Think Like a 5 Year Old: Reclaim Your Wonder & Create Great Things

by Len Wilson

Overview

Each of us once possessed great creative power. Yet somehow,
somewhere, creativity has been lost, and with it the joy and growth that
it brings. When we don’t feel creative, we don’t feel fulfilled.

Discover
your creativity story: why you had it, how you lost it, and how to get
it back. As you journey to reclaim your wonder, you’ll learn how to use
it to create great things in your personal and professional life.
Only then can you discover a more fulfilling life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630887995
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	06/02/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Len Wilson is an author, speaker, and advocate for creativity in faith and life. He is known for his pioneering work in visual storytelling and has consulted with organizations and ministries across the country. Len is the author or co-author of ten books, has been featured in dozens of articles for major religious periodicals, and has acquired leadership books for Abingdon Press, a division of the United Methodist Publishing House. He currently serves as Creative Director at Peachtree, a large church in Atlanta, Georgia. Follow Len at lenwilson.us or on Twitter at @Len_Wilson.

Read an Excerpt

Think like a Five-Year-Old

Reclaim Your Wonder and Create Great Things

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By Len Wilson

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2015 Len Wilson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63088-799-5

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CHAPTER 1

Trajectory | The Story of Creativity

What will be remembered as the pinnacle of American civilization, when the dust settles in at some future point, will perhaps be two things: the Internet and the moon landing. The moon landing is more remarkable, considering it was powered with the computing power of an alarm clock. What powered the NASA program wasn't technology, but creative ingenuity.

The third manned mission to the moon, Apollo 13, didn't achieve its goal—the astronaut crew endured an on-board explosion and was forced to abort their mission—but it did demonstrate the creative power of the people involved. The explosion had taken the ship's power. The three astronauts were forced to abandon the command module, which is the main hold of the ship, and crowd into the small lunar module. There they realized that the on-board carbon dioxide removal system was built for a crew of two, not three, and for a day and a half reconnaissance trip to the lunar surface, not a four-day haul back to Earth. The astronauts called and reported their carbon dioxide problem to flight control in Houston. They needed more filters. They were becoming hypoxic, losing breathable air, and without a quick solution would pass out and die.

The main command module of the ship had filters, but they were cube-shaped, and the ones on the lunar module were cylindrical. "Tell me this isn't a government operation," said Kranz, played by actor Ed Harris, in Ron Howard's epic film of the experience. But they had no choice. It was their only possible fix. With insufficient round lunar module cartridges, the Houston engineers, in a matter of hours, had to figure out how literally to put a square peg in a round hole, using only parts available on board the ship.

A short time later, the stranded astronauts received a set of instructions from Houston. They named the device they built with the instructions "the mailbox" for its shape and the life-saving materials it delivered.

The kind of creativity that puts a man on the moon doesn't just happen. It's the result of an intentional effort to foster a creative culture. (In fact, to an uncreative world, such feats seem impossible. A poll in 2009 by the British periodical Engineering & Technology found that 25 percent of people believe the moon landing was an elaborate hoax, perpetuated on a Hollywood soundstage.)

In the buildup to the Apollo 11 mission, a NASA deputy director had approached a researcher named George Land. He had lots of applicants, he said. But measuring people by standard intelligence measures (that is, the conventional IQ test) wasn't sufficient. He needed a way to select the people who would create the best solutions because NASA had unusually tough questions.

NASA's issue wasn't finding intelligent people. Their issue was finding people who could think differently and demonstrate the sort of ingenuity that could solve the sort of problem that plagued the aborted Apollo 13 mission. Land and his team developed an instrument to measure creative thinking, and NASA implemented it as an additional step in their candidate vetting process.

The test was a rousing success and, as a measure of employee performance, highly predictive for NASA. Afterward, a question remained for Land and his research crew. They had determined how to measure existing levels of creative thinking in prospective employees, but that didn't solve more fundamental questions. Is creativity innate, learned, or—perhaps—unlearned?

