Blog Category: Creativity
Creativity January 9, 2009
Our discussion of creativity this week reveals that engaging with it accesses a powerful tool whose utility goes far beyond visual aesthetics or art. Harnessing creativity is a powerful strategy for advancement.
It’s intriguing to use creativity in service of improving our lives. Duke Ellington said, “A problem is a chance for you to do your best.”
Please think for a moment about what have been problems for you in mind, body and spirit. Let’s end the week with a new, creative approach to at least one historic problem in each category.
Creativity January 8, 2009
Creativity – our topic this week – can be dramatically enhanced by being around creative people.
If you could form a five-person”Creative Council” to advise you, and you could choose anyone living or gone, who would you choose and why? What qualities in those people do you admire and would you find useful?
There are obviously so many choices, but I’d like to have Einstein, Mozart, Socrates, Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling. It would be great to have the qualities of searing insight, scientific genius, marketing savvy, wild imagination and musical composition.
Here’s the fun part: What advice do you think they would give you? How well would you follow it?
Creativity January 7, 2009
Creativity is a strategic advantage in life, so let’s become more creative.
The web has spawned many new terms . . . among them, the word “mash-up. Originally used to describe the integration of different kinds of web and technology elements, the term can now be applied to the creative combination of potentially disparate elements to form a new experience.
Think mobile phone + music + address book + email.
Think banking + inside a market + automated check-out + dietician onsite + florist. A now-common, but previously unusual, mash-up.
How can we take these commercial examples and apply the concept of mash-up to your life and career? What novel combinations can you create?
Emerson said, “All of life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.”
Try experimenting with mash-up’s! I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Creativity January 6, 2009
We ended yesterday’s Study Hall with a goal of your identifying several areas where you could embrace uncertainty in such a way that your creativity would be enhanced in 2009.
The most radical way to challenge what we know is to try on its opposite. Charlie Munger, famous partner of financier, Warren Buffet, says, “Invert, always invert.”
Munger advises always trying on the opposite of any situation. For example, was that really a terrible thing that happened, or was it the best thing that could have happened?
Being locked into perceptions that become hardened and calcified leads to a blocking of your creativity. Today, as an exercise, try on the opposite of what you hold as true in a few situations to observe the impact on your creativity.
Creativity January 5, 2009
Welcome to the 2009 edition of Study Hall!
This week’s topic is creativity. As the Apple ads say, “Think different.” This year, let’s also resolve to think creatively and broadly. At first glance, one might assume that creativity only relates to the arts, but we know that all areas of life present opportunities for creativity.
As we begin the New Year, expanded creativity can help us address times in our lives when we are “challenged” – in both the most positive and the most negative senses of the word.
Psychologist, Eric Fromm, said: “Creativity requires the ability to let go of certainties.”
It may feel counter-intuitive to “let go of certainties” as we begin a new calendar year. How do you feel about Fromm’s requirement? What “certainties,” if you let go of them, would foster your creativity so that 2009 could become the best year in your life so far?