THE CREATIVE MANIFESTO

Four methods for breaking free and keeping creativity alive

RULE 1: FEAR & RISK

No one wants to be afraid, but fear can be a useful feeling—it can be your guide in letting you know that you are exiting your comfort zone of thought and venturing into the unknown. Often, that’s exactly what you need to push past mental boundaries to make new discoveries. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown, and fear of rejection are limiters to your full potential and success as a creative being. Recall that Thomas Edison had to run over 10,000 failed experiments before coming up with a light bulb that worked…on his 10,001th try.

Learn to consciously step out of your mental comfort zone and risk thinking about things in a different way. Stumbling upon new ideas and creatively developing those ideas means actively thinking in a non-linear fashion. It also means letting go of expectations and negative thinking, yet remaining open to possibilities. Creativity is unbounded by rules and boxes! As we get older and more set in our ways, we must consciously break free of the patterns we’ve developed; our patterns limit change and thereby limit our access to true creativity.

Taking risks in how we think enables us to play again and re-learn how to engage and experience the world in an entirely new (and more creative) way. Perhaps playing with food, Legos, or Lincoln Logs will enable you to see something you didn’t see before. Maybe cutting images and articles from magazines and then making a collage with them will inspire you to see new connections and creative expressions. In the world of inventions, sometimes looking at new material and combining it with existing products can lead to new ideas. Sometimes we can exchange one tool for another to engage the world differently. (Image using a spatula instead of a paintbrush to paint a portrait.) If we aren’t taking risks, then we are constrained by our own—and other people’s—confined patterns of thought. When it comes to risk, there should only be one rule: don’t inflict harm upon others or ourselves.

RULE 2: STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN

Learning to see differently is also a pathway to creativity. Within each and every one of us, there is a third eye, an eye that can guide and lead us. This third eye is sometimes felt in the center of our foreheads and slightly outside our bodies. It appears when we meditate, when we are in “the zone,” and when we are free-thinking. “Looking through the third eye” may also be a spiritual metaphor for seeing things differently.

Listen to your inner self and to others. As we venture into the world of creativity, our guides may be living legends or historic artists. Historical personages, too, can be a guide to breaking free: look at Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Matisse. Each artist broke new ground in artistic expression. Leonardo da Vinci—an inventor as well as an artist—was an expert at drawing the human body, which in many cases led him to understand the limitations and possibilities of ideas. Experts can also be a good source of creative inspiration, but remember that over time, humankind has created endless new things and new ideas, and no one could have possibly predicted them all; the world is constantly changing. When it comes to creativity, we all have a different vantage point, a viewpoint that’s influenced by when and where in time we are creating.

RULE 3: PLAY AND FLUX

Being creative also means being (in some cases, learning how to be) comfortable while being in a constant state of flux. Creative people have creative highs and lows and must find ways to deal with the swings. That being said, it’s essential to “play”—that is, to learn coping methods to survive the ebbs and flows that go along with living in a constant state of creativity. A good way of breaking free from the cycles is to work out at a gym or go for a run…or take art classes. Art classes are a good way to play with lines, clay, and forms. Just don’t be too much of a perfectionist when you’re being creative—learn to play, learn to have fun, and learn not to make everything perfect. Many creatives have the tendency of spending too much time thinking rather than doing; many also over-analyze and judge rather than accept and move on.

Creative work will always be subjective and judged by others, but being creative is in and of itself a living art. After each creation, we (hopefully) continue to evolve, perfect, and grow. If we don’t, our stagnation will fold our boxes in on us…and those boxes will put the brakes on our creativity.

RULE 4: INTUITION AND QUESTIONING

It’s important to learn how to ignore others who stick to convention and who are consequently frozen in the here-and-now (and the what-has-always-been). We must learn and feel our own way through our own intuitions and beliefs. Others can help, but as we travel further and further away from established convention, our ideas—which may have been laughed at in the beginning—can change the world. Remember, creativity does not care if you laugh at it, it only cares about you visiting it from time to time. Creativity’s door is always open.

It is true that we often take things for granted, but we need to get into a routine of continually questioning to help us dive deeper and be creative—creativity waits around every corner as long as we keep moving. As we move through and experience life, we should ask what, when, where, how, and why, especially if we start to slow down. Movement is one of the keys to creativity, although it’s also true that during our explorations we must sometimes stop to ask questions. That’s often when creativity can flow. The old axiom is true: it’s the journey that matters, not the path. The journey can get richer by questioning.

Magazines and newspapers can inspire us. Bill Evans, the Imagineer responsible for the distinctive landscape architecture and design at the Walt Disney theme parks from 1955 to 1975, used to subscribe to thirty different magazines focusing on science, technology, art, photography, cars, business, and more. Even after he was no longer a direct employee, he continued to consult with Disney Imagineering to sculpt and create movements with plants. For over 50 years, he innovated and exercised his creativity…until he finally passed away at the age of 92. He found that by increasing his knowledge base of different ideas in different fields—and thereby sparking his own creativity—he could better solve problems within his own industry. Marty Adrian Sklar from WDI once said, “Bill Evans defined Disney theme park landscaping and trained just about everyone [else] who has created theme park stories in living environments.” By increasing the diversity of our knowledge base, we, too, can question connections and find new ideas as we journey towards engaging our creativity.

COOKING UP GREAT IDEAS

A Simple Recipe for Making Ideas

Where do good ideas come from?

Well, getting ideas and making them a reality is like baking a cake.

If you’re going to bake a cake, you need a recipe, ingredients, cooking tools, and an oven. Having a recipe for good ideas is essential, too, because a “recipe” in the idea world is how you go about defining the goal of the idea. First of all, determine if the idea going to be a product (as opposed to a service). If it is, what kind of product will it be?

When we bake a cake, we know that the ingredients are going to include baking soda, sugar, flour, salt, butter, and eggs. If we’re creating a product, we’ll need things like paper, pencils, pens, and colored markers. After we have all of that in front of us, we “prepare” our ideas by doing things like conducting research, reading books, talking to people, experiencing products, and getting a thorough understanding of the desired goal.

But back to baking a cake: we measure our ingredients, we crack the eggs into a mixing bowl, and we mix in the other necessary ingredients. The entire process of baking a cake is about the addition of its contents. This can be messy. In the product world, our intellectual “ingredients”—i.e., information through research and information acquired through experiences—are collected and “mixed” with pen and paper as we sketch out the idea’s possibilities. Like baking, cross-pollinating ideas with information is mentally messy, too, as we correlate and see possible interconnections.

Once the cake mixture is ready, we pour the batter into the cake pan and put the pan into the pre-heated oven. When creating a product, the information we’ve gathered is incubated with the sketched-out concepts. (Incubation is an internal mental process that can be done collectively or independently.)

After a set amount of time, the cake should be removed from the oven, the oven turned off, and the cake allowed to cool. The product incubation time will also come to an end in due time. Every inventor has a different incubation period—some Idea Chefs have faster incubation engines than do others.

Once the cake is cool, we smooth icing over the top and let the excess spill lavishly down the sides of the cake. With products, we finesse and refine the generated idea into a viable sketch, design, or prototype. The product idea may even need to go back into incubation since it’s an iterative process.

Finally, we eat! We experience the cake through its visual beauty and its flavor. To be a truly successful cake, however, others must find it delicious, too. This is similar to the world of product innovation: the generated idea needs to be given the emotional appeal (that is, its marketing and branding identity) as well as a thumbs-up from sponsors who will enable customers to eventually purchase and experience the product.

Good luck baking!

Idea Chef :: Adrian Chernoff