Since the test questions were simple to understand, they decided to give the same test to a group of young children. They administered it to a sample of sixteen hundred five-year-olds.

The results were astonishing. They learned that 98 percent of five-year-olds were what the NASA test described as "creative genius."

The In Between

George Land and his team of NASA-contracted researchers decided to track their young creative geniuses over time. They turned their research into a longitudinal study and, five years later, retested the same group of students. Among the same group of children, now ten years old, there was a drastic change: only 30 percent were creative geniuses. Again, at fifteen years old, 12 percent were creative geniuses. Throughout the period of the study, and since, Land and his team tested thousands of adults, far past the flat line of statistical analysis. They learned, with an average age of thirty-one years old, that 2 percent of adults are creative geniuses. In their famous study, Land and his team not only solved an important issue facing NASA leadership but also discovered a fundamental problem—one that plagues business, education, culture, and the life of faith.

Each of us was once a creative genius.

Somewhere along the way, though, we lost it—not entirely but to a significant degree. We may not be complete creative dolts. We can match an entree with a side dish, we can sometimes figure out when our phone's GPS is lying to us, we can choose among twenty flavors of stationery at the store, and, if pressed, we can actually contribute an idea at a business meeting. But we're far from what you'd call a creative genius.

As a creative director, I hear people apologize for the lack of creativity all the time. It's sometimes their lead sentence: "Oh, I'm not very creative." We like to refer to a "creative person" as some sort of special species possessing rare talent. We see ourselves as somewhere in between.

The archetypal image of creativity is the garage. Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Steve Jobs (Apple), The Who, Nirvana, Walt Disney, Harley and Davidson, Hewlett and Packard—entire industries share the same opening scene of young, hungry rule breakers working out of their garage. Because of this, we think of the metaphor of the garage as the setting for innovation and the seed for great things.

The thing is, most of us no longer tinker in our garage. Most of us don't even own a garage anymore. Instead, we own an attached storage shed. One study revealed that 75 percent of American garages are so filled with clutter that they have no room to store an automobile. Instead of metaphors for creativity and innovation, our garages have become final resting places for the artifacts of our consumption.

Perhaps circumstances dictate our choices; perhaps we become impatient with waiting and uncertainty. When we party on the weekend or get away after work with music and a drink with friends, maybe what we're doing is trying to regain our soul because all day we've been trading it in for a paycheck.

I don't want to work, I want to bang on the drum all day.

—Todd Rundgren

The problem isn't that most of us are incapable of creativity. Land's study and other scientific studies disprove the false dichotomy of creatives versus noncreatives. Creativity recovery isn't a switch to turn on, and to find our creative self doesn't mean we must drag the lake of our psyche, although this may be something you're inclined to do. Rather, creativity can be nurtured and developed. When we make the unexamined declaration that we are not creative, as most of us do, we rob ourselves of a powerful means of knowing and experiencing God's work in our lives.

Land's study is a scientific insight for what I believe is primarily a spiritual issue. We've lost our ability to create.

This book isn't for the 2 percent of adults who are still actively engaging their creative genius all the time. This book is for the 98 percent—those of us who are former creative geniuses and those of us who want to recover the creativity and the sense of joy and engagement we have lost.

The Source

One way of thinking about the way we have distanced ourselves from creativity is this: we have lost sight of our creativity's source. As creatures made in God's image, we are designed by God to be like God, and this means we're designed to create, not peripherally but as part of our fundamental nature. In other words, in the beginning, we are each given, as part of the warranty of being human, a harmonic calling, the melody of a set of good things to do with our lives. As an image or representation of God, when we create, we reflect the character of God and the glory of God. Our God-given creative passion is our unique art and the source of our fulfillment.

For the artist there is no distinction between work and living. His work is his life, and the whole of his life.

—Dorothy Sayers

Each of us is made to be God's cocreator. And, as with any creative process, the work draws the workers together. When we create, we move closer to God; conversely, when we merely consume, we move further from God. To call someone, or yourself, uncreative is simply untrue. Our creativity problem is not that we don't have this supernatural power within us. It's that we have lost track of it. It's latent.

