Becoming Creative
There is no one way. There are many.
I’ve met too many people in my life that tell me they don’t know how to invent anything. Smart people. Successful people. Self aware people. Not smart enough to invent anything?
Good followers. Good at executing other peoples’ ideas.
This has troubled me for as long as intelligent successful friends and colleagues have candidly shared these sincere self assessments. Something always struck me as off — but frankly, I lacked the insight for too long to understand how that could be.
I wanted to help and eventually I found a way that I think can help everyone.
Thinking Backward
School indoctrinates many people successfully to think linearly from the start of a subject-matter to the end of it. Students are rewarded for mastering that process of memorizing facts and repeating them at the right time in the expected order. There is a start and there is a finish.
Students that struggle keeping their minds in focus from step to step in the order taught are punished with poor grades and negative feedback.
Jumping ahead to an end-goal and daydreaming original ways to get there instead of mentally-cementing the path being taught to get there interferes with academic success. Daydreaming instead of focusing in class, is of course, one of many popular ways to fail a class. (I’ve been there.)
Jumping ahead to the end and imagining ways to get there is backward from how schools train students to think.
This backward thought process is, however, the key ingredient to all things creative. And it can be learned.
Are you in a classroom?
If you are in a classroom then please, by all healthy means possible and available, do your best to learn the recipes presented. Do your best to repeat your classroom facts back in the right order and Ace your exams. Think exactly how your teachers and professors are coaching you to think. Be a winner in school when you are in school.
However, only do that shit when you are trying to learn something already figured out by someone else.
Then when done with school stop doing that shit.
Build a mental muscle school hid from you
Google “begin with the end in mind” sometime. Most hits will probably point to a very famous book written about 30 years ago, but the idea is older than that.
The idea is a fundamental insight for success in all areas. Most people that are aware of this insight and feel they fully understand it, consciously apply it superficially if they ever apply it at all.
Seeing in your mind the end-goal and not having all the steps between where you are now and that goal can be daunting if that end-goal is crazy-far from where you are now.
School provides all the steps between start and finish. Creative people have to find those steps themselves.
Consciously applying the principle of beginning with an end-goal and planning your way back from that future-state into today causes a searing pain in most peoples’ craniums because we are not taught to operate that way. This thought process is directly backward from academic success conditioning.
Pain for gain
Imagine something that does not exist today. This could be a new kind of space-ship, an amazing story everyone would like to read, or that fancy new report your client would like to have.
Imagining something that only exists in your head is the first step in being creative. Anyone can do that part without practice.
The “creative” people, however, are the ones that can discover the steps that get us from today into that tomorrow. And this is where all of us can get better with practice.
There is a process for doing this and I will try my best to explain it here now.
- Jot down that end-goal. Visualize it in your head so you can see it. Be as crystal clear with your mind’s eye as you can be.
- Ask yourself, what things would you need to have in-hand to be just one-step away from that wonderful end state? Jot those things down too.
- Next ask yourself what things would you need to have in hand to be just one-step away from these things that were just one step from your end-goal? Jot them down too.
- Keep doing this until you realize, shit, you already have what you need to successfully complete/acquire the things at the most recent level of steps you imagined.
I find this process works best when it is visualized. For years I have drawn arrows from steps to steps toward my end goals as a way to formalize my thought process on tough creative tasks.
We plan from the end-goal to the start, and we read that plan from the start to the end-goal.
The “solution plan” is what you are taught in the order we read a plan. Creating a new plan from nothing is best done in the opposite direction.
You can do this on paper, or by using drawing tools on a computer. You can even try it using an application I and some friends have been working on to make this process more accessible to everyone in a free web application called Twigflo. (Try it and let me know what you think — and how much it hurt to try thinking this way in your creative muscle building.)