Creativity
7 Habits That Will Boost Your Creativity
Regularly coming up with new ideas begins with a few adjustments in your daily habits
Do you want to be happier and more successful in life? Do you want to be more confident in the decisions you make? The answer is obvious. It’s a resounding, “Yes!”. Honestly, who wouldn’t?
Ever since I started my medium journey, I have been exploring numerous stories across this platform. The way each writer describes his/her adventures, reflections, and walks of life inspires me every single time.
It’s pushing me even more, enhancing my creativity, and adding on more responsibilities as a writer. It’s always an enticing journey to learn new stuff and gradually improve every day.
It’s all about being the better version of yourself every day.
But why exactly am I doing this for? Why am I trying to be creative in this discipline when I’m a software engineer by profession and code for a living?
For me, the answer is simple. It’s about being a better problem solver, seeing things differently, and better dealing with uncertainty. And more importantly, it applies to all sections of my life.
Remember, our unconscious mind keeps working in the background when we’re reading books and poetry, reading/writing on medium, or even when we’re scrolling through social media.
Just like we need variations in our body workouts to build more muscles, we also need to provide different stimuli to our mind in order to stay sharp!
According to research, being creative helps you live longer and improve your quality of health and life.
Engaging in a creative process also builds confidence and leverages innovation.
If you observe the new generation of leaders such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, they all have one thing in common: Creativity.
Their creative potential drove the world forward with their inventions and innovations in science and technology.
They were always on the lookout for the answer to, “How, and to whom, will you provide value?”. The creative mind of those individuals was continually generating those great ideas and fueling them, even at times when they had to face failures.
You’ve heard enough about why creativity matters, so I guess your question right now is, “What exactly do I need to boost my creativity?”
Here are seven ways to help boost your creativity.
1. Allocate a Schedule That Supports Creation.
Creativity isn’t something that you’re born with. It takes continuous effort over some time. A great way to achieve this is to try and build it as a habit. Just allocating a few minutes to work on your craft every day is enough to accumulate significant creative momentum in the long run.
That is why better companies worldwide leverage employees to dedicate parts of their daily/weekly routine to work on new skills and ideas.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2016, Bill Gates shared that he reads around 50 books per year. Reading is, he said, “the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg started his book club in 2015 to challenge himself and others to read a book every two weeks.
No doubt, reading is one of those habits that broadens our minds and enhances creativity. But building habits take time, and you need to put work consistently to add something new to your skillset.
The skills you’re working on may/may not be relevant to your current work, but if that is something that piques you, then structuring a reliable schedule is a great option to work on.
Take the time to set up a daily/weekly schedule for your routine tasks a few days prior and save your creative juices for the things you value the most.
2. Improve Your Attitude
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. — WILLIAM JAMES”― Jeff Keller, Attitude Is Everything: Change Your Attitude … Change Your Life!
This particular line — “Attitude is Everything” may seem obvious and trite, but it is indeed everything.
Whether it’s our personal or professional life, attitude is one crucial aspect of human life. It is only the right attitude, which gets us good results.
A study from Harvard University found that “When a person gets a job or is promoted in their job, 85% of those outcomes is contributed by their attitude and remaining 15% is due to their domain expertise” — Shiv Khera, You Can Win: A Step-by-Step Tool for Top Achievers
If you want to see what the human mind can achieve with the right attitude, go and meet players/coaches. And ask them this question,
“What factor affects the player’s performance the most ?”
What do you think most will answer?
Think about it.
That’s right — Attitude!
In the sporting world, attitude can easily dictate a player’s coachability and decides how it will affect team performance. No matter how hardworking and creative they are, it always comes to their high level of consciousness and a healthy mental attitude, which ranks them consistently on top.
Consider Muhammad Ali — the man considered the greatest boxer of all time. He inspired millions by standing up for his principles throughout the 1960s and by always entertaining both inside and outside the boxing ring.
No doubt, he had losses in his career, had his boxing license suspended, and was even sentenced to jail for five years. Still, his attitude played a significant role in helping him to keep moving forward and ultimately contributed to the greatness of his character.
So, make sure you always prioritize having a healthy attitude. Being creative comes with many ups and downs and a high risk of failure. Life is stressful at times, so use your healthy mental attitude as a buffer to work on your creativity crafts even at tough times.