I believe that when we seek to become more creative, we're really seeking to rediscover our unique art. God intends, through the grace of faith in Christ, to re-create us: to reintroduce us to our identity as God's creatures. When we reclaim this original creativity, we become who we were made to be, whole and complete: images of God. Creativity and faith are kindred spirits. When we follow Christ, we become a new creation. And when, out of the wonder of this recovered identity, we create, our fulfillment and God's glory happen at the same time, and the result is great things that hopefully play a part in changing the world.

To be clear, this rediscovery isn't necessarily religious. Often, it's not. As Romans 1 points out, all of creation points to the glory of God. In other words, creativity can be those things Robinson and Torrance said—new ideas and solved problems. It can be a new look to a designer, a better solution to an engineer, an alternate strategy to an executive, a more organized calendar for a mom, or "adding value" to a business plan. Creativity builds, not destroys. It answers a question, helps someone, or expresses an idea. In all of these activities, when we create, we make wonder, to ourselves and to others who benefit from our work.

Creativity is not a luxury. It is essential for personal security and fulfillment.

—Sir Ken Robinson

Most creative people have maintained, and relearned, a way of thinking (a philosophy), a discipline of living (a strategy), and a set of tactical practices that help them to do what they do. These are not sacrosanct; indeed, we the 98 percent can learn them, increase our creativity, and rediscover our art. I believe there is a high correlation between rediscovering our creativity and overcoming a lack of engagement in our work and in our life. This book is about helping you find the melody of passions that is God's accomplishment in you.

We are God's accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things. God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.

—Ephesians 2:10

The goal of this book is to help you know the story of your creativity: why you had it to begin with, how you lost it, and how to get it back. Each of us is called to a life of creativity: to know how we are made, to reclaim our passion, to learn the craft of creativity as an act of faith, and to surrender this act to God. My hope is to help propel you back to a trajectory of creativity. A creative life is fulfilling, productive, often successful, and usually harmonious—the kind of life we want.

How do we reclaim the wonder we're made to make? In order to understand creativity let's first turn to the group of people who get it best: children.

CHAPTER 2

Storyboard | Five Ways Children Understand Creativity

I assure you that if you don't turn your lives around and become like this little child, you will definitely not enter the kingdom of heaven.

—Matthew 18:3

Preproduction

Recently I interrupted a film preproduction meeting in my entryway.

With four children, I never know what I am going find when I get home. On this day they'd apparently written a complete screenplay (which I was not allowed to see) and were discussing how to film it. They'd decided the best way to storyboard the script was to crowdsource: each child drew up interpretations of select scenes from the script, mounted it on a large piece of plywood, and, one by one, pitched the vision to the group. The group then decided which storyboard to shoot for each scene.

Of course, you say. Kids are creative. A regular joke that circulates among young parents at bounce-house parties is the desire to steal whatever creative-life-force-high-energy drug children are on. Kids are full of life and wonder. They're growing. They embody the creative spirit. We want all these things as grownups.

But just because children are creative, and we were once children, doesn't mean that we are automatically creative or gain their creativity by osmosis. In fact most days being around children is intensely counterproductive. Yet, I have found that being around children somehow increases my creativity.

Here is a set of tips I have learned from my children.

Things My Children Have Taught Me About Creativity

1. "What If" Questions

I love to ask my kids crazy questions at the dinner table. One night I asked them to give advice to their younger brother on starting his kindergarten year: what is one thing you wish you'd known that will help him? They all shared tips, and I learned some things about their life and how they think. Sometimes I'll lead a sentence with "What if ...?" For example, I'll say, "What if we had to make a new product to sell using only this straw and that roll of masking tape? What could we make?" They generate amazing ideas. After a period of brainstorming, I'll ask them which idea they think might sell the best on the shelf at the department store. Besides having lots of fun, I am trying to maintain their natural "what if" thinking, which we innately possess but lose as we age.

