Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: The Root Sources
of Creativity
EVERYONE IS creative. Creativity is a natural, spontaneous characteristic of positive individuals with high self-esteem.
Companies that create a positive working environment receive a steady flow of ideas from everyone on the staff.
What are the factors that largely determine your creativity?
There are three. The first is your past experiences. What has happened to you in the past has a major effect on determining how creative you are in the present.
Influence of the Past
It seems that creative people, because of their backgrounds a consider themselves to be highly creative. Generating ideas is normal and natural for them.
Uncreative people, on the other hand, have often had negative environments, starting in childhood and continuing through different jobs, where they have generally accepted that they are not particularly creative at all. Even when they have good ideas, which they often do, they will reject or ignore the ideas, believing that if they are the source, the ideas can't be any good.
When you work (or have worked) for a company where your ideas are encouraged and stimulated, where your bosses and coworkers treat your ideas with respect and interest, you will feel yourself to be more creative in your job.
Power of the Present
The second factor that determines your creativity is your current situation. Is there a lot of encouragement for new ideas in your workplace? Do people laugh together and get involved in discussing ideas together, or are your ideas ridiculed and criticized?
In the 1990s, Eastman Kodak was a $60 billion company with 140,000 employees. It dominated the world of film, as it had for many decades. Then, after many years of work a the scientists and researchers at Eastman Kodak discovered a new process called "digital photography" that did not require the medium of film to take and print photographs.
When they took this discovery to their senior managers a they were roundly criticized and told, "This idea is no good;
Kodak is a film company and this technology does not require film."
They were sent back to their offices and laboratories and told to forget about this new breakthrough technology. The rest is history. Within a few years, the Japanese camera manufacturers leaped all over the idea of digital photography a bringing out new digital cameras one after another, and soon, Kodak was finished.
The Person You See
The third factor that determines your creativity is your selfimage.
Do you consider yourself to be a creative person? Do
you see yourself as being highly creative, or not? Many studies indicate that 95 percent of people demonstrate the potential to perform at high levels of creativity. The work done by Howard Gardner at Harvard University concluded that there are several different ways of thinking, and that each person is a potential genius in at least one area. What this means is that the key to unlocking your creativity is to begin to think of yourself as a highly creative person.
The Inner Game
Timothy Gallwey, in his book The Inner Game of Golf a teaches that the way to become a better golfer is to imagine that you are already a top golfer and to play golf as if you were already at championship levels. The very act of thinking about yourself as an excellent golfer improves your golf swing and your drive and putting almost immediately.
By the same token, the way to increase your creativity is to imagine that you are already a highly creative person.
Repeat to yourself, over and over, "I'm a genius! I'm a genius!
I'm a genius!"
Visualize and imagine yourself as a highly creative person.
Imagine that you are so creative that there is no problem in your world that you cannot solve by using your creative mind. Imagine that there is no goal that you cannot achieve by developing ideas for its accomplishment. Imagine that there is no obstacle that you cannot overcome when you apply your creative mind, like a laser beam cutting through steel, to remove the obstacle.
The good news is that everybody is inherently creative.
Creativity is a tool provided by nature to man to ensure survival a and to deal with the inevitable problems and challenges of daily life. The only difference is that some people use a lot of their inborn creativity, and some people use very little.
ACTION EXERCISES
1. Identify your biggest single goal in life today. What is it a and what one action could you take immediately to move a step closer to that goal?
2. Identify the biggest problem or obstacle standing between you and your most important goal. What one action could you take immediately to solve that problem or remove that obstacle?
