experiment with a creative burst.
Search your immediate environment
Find several features/ingredients that interest you
Mix them
Use them while designing an original, useful1 perspective
Here’s a humble attempt after 20 seconds scanning my habitat.2
The skyscrapers begged for attention - two Pringle cans blotting out the Sun.
Playing with words is akin to a single set of 25 push-ups. You won’t be a creative person right away but you are starting a creative habit. Over time, you will think divergently more easily, intensely, and frequently, while building creative muscles.
In a fast-paced world where conformity reigns, creativity is going to be one of society's most valued assets. Our personal and societal evolution depends on healthy dissent and defiance.
Use creativity as a tool:
Defy the zeitgeist3 - dominant assumptions held by the culture with excess strength and certainty (such as the newly popular idea that there are no "bad" foods).
Defy the crowd - conventional beliefs that bind people into mindless tribes.
Defy yourself - questioning and testing your own set of beliefs regularly.4 If you engage in the same behavioral and thought patterns 30 years from now, you missed great opportunities to be smarter and wiser.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please leave a ❤️. Even better, share this conversation. And if you read The Art of Insubordination (with the Strategies and Rules of Principled Dissent), send me thoughts, questions, or beefs. I love hearing from readers.
Most definitions of creativity rely on the presence of novelty and usefulness. With these definitions, a cake made from asphalt would score low on creativity because the end result would be inedible. However, you can probably see the problem with this definition. If the purpose is aesthetic beauty instead of a meal, then the cake can be very creative. An entire industry relies on the premise of bakers designing cakes that don’t look like cakes.
I will continue working my ass off until my work is sponsored by Pringles. Don’t judge my quick attempt at creativity too harshly. Remember that first drafts are supposed to be shitty. If you fear first drafts, you are doomed to very low creative production.
These three purposes of creativity are part of Dr. Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of creativity. One of many scientific theories that influenced The Art of Insubordination.
This idea of defying the self is one of the four principled rebel types that I refer to as The Niche Carver. Uncover your own rebel type by taking this test.