"What if" thinking is a well-known principle of creativity. It is the kind of thinking that CEOs desperately want in themselves and in their organizations. It's the ability to think with a new mind about an existing problem, to use limited resources for new application. As the Apollo 13 engineers were forced to do, "what if" thinking encourages new solutions to seemingly impossible problems.

"What if" thinking is more properly known as divergent thinking. Ironically, though this trait is highly desired in business and cultural life, our schools don't teach it well, if at all. If you grew up going to Sunday school, perhaps like me, you learned quickly that the safest and most probable answer to any question was simple: Jesus. In our schools, companies, and churches, we teach convergent thinking, or at least it happens naturally and we don't stop it. We learn from an early age not to say whatever comes to mind, but to say what we perceive is correct. We learn to look for a single, definitive answer when often the problem has multiple answers.

2. Fearlessness

In a family of people in touch with creativity, my eldest daughter may lead the way. She is fearless and given any sort of blank canvas will immediately begin creating. While in a summer musical theater camp before her sixth-grade year, she volunteered to do some set pieces. She brought home some paints and commandeered the space where my truck parks—yes, the garage. She spread out a massive cardboard wall and, with her younger sister, painted it white and added in a house with windows, signs, flowers, and so on. She made an entire scene, without sketching it out first or worrying that she had no backup paint or second massive piece of cardboard should she screw up. She didn't even know that what she was doing was an act of bravery. She just wanted to draw.

3. Space for Chaos

The downside to my daughter's ability to instantly convert any space into a studio is that she doesn't yet know the concept of a blank canvas. Everywhere she goes in our house, and especially when she includes her siblings, she trashes the place. In the space of a few hours, my entryway was full of stuff, and after their preproduction meeting, no studio intern came and cleaned up. For the weeks she painted her set pieces, I couldn't park in my garage.

Writing this, I sound pathetic. Why should I care? Let my children create. It's just that, with ten rooms in our house, at any given time eight or nine of them are trashed. It seems while we clean one, they trash another with creative verve. Without squelching their creative spirit, I have been trying to teach my children that there's a time for creating and a time for doing the more mundane work of preparing and cleaning. So far they're not buying it.

I'll admit, I'm a clean-desk guy. I like a blank canvas to start the day. A blank canvas gives me both the feeling of possibility—I am unencumbered with past or concurrent projects—and the satisfaction of having accomplished something prior, which results in a clear desk. The problem is that sometimes I let my desire for order get in the way of actually doing things. I tend to obsess. As a result I have had to create structure around my workday. For example, I used to obsess at having an empty e-mail inbox, until I discovered that there's a poor correlation between true productivity and having read and replied to every e-mail sent to me.

I like order. Just as I'm teaching my daughter that there's a time for cleanup, she's reminding me that there's a time for chaos, too.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Think like a Five-Year-Old by Len Wilson. Copyright © 2015 Len Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Part 1: I Had It, but I Lost It,
1. Trajectory | The Story of Creativity,
2. Storyboard | Five Ways Children Understand Creativity,
3. Wonder Free | How, Somewhere Along the Way, We Lose It,
4. Demons | The Lies That Steal Our Creativity,
5. Leaving Town | The Secret to Rediscovering Creativity,
Part 2: The Four Parts of the Creative Life,
6. Stardust | The Types of Creative Expression,
7. Heart | How to Care Like a Five-Year-Old,
8. Soul | How to Sense Like a Five-Year-Old,
9. Mind | How to Think Like a Five-Year-Old,
10. Strength | How to Build Like a Five-Year-Old,
Part 3: How to Become More Creative,
11. Blinking Cursor | How to Overcome the Tyranny of Beginning,
12. Minecraft | How to Find a Workable Creative Process,
13. Half-Life | Why We Must Constantly Keep Creating,
A Few Creative Suggestions,
Ten Ways to Find Good Ideas,
How to Capture Good Ideas,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Study Guide,