Can creative thinking and even spontaneity come from a highly organized approach? Yes! For example, if you watch great comedians closely, you'll see that they have certain habits of mind. Even the most spontaneous ones get better with practice, because they're training their brains to find the humour in situations.
In the same way,
you can train yourself for more creative thinking. Just start cultivating the
right habits in your mind. Why not start training your brain today, with some
simple techniques?
Creative Thinking Techniques
Want the mind of a
creative inventor? Start redesigning everything you see. Imagine better cars, faster
ways to serve food, or better light bulbs. If you do this every day for three
weeks, it will become a habit.
Want to be the
person who always has something interesting to say? Train yourself to look at
things from other perspectives. What would the Buddha say about this? How would
a Martian view it? What's the opposite perspective? The point isn't to ask
others silly questions, but to ask yourself, to see what interesting ideas
result. Do this until it is a habit, and you'll always have something interesting
to add to a conversation.
Want systematic
creativity in poetry? Put a word on each of 40 cards; 10 nouns, 10 verbs, 10
adjectives, and 10 random words. Shuffle, deal out four cards, and write a
4-line poem using one of the words in each line. Your mind will find a poetic
use for any word if you use this method often.
Solve Problems Creatively
Maybe you've heard
of problem-solving techniques such as "attributes listing," and
"concept combination." More creative thinking doesn't come from just
knowing these techniques, though. You have to use them until they become a part
of your habitual thinking process.
Imagine you want to
invent a new bicycle. If you've trained your mind in "assumption
challenging," you'll automatically begin to ask things like, "Are
wheels necessary?" "Does it have to go outside?" What if the
"bike" was indoors, and pedalling it ran a video screen? You could
"steer" through endless different scenes.
You won't always
have great ideas, but you'll have enough ideas to make it more likely that
you'll find a useful one. This "spontaneous" creativity will be
because of your brain training exercise. Why not start developing those habits
of creative thinking?
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