THE CREATIVE MIND

How to Turn on Your Creativity Like an Entrepreneur

Learn to master the 7 ways that Entrepreneurs use to ignite creativity

Creativity is a human attribute. A natural function of thought. The only learning involved is how to harness your creative mind.

Therefore, Creativity is not beyond anyone. It is everyone. Creativity is you and me. Creativity is a choice. Our choice.

As such, we’re all Creators, Inventors, and Visionaries.

Like any skill, Creativity isn’t easy to master, it takes practice. Though once mastered, it can flourish in each and every one of us.

“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” — Michelangelo

Your environment and those around you can energize your Creativity. We may never know how to isolate all the variables that generate creativity, but we can rely on it —Why? — because it’s incumbent in us. Brian Pennie said:

“When you feel energised, alive, and at your best, pay attention to who you’re with.” — @penniebrian

Our only influence is to build the conditions that invite it. Cultivate it. Conditions to facilitate randomness. Conditions that nurture curiosity. Conditions that energize you and make you feel alive.

Would you like to know more? Below are seven ways, “7 Habits”, that enable Entrepreneurs to be highly creative (Covey, 2005).

1. Fear

All Entrepreneurs experience fear. Yet from the outside looking in they seem to be fear-less. Why is that?

Firstly, what is Fear? Think of it like this:

→ Fear = False Evidence Appearing Real.

So what’s false evidence? Can we define it?

For context, allow me to paraphrase an article written by Umair Haque, entitled “Why We Need a Revolution of Love”:

“Think about our institutions. What do they really do — or make us do? They prey on our three great primal fears, annihilation, abandonment, and worthlessness — or worse, they make us little predators of each other. There I am. I am trying desperately not to be annihilated and abandoned. What am I really doing? I end up trying to out-earn you, out-consume you, out-do you, out-out-accomplish you. That way, maybe, finally, I am worth something. And you are not. I elevate my status, position, title, rank. I win more money, sex, fame, power. All to make you feel small, little, weak, and myself feel big and strong.” — umair haque, 2020.

For Entrepreneurs, fear is existing in a world described by Umair above.

Fear is toiling 9–5 for the rest of their lives.

Fear is working in the Corporate world.

Fear is working for Toxic Leaders. Toxic cultures. In an environment that arrests their Creativity.

Fear is failure. Yet they fail often and make mistakes. Therefore, fear is a motivator.

Entrepreneurs struggle to accept the scenario that Umair described above, despite fear. They’re almost unemployable because they do not buy into such constraints. They cannot accept the world in which they exist without having an impact. Changing it. Adding value. Making a dent in the Universe.

Entrepreneurs seem fearless because of fear itself, it drives them. They see it as false evidence because it contradicts with their vision, their place in the “Misfit Economy” (Clay and Phillips, 2015).

Learn to embrace your fear.

2. Frame The Problem

So how do Entrepreneurs deploy creativity? They identify and frame the problem, then they step back. Like an irritating stone in their shoe, a cognitive irritation stimulates their creative juices.

They discover a compelling or unsolved problem. They articulate it clearly and vividly in their mind so that their brain becomes irritated.

Then, they walk away.

In doing so they allow their subconscious mind to work in the background. This employs a fuller complement of neural resources, memories, experiences for creative connections to flow (Stupple et al., 2017).

3. Obey Curiosity

Entrepreneurs obey their curiosity, religiously.

“Creativity is just connecting things.” — Steve Jobs

To be creative like an Entrepreneur you need to connect more things. Random things. In doing so you enrich your neural database.

Honor your passing curiosities. Write them down.

If an idea tickles your brain, spend a moment with it. Follow its path. It may have no obvious purpose other than to satisfy your intuition, a gut feeling.

So pause and observe.

It could be an article, a book, an event or a conversation with a person you meet. It’s easy to let these opportunities pass you by, discarded as fleeting moments, but you do so at your creative peril.

To be creative like an Entrepreneur think of these random events as ingredients, building blocks, Lego bricks to paint your creative canvas.

4. Harvest

Find a way to collect your ideas, your experiences. For example, highlight as you read. Then go back and re-read the text you highlighted from time to time. Copy and paste the best bits into a document that you can easily retrieve later.

It’s a four-step process:

1. Read
2. Highlight
3. Review
4. Organize

Doing this increases the likelihood that you’ll retain information and eventually conjure up fertile connections from random bits of information.

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark” — Michelangelo

Always tickle your consciousness so your subconscious can distill over time.

5. Being Boring

Do something that doesn’t interest you. Things that you might label as “boring” because they reside outside your field of interest.

Read at least one article a week that holds little or no interest for you. Engage in an activity or event that you’d normally bypass.

Trust me, you’ll be rewarded by doing so. As an ex-engineer, I often connect things between the built environment and the digital world from all sorts of experiences.

6. Discomfort

You’ve got to become comfortable with discomfort. So invite uncomfortable conversations.

“Your personal growth depends on getting comfortable with discomfort!” — George J. Ziogas

Creative friction is a great stimulus for Entrepreneurs. One example is to engage in conversations with people, those who would normally recoil you.

Two of the most fruitful conversations I experienced lately were with a drug dealer at a bar and a politician. Now I didn’t change after these conversations, rather I gained a new perspective through the eyes of another. It exercised my neural flexibility.

Learn to exercise your neural muscles with a dollop of discomfort.

7. Stop-Start

Entrepreneurs stop and start working when a creative spark hits. When something is stirring inside them and boils over.

At random times they feel an inrush of clarity and act.

By following the disciplined steps above, they honor these moments by doing, writing or drawing their initial idea. No matter what’s happening they interrupt and transcribe their thoughts to arrange their flow of thought.

If they ignore random moments like this — or defer — they struggle to recall once it passes. Clarity is lost. When Entrepreneurs sense a rush of ideas, no matter how they feel or what they’re doing, they recognize the symptoms for what it is. They act and record it somewhere, be it a sketch, a scribbled note or whatever, but they capture it at the moment.

Form a habit to capture your moments.

Final Thought

Creativity is random connections of mind, fleeting thoughts that ‘pass us in the night’, or indeed at any time.

Creativity is like Energy — it is Energy — it flows through us; it’s shapeless, formless, intangible, yet powerful beyond measure when harnessed. Our role is to solidify its power.

“Research shows that creative thinking involves making new connections between different regions of the brain, which is accomplished by cultivating divergent thinking skills and deliberately exposing oneself to new experiences and to learning.” (Psychology Today)

The trick to being creative like an Entrepreneur is to be open to inspiration from an array of sources to connect the dots. Creativity is in many ways a mystery, but the practiced disciplines above can invite its arrival in all of us.

References

• Clay, A. and Phillips, K. (2015). Misfit economy. 1st ed. Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition, pp.1–32.
• Covey, S. (2005). The 7 habits of highly effective people. London: Simon & Schuster, pp.188–202.
• Stupple, E. et al (2017). Development of the Critical Thinking Toolkit (CriTT): A measure of student attitudes and beliefs about critical thinking. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 23, pp.91–100.