Creativity is like a fountain. The problem is, for some it’s a fountain in a modern city with modern infrastructure, but for everyone else it’s the fountain in the middle of nowhere off of a well in an area where the water table is all but gone and we’re going on year 15 of a drought. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I smashed through it.
The trick to making creativity reliable is to focus on the infrastructure which supplies it. If you just keep digging more of the same wells, you just end up destroying the land and get diminishing returns. You have to do something different. You have to build an infrastructure to tap into your creativity.
Creativity comes from experience, and not all experiences are created or experienced equally. You have to practice to make sure everything is natural. Setting arbitrary conditions can help scaffold your creativity in a way which helps you grow. You also need to make creativity a habit to internalize it.
1. Creativity Comes From Experience
Creativity is borne from experience. To be more creative, you need to experience more. Go out and see a new movie, read a new book, go take a drive somewhere different. Each experience and each memory contributes a new perspective on something which you can draw from. More of the same is just more of the same. Go on an adventure, get a little crazy, learn something new.
Experience is the rain which washes over the land of your mind. The more you get, the more saturated the ground, and the less you have to worry about having enough water to draw from to survive. You don’t have to water your crops if it rains enough. The more water there is, the more which can soak in to replenish your stores as well.
You can’t just search keywords and put an article together and expect there to be anything resembling authenticity or emotion. There has to be something you draw on; something deeper than the surface. Each set of mistakes I learn from is a topic, each new skill I get is a headline. Turn the good and bad into something you can grow from and something which grows from you.
2. Mindful Experience
You need experiences to draw on in order to be creative, but not all experiences are made equal. You can’t just go to the grocery store ten times and expect to experience something new (unless something happens). Even the mundane can be novel with the right perspective though.
Be mindful of what you do. Mindfulness can help you squeeze more out of each experience. How you experience a given situation affects how much you can draw on it. A routine trip to the grocery store won’t make a good story, but a trip where you make the most of it and live every second to the fullest might.
Put down your phone and see what’s actually going on. Ask questions and interact with the situation. If you keep your head in the clouds, you’ll never see the flowers just off the ground.
How you experience is as important as what you experience. You have to have clouds for it to rain. Rain which is coupled with frost isn’t ideal for growing something though. The quality matters as much as the quantity.
3. Practice Makes Perfect
Creativity is a skill. You need something to draw from like you need materials to do art, but at the same time, you must practice. I subscribe to quantity over quality for practice. Don’t focus on the result, focus on improving the process and doing more. More volume means more opportunities for learning (as long as you’re actually engaged).
How do you go about making something or solving a problem? Most of the time, you just throw ideas at it until something clicks. Art and creativity in general is no different. The more ideas you test or throw at a problem, the more likely something is to click. As you practice more and more, it gets easier and easier to be creative and to come up with novel ideas.
The more you paint, the easier painting gets. As you practice, you iron out the basic skills and scaffold the more complex skills unless you’re just killing time. The more you brainstorm, the easier brainstorming gets. You can weed out what works and what doesn’t sooner.
I don’t sit down with a perfect blog idea in mind when I write. I just throw ideas at it until something clicks. Seek out what fits you and your mood. What do you want to do and how can it further your craft? I might have an idea of where I want to go, but I have to explore it to turn it into something attainable.
4. Conditional Creativity
Creativity flourishes when there are limitations. Having conditions which limit you actually better enables you to innovate. I started writing shorter articles to limit myself. Implementing artificial limitations meant I had fewer details to focus on and could be more creative with the details I worked with.
Certain creative limitations can lead to more growth and discovery that would have never occurred otherwise. I started limiting myself to certain topics for certain articles. I may not have had an idea when I started, but I had to figure it out. The limitation flexed my creativity and forced it to improve. For instance, this article specifically is being written to avoid writing about my fallback of technology.
Just like the art which uses it, creativity is a skill in itself. Develop the skill and develop how you use it. Arbitrary conditions added to your work can make you try things you’d not have a purpose doing otherwise. Scaffold your growth. The more artificial limitations I set on my different types of work, the more I improve.
5. Creativity as a Habit
Just like you can’t fully employ a muscle without stretching to improve its range of motion, you can’t use a muscle without working it out consistently. Creativity should become a habit. We addressed being creative as a practice, but it has to become a habit to transcend practice.
Creativity is a language; you have learning and you have acquisition. The rules need practice and internalization for the language to become natural in actual usage. Fluency comes from habituation; habituation comes from both practice and internalization. You must assimilate the language and it must mean something to you to mean anything at all.
Make creativity a habit. Create more, think more, design more, plan more. The more you work towards turning creativity into a habit, the easier it is to strike hot. Don’t just practice being creative, make it who you are. The more I write, the harder it gets to not write. It is a habit now, and habits are hard to break.
Putting It All Together
Creativity is a resource you can draw on, but like any resource, you need to make it efficient. Creativity is borne from experience, so experience more to have more to draw from. Be mindful of what you do and how you do it so each experience is worth more. Not all experiences are created equally.
Creativity is also a skill which needs work. Practice, practice, then practice again. People have no qualms practicing an instrument for hours, but are glad to skip the improvisation to work on more sheet music. Practice creativity. Set limits and adhere to them to build a scaffold to grow from. Make creativity a habit as well.
Focus on both aspects of creativity; it as a resource and it as a skill. When you combine the two you can make it as on demand as a faucet in a city, but if you neglect it, it might depend on the weather and the season whether you get anything. Grow and build your creativity. It doesn’t hurt if you do it right.
Featured image by Alexandr Ivanov from Pixabay