How to Be More Creative: Five Ideas  

By Shlomo Maital

    The business weekly The Economist has, in its latest issue, a great piece titled “What to read to become more creative”. 

     I can save you, dear readers, some time by summarizing the basic ideas in the five books Economist reviews.

    1.  Graham Greene.  A world of my own.  Greene wrote 25 wonderful novels.  Yet he suffered, like many of us, from ‘creative blockage’.  He was saved by …  dreaming.  “It is possible to rise above the quicksand of creative block by freeing oneself from the impulses of perfectionism and self-doubt.”  Greene’s book was published after his death, and recounts some of his dreams –Prince Philip as a scoutmaster, Pope John Paul II in a hotel room.   In dreams, our ‘imagination runs unbounded by the strictures of external judgment’. 

       Small suggestion:  Practice day-dreaming —  let your thoughts run wild while you are awake.  In another article, Economist suggests that ‘tedium’ is a great creativity-booster.  Boredom and idle time can lead to great ideas, that pop into our heads, if we leave room for them.

2. Julia Cameron.  The artist’s way: A spiritual path to higher creativity.  Cameron, an artist, recommends “two practices for artist recovery” —  a) the morning pages –  a daily ritual of witing three sides of paper, in ‘stream of consciousness’ (whatever comes to mind); and b) artistic dates – expeditions to inspire creative connections through frivolity, each week.  My own ‘take’ on this is ‘zoom in/zoom out’.  Zoom in, into your own head; zoom out, to anything out there in the world that could inspire you.    Her book, by the way, has sold over 5 million copies.

3.  Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire.  Wired to create: Unravelling the mysteries of the creative mind.   Kaufman is a psychologist, and heads the Imagination Institute at U of Pennsylvania; Gregoire is a science writer.  They list ten things creative people do differently – from daydreaming to cultivating solitude.  (Many of us avoid solitude at all costs!).  They cite Picasso, who once said, if I know what I am going to do, why bother doing it?  Meaning: Let your impulse and your intuition have free rein.

4.  Albert Read.  The Imaginative Muscle.   I love this one.  Creativity is a muscle, he writes. It can be trained.  I spent years working with managers on retraining their creative muscles, that most of them, nearly all of them, said they had lost forever because they did humdrum things the same way day after day, for high pay.  Read starts with an ancient cave painting and tries to pin down imaginations’ “constant mercurial nature”.  I’ve written books on creativity, but have barely begun to understand the fluid, changing nature of ideation. But I do know — by exercising your creativity brain daily, in every possible way, you can strengthen it, just as you strengthen your biceps and abs with exercise. The creative brain IS a muscle. Use it or lose it.

5.  Samuel Franklin.  The cult of creativity.  Franklin claims that today’s cult of creativity – cult, because its adherents treat it as a near cure-all for all that ails us —  began “in the 1950s as a psychological cure for …structural and political contradictions of the post-war order.”.  And it is true, that when the world is in its deepest crises,  innovation is at its highest level of intensity.  “The concept of creativity never existed outside of capitalism”, he claims.  What nonsense.  Creative people had ideas long before free-markets took hold.  Just read the Bible.  So, sure, be creative.  But remember, for every weirdo idea guy and gal, you need dozens of disciplined people to bring their ideas to fruition.  Imagine a society with all creative weirdos.  Yikes.