How to be Creative
While recently reading the "The Complete Tightwad Gazette" by Amy Dacyczyn, "The Frugal Zealot" I found this article about creativity and enjoyed it. Here it is...
How to be Creative
My own creative journey began nearly 20 years ago. My mother forced me to take an art class in high school. I recall tortured occasions of sitting before a blank piece of watercolor paper without a clue as to what I should paint. I was not the most talented student, and receiving the art award in my senior year was unexpected. (So much so that I was delinquent and absent during the awards ceremony.)
I went on to art school in Boston. At times ideas came easily but often it felt like beating my head against the wall. I did snag a couple of merit-based scholarships and graduated as one of three in a dead heat at the top of my class.
After art school a large advertising agency gave me my first job. There is a clock in the real world. You sit before a drawing board, working under an art director who has a different sense of what is good. The task before you is to second guess how the art director interprets the needs of the client. It is not kindergarten, where the teacher understands the fragile nature of creativity and tells you every idea is wonderful. The real world is where creative failure costs money.
During my professional peak my creative effort satisfied art directors only 50% of the time. As a result I designed very little and did pasteup, typespecking and layouts most of my eight years working full time.
Occasionally I obtained a freelance job, such as a logo for a small company. I always negotiated a fixed price and worked tirelessly to come up with the best design possible. My success rate with no clock and no art director was about 95%.
After I married and my first child was born I freelanced only from home. I had a few jobs but for the most part put my creative energies into personal projects. Christmas cards, birth announcements, children's birthday parties, and homemade presents.
This freedom from the professional grind helped greatly. Some years later, at a business woman's dinner, I related the details of recent personal projects to a lady who was one of my clients. She turned to the woman at her side and said "Amy is creative, creative, creative."
This is a long story to tell you what I have learned about "How to be more creative." My credentials are the years of success and failure. If it had always come easily I would not have been forced to analyze. But through my roller coaster ride I have come to understand something of the nuts and bolts process of creativity.
People tend to believe that creativity is a mystical gift reserved for a few. Thy think this mistaking creativity for "craft." Creativity is the process. Craft is the product. When there is a lack of a recognized outlet, such as writing, art, or music, creativity goes unnoticed.
Creativity is nothing more and nothing less than solving a problem in an original way. As humans we all have this spark. We string together words to express out thoughts. We do not memorize and repeat the sentences that we speak. We put together new word combinations continually.
Creativity occurs in subtle ways. While preparing a familiar recipe and you realize that you lack an ingredient and make a substitution. Or while folding laundry the way your mother taught you 20 years ago, you discover that by rearranging piles in a different order you can save time. Or you have a problem with a co-worker and attempt a new strategy to make the relationship work better. Or you figure out how to build a lathe out of salvaged materials and a washing machine motor. These are all forms of creativity.
Ten steps to a more creative you
Step 1. Realize that you are creative. Look for it in your daily life and nurture that part of yourself.
Step 2. Give yourself mental space, a clear field. We tend to fill up our days with the TV, car radio, reading the paper (or Reddit, Digg, Hacker News), chats with friends on the phone (or email). Instead do that "mindless task" in quiet. This type of activity dominates my life... housework, mowing the lawn, scraping paint.
Boredom never strikes as the mental gears whirl continually. I write only after mentally rehearsing a paragraph a dozen times.
When someone says, "I'm just not creative like you," I reply "No I just thought about it longer."
Step 3. Never ever compare yourself to others, but rather enjoy your own innovations. I stumbled over this block working in the shadow of many award winning designers. No matter how good I could become there would still be someone better. Later I realized that no matter how bad I was there was always someone worse. Compare yourself only to yourself. "This is how good I am today. I am better than I was yesterday and I will be better tomorrow."
Step 4. I use a strategy I call "putting the problem into the mental computer." Your brain functions continually, even as you sleep. Study the parameters of your problem and then let it rest for a few days. Very often your mental computer will spit out the solution unexpectedly as you shower or drive to work. This works much better than trying to perform as the clock ticks away. If you are trying to come up with a great party idea, give yourself a couple months of mental back burner time.
Step 5. Brainstorm. Toss the idea around with another person. Be flexible and say or write down every "stupid" thought that comes. Very often another person can take your idea and add a twist that makes it great. Jim is my brainstorming partner. He is very good at telling me when my idea is good and I should run with it. Sometimes something isn't working just right and he can look at it and comes up with a better sentence or illustration idea.
Step 6. Find a springboard, a starting place. For the tightwad this usually means determining which resources are cheap or in surplus. Build from that point.
Step 7. Do not share your creative ideas with anyone who continually tells you they are dumb. This is often a spouse or a parent. Professionally I should have switched jobs until I found an art director who shared similar creative style. The art directors that didn't like my ideas were not more creative than me. Often they were less creative. Mostly it was a matter of seeing things differently. But, the constant message that I was doing in wrong took its toll. A mouse does not go down the same hole over and over if he fails to find cheese.
After I stopped working under art directors and created for myself, or for my clients in my own way, I began to realize that I was creative after all.
Step 8. Practice. As with any skill, accessing your creative ability improves the more you do it. You will develop your own methods and strategies to fall back on when tackling new problems.
Step 9. Avoid negative stress. This also tends to block creativity, as your mind focuses on that problem instead. Try to limit contact with individuals who bring on these problems. If it is someone within your household, try to limit your reaction to their actions.
Step 10. Start small. When you bite off more than you can chew you set yourself up for failure. Instead set small easily attainable goals to build a sense of success. In subsequent projects stretch yourself to slightly more ambitious undertakings.
Sometime as you were reading the beginning of this piece you thought "What the heck does creativity have to do with thrift?" Tightwaddery without creativity is deprivation. When there is a lack of resourcefulness, inventiveness, and innovation, thrift means doing without. When creativity combines with thrift you may be doing it without money, but you are not doing without.