9 STRATEGIES FOR INCREASING YOUR CREATIVITY
Creativity is not for sale. No matter if you are are just a bit talented in the field of bright lights, it would be a pity to leave potential unused. Wouldn't you like to be more creative than you are right now? Here are 10 strategies for increasing your level of creativity, lined up by Daniel Burrus.
1. Look where others aren’t looking to see what others aren’t seeing.
2. Innovation is based on knowledge. Therefore, you need to continually expand your knowledge base. Read things you don’t normally read.
3. Your perceptions may limit your reasoning. Be careful about how you’re perceiving things. In other words, defer judgment.
4. Practice guided imagery so you can “see” a concept come to life.
5. Let your ideas “incubate” by taking a break from them. It shifts my brain into another place and helps me be more innovative and creative.
6. Experience as much as you can. Exposure puts more ideas into your subconscious. Actively seek out new experiences to broaden your experience portfolio.
7. Treat patterns as part of the problem. Recognizing a new pattern is very useful, but be careful not to become part of it.
8. Redefine the problem completely. One of the lines I’ve been sharing for the past few decades is: “Your problem is not the problem; there is another problem.” After all, if you had correctly defined the real problem, you would have solved it long ag. Because all problems have solutions.
9. Come up with ideas at the beginning of the innovation process … and then stop. Many times we come up with several ideas and start innovating, and then we come up with more ideas and never get any single idea done. At some point you have to turn off the idea generation part of the process and really work on the innovation and execution part in order to bring a project to life.
No matter what your expertise or what industry you’re in, you can become a lot more creative in what you do.
DANIEL BURRUS is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and innovation experts. www.burrus.com