Improving

"Creativity is the breaking of habits through originality" - Arthur Koestly (The Act of Creation)

Creativity is a skill and a habit. For any situation, we are looking to bend, break, combine or connect. We need to practice this skill. This is obviously a non-exhaustive list of areas to help improve your creativity. Will roughly break these up into two sections, input and output.

Input

You need input. As much as you can get, for everywhere. The further left of field the better.

While you are probably going to be learning things from your field, those new connections and new ideas often come from seeing your current field in new ways, so go wide.

Find new ideas wherever they live. There are wonderful people doing wonderful things in so many areas and they for sure thought of things that might be useful.

I was rewatching Top Chef for the millionth time, and they did this episode inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright used this idea of creating tension in his buildings by using this idea of compression and expansion.

Parts of the building would be smaller in general size and ceiling height but that would lead to room that was wide with expansive with high ceilings. That contrast gives you a feeling that the bigger space is even bigger.

This is the epitome of good design, it pulled in human psychological response into the design, fucking brilliant.

The idea of creating tension with compression and then expansion can be used all over the place.

Read a random book on some area of history you may like. How does it relate to what you are working on, are there broader themes?

Oh, the Romans had this interesting blah blah, why did they do that?

You have to breathe in before you can exhale. Sean Tucker in the book, Meaning in the Making, talks about how when he was learning how to sing, before he could sing well, he had to learn how to breathe in first.

He uses this as a metaphor for finding inspiration or our curiosity before we exhale.

Creativity and Solitude

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible. - Pablo Picasso

You need to find space to breathe in. Group think is real and can block you from seeing a new idea or kill a good one too early. This is tied in with getting bored. It is good to get bored and lower our stimulus. It is easy to be on our phones consuming a bunch of nonsense so much we never can hear our own thoughts.

This can be extended amounts of time or small blocks of time either way creating boundaries of space and time to be creative.

Cabin challenge

Doesn't have to be a cabin, could be a hotel room or some space and try to stay in that space without your usual stimulus for a few days.

Daily Space

Try to set a time period where you again put aside normal stimulus and block some time and space to be alone.

Travel

Travel is my second favorite drug of choice. If you can, I highly recommend it. It doesn't even have to be somewhere crazy and exotic. But I have run the experiment so many times, and every time I can change my surroundings, especially somewhere new, it has a big impact on me. I think our thinking patterns can be worn in and tied with our routine and our places. Getting out of that shakes up the entire system.

Reading

Citation needed, but it seems like really creative people have a serious reading habit. It allows you to take in ideas from other places. Many problems have been solved, often though in unrelated fields. This is a great way to find ideas to steal.

I read this book "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande, which talked about how checklists moved from aviation to medicine. How could that be applied to software. There are often similar problems in software where things become routine and easily fucked up. Which with certain work could mean taking down a high traffic website or a rocket crashing.

So in our reading it is good to read widely.

I heard this tip from comedian Bill Burr. When he feels like he needs a bit of a boost of creativity, he buys a bunch of random magazines, that he has no normal interest in, at the airport and then reads them.

In an interview with musician Chappell Roan, the interviewer asked where she got the line "Super Graphic Ultra-Modern Girl" and what it meant. She said she had no idea what it meant but lifted it from an architecture magazine she found.

Hopefully, you find an answer to a problem you have that just hasn't been transferred to your field yet.

Observe

“You see, but you do not observe” is a quote by Sherlock Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia (1891, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).

Sherlock Holmes is the greatest detective because he observes things that most people don't or just ignore. By observing these simple things, he can use them to put together a history of events. A scuff on a show tells a story that most people miss.

This can also include observing what is missing. The dog not barking.

If you don't observe the world, then you don't know what is missing.

There is where an open questioning mindset comes into play.

Everyday people do the same things over and over again, and look past the "common" but interesting things.

Become an observer of the world.

Observation challenge

Try to insanity 5 things you haven't noticed wherever you are. Maybe it is objects, but perhaps it could be things from your other senses. It is oddly quiet or smells like muffins. (it is rarely muffins)

Can find things that are missing? You probably have this happen organically time from time, like when you need a garbage can or a bathroom.

I would like more challenges, but I would just be stealing most from this great book: How to be an Explorer of the World by Keri Smith.

What sucks challenge?

What is annoying, irritating, or squeaky wheels?

Throughout a day, write down a bunch of things that were annoying.

Walk

In many books on creativity, especially books profiling creative people, walking is a common trait expressed. There seems to be something in moving and I think seeing new things that help spark creativity.

There is some research on this that I am too lazy currently to lookup, but walking seems really helpful creatively. Probably a combination of exercise and getting new visual stimulus. Try to switch up your path or incorporate nature.

