Photo credit: http://nickdart.deviantart.com/art/creativity-158880688
Look around you. Seriously, look around you. Everything you see came from someone, but more importantly it started out as simply a creative idea.
We’ve all had those moments when creativity is a spark, when it burns brightly, then fades away.
We’ve also has those moments when creativity is a fire, burning brightly and furiously, and it stays with you and things start to happen.
For the last few days in advertising class, we’ve talked about creativity, where it comes from, and how it blesses us at times and curses us at other times. But the truth is, in creative fields, where ideas are important and making things work is essential, we can never give up on ourselves. We must persevere and find ways to get our minds to think in a different way—to see the world differently.
As innovator and designer Tim Brown states in his TED video, we’ve forgotten how to play. We don’t make time to play as we get older.
As Elizabeth Gilbert says in her brilliant TED video, “You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?”
How do we explain that we’re in the shower, hair full of shampoo, when an idea comes as to how we will end the book we’re writing? This is what happened to me. After stressing for weeks about how I would end my novel, one day it just came. From nowhere, from some unidentifiable source, and I was dizzy with glee.
We’ve all brushed up against “that thing,” that “mad creativity” that comes along at both opportune and inopportune moments at some point in our lives. The question remains, however, as to how we foster it. Do we know how to take care of it?
Feel free to share how you generate and foster your ideas…
