a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way of doing things. As a result, as adults our creativity often comes out more through luck than application. The ice-cream cone is a case in point. It was created by Ernest Hamwi in 1904 at the St Louis World’s Fair. He was selling waffles and next door to him was an ice-cream vendor who ran out of dishes. He rolled a waffle to put the ice cream in and the rest is history. Unfortunately, these lucky instances are few and far between.
As an example of the natural creativity of children, there’s a lovely story I came across recently about Johnny in a physics lesson. The teacher asks Johnny, ‘If I give you this barometer, how would you find out the height of that church steeple?’
Johnny, sure as you like, says, ‘That’s easy! I’d find the vicar and ask him if I were to give him this fabulous barometer, would he tell me the height of the steeple!’
The teacher says, ‘Wrong, Johnny. Tell me how you would really do it.’
So Johnny then responds with, ‘Well, I would climb to the top of the church, drop the barometer to the ground and count how long it takes to hit the ground. Knowing the accelerating force of gravity, I could work it out from that.’
At which point the teacher took a very dim view of Johnny’s future indeed. The problem was that the teacher was looking for one particular methodology to solve this question.
For him there was a right and a wrong answer. And yet Johnny had managed to create other great ways to solve it.
Throughout our lives we are trained to do the right thing, the right way. It begins with our parents, continues in school and gets reinforced at work and throughout life. We do need to learn how the world works, how to think logically and be effective in what we do, but by doing so we often lose the ability to be Johnny – to think tangentially and solve our puzzles in a creative way.
The great news is that we still have the same creative capabilities that we had when we were young – we have just forgotten how to use them.
Our brains are able to take in incredible amounts of information and automatically make unconscious connections between seemingly unconnected facts. Computers the world over are dwarfs to our giants. You can take information in so efficiently through your senses that you can even perceive the difference made by one single photon of light. This information is then processed non-stop by your incredible brain that works tirelessly.
We can then engage in a rich gamut of emotions that help us understand where our creative passions lie. We experience intuition. We even wake up in the middle of the night and have ideas come to us as if by magic. And we have the ability to take someone else’s ideas and improve on them.
Each of us has more or less the same ability to create, because we are all born with the same natural ability. We might need a bit of a mental workout, but the creative muscles are still there. We have ideas every single day. We can’t help it – we are human. The remarkable gift of human creativity is responsible for the very best advances made in human society.
Most importantly, you have the capability to improve your creative output every day for the rest of your life. You can choose to change your focus away from routine and habit, and instead experiment with newness and difference. If you make this your focus, this will have a life-changing impact on you.
In short, you have all the raw material to be truly brilliant in having ideas – in fact, you were built for it!
CREATING OPPORTUNITIES
As we have seen, opportunities are created in two ways:
1. By you
2. By the universe (world sounds just too small)
This book covers both.
BY THE UNIVERSE
Opportunities for us to ramp up our lives pop up every day. The world is so fast-paced and abundant that it constantly supplies us with possibilities for change and development. To tap into these opportunities, we need to collaborate with the Universe, firstly by discovering who we really are and what it is that we really want to give us a richly rewarding and fulfilling life.
At the same time, we must learn to develop a heightened state of awareness in order to notice the opportunities around us to which we would usually be blind. Often the universe is shouting ‘Hey dude! Yeah you! All that stuff you wanted, that bohemian, laid back, creative lifestyle, it’s here. WooooHOOO! You can have it now! Yeah you!…
… WAKE UP!’
So first, you have to be receptive to all the opportunities that the universe puts your way. You have to let go of all your preconceptions about your life and what you have been taught is right and wrong. These very important principles are all included in this book. Above all, you need to lighten up and have fun. By approaching the choices and ideas presented to you in a playful manner, you are far more likely to maximize your creative potential.
By following the book you will dramatically increase your chances of having the universe manifest great opportunities for you. I know this language sounds a bit hippy, but it’s true. I believe that we manufacture our coincidences by being aware and in an open, receptive state. Follow the book, have some fun with it, and see what happens for you.
BY YOU
This book focuses mainly on giving you the skills to create inspiring opportunities that you can then make happen. To really break free of the norm and create something new and something different in your life you need a process or a system. It’s a bit like driving a car – you need to learn the process to know how to drive. After a while, you no longer need to think about the process of driving. It simply becomes second nature. It’s the same with learning how to be creative. First you learn the process and then, once it’s second nature, you can improvise, you can mess with it any way you want. It’s not fixed, it’s flexible. But it does have some good logic to it, so it is important that you follow it consciously a few times before coming up with your own version of the process.
THE BASIS OF CREATIVITY IS SIMPLE …
This is the process …
… but that ain’t enough!
It lets us know where we are going and what the output from each of the three stages – Insight, Ideas and Impact – should be …
We’ll explore each in turn and for each one I have included loads of tools and techniques to help you. These are exercises designed to stretch your thinking and your perspective so that you get a new angle into the possibilities that open up for you. The process will open the door to opportunities that you won’t have thought of before, and this will not fail to excite and energize you. The exercises might not be the kind of things that you usually get up to, but that just makes it more of a laugh.
Again, these exercises are not set in stone, nor are they exhaustive. I could have included hundreds of them, but I cut them down so you wouldn’t feel boggled. They are based on strong principles of creativity so try them a few times, and then if you wish you can adapt them or invent your own. If you come up with some blinders, send them to me and I’ll put them in the next edition. In 30 years I expect the latest edition to be weighty enough to be used for bicep curls.
So