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Creativity!
Creativity! – Are you Creative? Can
you learn to be creative or is it something you are born with?
Creativity is a process of developing and expressing novel ideas
that are likely to be useful.
Or
Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize
ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving
problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and
others.
Therefore creativity is a process that anyone can improve on. Defining
that process and improving on it is what we need to do to increase our
creativity. Moreover, the purpose or goal of the creative process is
the solving of a particular problem or the satisfying of a specific
need, so if we keep this in mind, our process will have better results.
In order to be creative, you need to be able to view things in new
ways or from a different perspective. Creativity involves convergent
as well as divergent thinking. The creative process begins with divergent
thinking—a breaking away from familiar or established ways of
seeing and doing that produces novel ideas. Convergent thinking occurs
in the later stages of the process. As the original ideas generated
by the divergent thinking are communicated to others, they are evaluated
to determine which ideas are genuinely novel and worth pursuing.
Again, creativity is a process you employ to improve your problem
solving. So you’re not done until your creative efforts have produced
a product, service, or process that answers the original need or solves
the problem you identified at the outset.
Creativity is a widely misunderstood subject. Do you have any of the
following misconceptions about creativity? Doing away with them will
improve your creative potential
Misconception #1: Intelligent people are more creative.
This is wrong as intelligence correlates with creativity only up to
a point. Once you have enough intelligence to do your job, the relationship
no longer holds.
Misconception #2: Young people are more creative
than the old. In the business world, the necessary creativity can be
found in an adult of any age. At the same time, however, expertise can
at times inhibit creativity: experts sometimes find it difficult to
see or think outside established patterns.
Misconception #3: Creativity is reserved for the
few—the flamboyant, high rollers. The willingness to take calculated
risks and the ability to think in untraditional ways do play a role
in creativity. But that doesn’t mean you have to be on the wild
side, or take the midnight jet to Vegas for a quick 24 hours in order
to be creative. It doesn’t mean that you have to be markedly different
from everyone else.
Contrary to popular conception, writes Peter Drucker, most innovators
"in real life are unromantic figures, and much more likely to spend
hours on a cash-flow projection than to dash off looking for 'risks.'"
On rare occasions, those innovations will be visionary leaps forward
that revolutionize an industry. But more often they will be small improvements
that advance the organizational cause.
Misconception #4: The creative act is something you
do alone. Actually many of the world’s most important inventions
resulted not from the work of one lone genius, but from the a group
of people working together.
So to improve our Creativity there are a few areas we can work on.
Number one is curiosity. Don’t hold back. Ask questions, wonder
why, look outside the box and the everyday things you see all the time
– not only in your work, but in other things around you.
Challenge yourself, and others to do things differently and that will
make you see things differently. Take a different way to work. Eat at
new restaurants. Talk to new people. Talk about things you don’t
know anything about.
Don’t be satisfied with the way things are. Shake things up!
Don’t settle. Provide a little constructive criticism, or even
constructive discontent. Open the door to new ideas.
And finally look for opportunity. The silver lining in the cloud is
only found by examining the cloud in detail, not simply accepting it
as a rainy day. Look for ways to do better, faster, smarter, and ask
others to help you find better ways.
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