Three Ingredients in Creativity

Developing creativity requires both self-awareness and self- motivation. 

Creativity is the flow. It’s about breaking down the convention thinking box, connecting wider dots, embrace broader viewpoints, and come out novel ideas. Creativity has many “ingredients,” and creativity is the high-level intelligence.

Intuition: Intuition is often called “gut feeling,” sometimes, not just the emotional side of the mind, it’s an inner calling. An intuitive mind has the inner strength and the willpower to follow the courageous heart, and thus, having the better chance to be creative. Intuition needs some kind of catalyst, sometimes that can be as easy as asking a right-brain-oriented question. We need to be provoked to make our intuition work. it's about proactively opening ourselves, leverage intuition to take “fast thinking” scenario and switch on creativity button purposefully. Intuition should be taken as a new insight, a new idea, a new angle, but must be backed with sound reasoning in the end before putting it into action. Creativity is nurtured in solitude and triggered by intuition, it requires to step away from the normal noises, listen to your heart, follow your guts, be curious enough to understand the surroundings and let creative thoughts flow.

Insight: Creativity often means you need to apply the previous knowledge to the different context, thus, insight is the right ingredient for developing creativity. Creativity is about connecting dots, which are usually seemly unrelated because they are scattered in transdisciplinary, but interconnected domains. Too often people may take the easy path, think and work at a superficial level rather than spend the time on understanding what is going on underneath. Being insightful means that you have to digest knowledge, and not just understand it on the superficial level, but to “see” things or make connections others cannot, to stimulate creativity. Insight is captured from information, and the information is based on data. An essential aspect of creativity, both at the individual or group level, is the ability to challenge assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario. With unique insight, there’re more possibilities you can discover the new path, experiment the better way, and spark creativity.

Imagination: Creativity is an actual idea carried out in a tangible way that offers or shows something new or imagined. Imagination is the fuel for the “Creativity Engine.” Thinking things differently and making imagination roll into reality is creativity. To nurture creativity, it is important to get out of the "fear" that blocks our own genius, learn how to liberate the imagination and come up with bold ideas. No imagination, the creativity engine simply will not run. The imagination can entertain the seemingly impossible, given the right resources of knowledge, experience, and talent; a bridge may be created between the current 'impossible' to a whole new 'possible.' Imagination is the ability to expand the boundaries of knowledge to connect unusual dots for sparking innovation. As Albert Einstein said, “imagination is more important than knowledge.” An open mind leads to imagination, imagination leads to discovery, discovery leads to creativity.  So, you should learn how to liberate the imagination and come up with a new approach to solve problems, that is creativity.

Creativity has many faces and manifestations. And by manifesting creativity from an individual endeavor to a team activity and a collective effort, the horizon of creativity is expanded and the collective creative potential can be unleashed.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation