While it’s necessary to have some stability and routine in your daily life, it shouldn’t work against the idea of creativity.
Why cultivate creativity in your life?
Creativity is simply the consequence of keeping an open mind so that it can bring in new ideas. Creativity is also associated with the progress that comes with a changing world. Without a minimum of creativity, it is simply difficult to keep up with the upheavals that we insist on (economic, social etc.). In some cases, creativity gives a competitive advantage in what seems to be a global competition.
Creativity should not only serve prosaic purposes (money etc.) to be authentic, it is above all an element that must be a part of who we are, a piece of our personality.
How to welcome more creativity in your life?
If creativity is an important issue in societies that automate more and more tasks, it remains a vague or fuzzy idea most of the time. There are thousands of ways to be creative, even in a job that gives little space to it. Since we cannot define a universal rule that would make us more creative in all the contexts we encounter because of the great variety of situations, it would be more efficient to see which attitudes favor creativity.
Comfort zone, learning zone, danger zone
What characterizes creative people the most is probably their propensity to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. You’ve probably heard of the concept of the comfort zone. Imagine that there are 2 concentric circles that characterize you. The first represents your comfort zone, the second your learning zone and beyond that is your danger zone.
Your daily actions should aim at expanding your comfort zone and your learning zone. To do this, you need to spend some time each day in your learning zone (to expand your comfort zone) and your danger zone (to expand your learning zone), especially through your will and courage.
Becoming aware of what bothers or scares us
To expand your comfort zone, you simply need to become aware of what scares you or makes you uncomfortable and try to be more comfortable with situations that scare you a little every day. The idea is not to do things we don’t like all the time, but simply to try new things and learn from those trials.
Looking at the world with the eyes of a child
What characterizes the newborn or the child? It is the way they look at the world. Why is this look so particular? Well, it’s simply that they discover most of the time what they see, that’s why they are mostly ecstatic and imagine a thousand and one things all the time. The idea is not to pretend to be permanently blissful, it doesn’t make sense and it would be even more ridiculous when you are an adult. You have to understand here, to see things as if it was the first time you saw them in an intellectual way. This is not an easy exercise of course, we can’t ignore what we already know.
Talking to an alien
Going off the beaten path is not easy and neither is seeing the world with fresh eyes. Nevertheless, doing the exercise of trying to imagine presenting something or an idea to an alien can help us to step outside our conditioning and see the world differently. By doing this exercise from time to time, you will have to reconsider a lot of certainties, which will give you a fresher look.
Values correlated with creativity
Not having read any academic articles on the sources of creativity, we cannot draw any definite conclusions from what follows. Correlation is not causation. Successful people who have made creativity an important part of their success have the following qualities:
They are confronted with new ideas
Through reading, they are able to consider several angles of the same problem and appropriate ideas that will give them an advantage over others.
Deliberate practice
People who excel in a field often use deliberate practice. This is a method of learning that relies on setting performance goals and action plans in order to create intensity of effort and focus. By doing so, you will be able to focus on a particular skill that you can greatly improve. Deliberate practice necessarily generates new ideas because you will get feedback from your work and it may or may not confirm assumptions you had previously made. It is through the intensity you create that you become both better and “deeper” in what you do.
Art
Artistic activities allow you to connect to the most human part of you, let alone the most creative. By working on your artistic side, you will necessarily develop your creativity. Here are the classical arts as they are defined: architecture, sculpture, painting and drawing, music, literature, performing arts (theater, dance, mime and circus). You can add others of course.
Embrace a form of routine
It may seem counterintuitive, creativity is organized and planned in some way. And like anything that is planned, it can result in some form of routine. Routine is not bad in itself, it is primarily what makes up our routine that can tell us whether it is good or not. Routine is good for several reasons: it makes deliberate practice possible, and it allows us to materialize a conscious and regular effort to include artistic activities every day.
