Let your conscious and unconscious work together for creative breakthroughs

Creative breakthroughs are not like taking out the trash, nor buying almond milk on the way home from work. Creative breakthroughs build slowly and come suddenly.

To make creative breakthroughs happen, you need to get your conscious mind to play nice with your subconscious mind.

Creative insights follow four stages: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification.

• To Prepare for an insight, learn everything you can about the problem. If you haven’t identified the problem, simply learn everything you can about what you’re curious about. This can be a conscious process, if you’re effortfully learning, or it can be more unconscious, if you’re listening to a composer’s music without paying attention.
• Incubation is an unconscious process. While you’re resting, or working on other things, Incubation is happening. Your mind is taking the raw materials from the Preparation stage, finding connections that are strong, and discarding connections that are weak. Making yourself Incubate can be a conscious process. Like Hemingway, who consciously tried to stop himself to think about his writing between sessions, said “It is the wait until that next day that is hard to get through.”
• Illumination is the moment of insight. It can happen unconsciously, which you can’t guarantee, but you can consciously improve your odds. Build a habit of generating creative work. The more times you roll the dice, the more likely you’ll roll a seven. The more you create, the more opportunities there are for Illumination to happen.
• When you Verify, you evaluate the creative solution you’ve come up with, consciously checking your math or your grammar, or taste-testing your creme brulee. It’s easy to creatively block yourself by trying to Verify too soon. Don’t worry about spelling, or building codes, or what kind of hardware you’ll use to fasten your tightrope when you’re still trying to tease the idea out of your mind. Save the details for later.

If you manage your conscious energy, and give your unconscious the space to do its work, creative breakthroughs will come more easily.

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