Challenge

• Walk in a new neighborhood/park
• Do an observation challenge as you go. Try to find things you ignored, things that are missing, things that are all the same color, or count the number of x things you find.
• A walking meditation challenge. Find a quiet place where you can walk unobstructed and walk slowly focusing completely on the movement of placing your feet and walking.

Become a collector

Become a collector of the things you love. Ideas, concepts, philosophies. These can serve as inspiration for later projects or ideas.

Like many of the suggestions, these are traits that many renowned artists seemed to have.

Andy Warhol was a serious collector of random things

Every month, he would open a new plain brown cardboard box, filling it with different scraps of ephemera that he encountered every day over the next four weeks. This included everything: takeout menus, letters from other artists, labels, and anything else that crossed his path. At the end of the month, it was taped up, labelled, and put into storage. ¹

Challenges

• Create a mood board of things you love that you find inspiring.
• Start a common place book of quotes and ideas that you love
• Keep tickets, cards or other things from trips and places and stick into a notebook, box, mason jar.

Output

We have breathed in, andd now it is time to practice the exhale.

Divergent Thinking

The key to being able to be creative is to be able to escape those well-worn mental procedures to go a different way or "generate more divergent ideas". ²

There is this research paper that talks about this aspect of creativity and how it could easily be measured. They propose a short test where your goal is to list a bunch of words and the test rates how unrelated they are. The more unrelated they are, the better. If I say car and steering wheel, that is not that creative. But if I say car and tuberculosis, they are further apart and may not have an obvious connection.

Challenges

Take the divergent test

Get a baseline for where you currently are. After sometime practicing, repeat.

Unrelated Words Test

5 minute brainstorm

Pick a topic or subject and set a timer for 5 minutes and write down as many thoughts, words, or ideas about the topic or subject.

After you will exhaust the initial ideas, try to push through and keep generating ideas even if they start to drift from the source. As they drift, try to find ways to link it back.

If you get stuck, use what you see around you to help with some input.

You see a wall. What is a wall? It is a barrier, possibly shelter, something in the way. How does that relate to your topic?

The goal of this is to strength those divergent skills. Filter nothing.

There are many versions floating around, so feel free to play with it, extend, whatever, but the goal is to get stuck and find ways to keep going.

Use challenge

How many ways can you use x? A brick can be used to build a house, a fire pit, it could be a door stop or an insane paper weight, a murder weapon, etc. It could be broken apart into smaller things.

"100 bad ideas."

This comes from a Reddit post. I am not sure the origin, but the idea is to create 100 bad x's of something. It could be product ideas, drawings, songs, photos. This is a quantity exercise designed to push past the usual and also just to play with things. Put the outcome aside. The goal it is for it to be bad.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAskReddit/comments/adjqmj/what_are_some_proven_ways_to_increase_creativity/

Story Cubes

Another fun one is to use story cubes, writing dice or something similar. There are a bunch of these as products and probably websites. But basically, you roll the dice and each face has a symbol, and you use them to create a story.

Play

Actor and comedian John Cleese thinks of creativity as a way of operating. ³

He describes an open mode vs closed mode. In open mode you are exploring, playing and seeking other paths. This is the mode where you are looking for new. In closed mode, this is the application mode where you are just applying already known things.

You have to play and explore because often times there is no known linear path to a new result.

To be in open mode means allowing ourselves to be curious and be able to follow that curiosity. To have non-objective play, where we discover things, try things out and, hopefully, in Bob Ross terms, have happy accidents.

Side projects

Side projects can be a blessing and a curse, but let's focus on the blessings for the moment. They are a great way to explore some new things in a low stakes way. I have picked up a skill or some technique just by playing with and then later it was useful in my main work.

I think it is also really helpful for creativity, as you can see your main work through a new lens. How do they relate? How could this side quest help with my main quest?

Note-Taking

A notebook works like a map: It creates clarity - Daniel Coyle

Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. – Richard Feynman

Buy a notebook or several.

I keep a notebook and pen on me at all times. In fact, my notebook is my wallet as well.

I think we tend to think of notebooks as just there to keep a record of something. Sometimes that is true, maybe you record your workout out or just take note of something, but it is a thinking tool, or can be.

As you write, you can see patterns in what you wrote or by just starting a page it forces you to think about the next step or what is missing.

You see patterns in thought, what are you interested in, what topics or themes keep coming up.

It is a good way to start to collect your thoughts on a topic. As you are out on your many walks, you think of an idea for your project and throw it in your notebook.

With think of a notebook as a place to record things, and it is, but it is also a thinking tool. Working on a problem, you put on a page and that space is now a workspace for thinking.

The reason I recommend a physical notebook, as there seems to be something more memorable to the human brain about the physical act of writing.

References