3. Mix Perspectives To Fuel New Insights
One of the best ways to boost your creativity is to harness the brainpower of others — Drew Boyd
The habit no. 6 on Stephen R. Covey’s highly popular “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, reflects the importance of synergy. Simply put, synergy means “two heads are better than one.”
Synergy is the habit of creative cooperation — Stephen R. Covey
Interaction with diversified mindsets — functional, cultural, and gender; you are more likely to explore new ways to look at things.
For example, each time I finish writing new articles, I run it through some of my friends at the end to see how they perceive my writings.
In particular, one of my friends always overwhelms me with his expression of thoughts and his artistic way of looking at things. It always helps me to combine new ideas and learn something new.
Creativity is a team sport, so be sure you engage in a handful of groups with the right level of open-mindedness and knowledge. It makes sense to include colleagues with diverse backgrounds to create a different team, because your team may end up producing a large share of exciting ideas and concepts.
The best teams can help you generate new ideas and broaden the team’s perspective on how to commercialize new ideas through innovations.
Rewarding participants for being a part of your session will surely help maintain group energy level.
The most creative people practice the principle of reciprocity by helping others and asking for their help if required — Drew Boyd
4. Combine old ideas with newer ones
You may hear about a lot of developments and newer inventions every day, but the truth is most unique things are a combination of existing old things.
That is precisely how startups pitch themselves, and that is how new movies are released; more advanced smartphones evolve every once in a while with more sophisticated features.
See how these great examples are formed with combinations of existing ideas and designs:
Before Facebook became popular, three social media networks — Blogger, Friendster, MySpace were already out and had captured the attention of users. Lack of strategic planning, poor timing, or just plain bad luck contributed to the failure of these social media sites.
On the other hand, Facebook rolled out the perfect strategy with its innovation with new tools and features, such as identity and organized private community, which these older platforms failed to innovate.
Here’s another example,
In the early 19th Century, Wright Brothers had a famous Kitty Hawk flight, one of the monumental flights in aviation history. Even the invention of this impressive piece was inspired by an idea of how a pilot might balance an aircraft in the air, just as a cyclist balances his bicycle on the road.
Moreover, it’s been told that 11 other flying machines came before Wright Brothers launched their first airplane.
But what made the Wright Brothers stand out from others was that they created a genuinely flying machine, that even others and Wright Brothers themselves had failed before.
It was because of their insatiable desire and love for the invention of the first practical working aircraft, which led them to surpass their hurdles.
From these examples, you can see that combining old ideas, dissecting them, and turning them into new ones is an excellent tool in the creative arsenal.
Nevertheless, the newer ones should deliver more than what is expected of it; it should blow people’s minds. It should surpass the older generation of products in terms of its value, innovation, and service offerings.
Hopefully, you can see how to use different old ideas to generate a variety of ideas that you may not have considered before.
Remember, in the world right now, millions of companies are waiting for your brilliant ideas.
On the other hand, some people are waiting for your downfall and your ideas to fail miserably. I hope you know what to do.
5. Broaden Your Observation Skills And Judging Criteria
Say you like an idea that excites you, and you are more than ready to dive deep into it.
But is the idea really the best fit for you? Or are there any better alternatives?
You want to work on those ideas that have actual potential. You’ll need a constant evaluation of your plans to process them and know if it really qualifies as per your criteria. Otherwise, you might run the risk of ideas creating the requirements for you instead.
Being mindful of your judging criteria and making necessary adjustments is, therefore, required to be creative. The judging standards are entirely up to you on how you want to lead your ideas or vision.
But make sure that you have the right criteria to judge. Run through the latest trends around those ideas and have constant research to keep up with your performance and outcomes. You’d want the essential criteria to do the job for you.
If you see how top-notch companies select their potential employees, they always come under one of the best criteria they want in their candidates.
If you have wondered about getting a job at SpaceX, then here’s what Musk said:
“When we interview people, we ask for some evidence of exceptional ability that includes innovation” — Elon Musk.
Just as innovation is SpaceX’s primary judging criteria for its employees, it’s time for you to start your own benchmark. Because, if you’re not working with your right judging criteria, you can’t tell if something is really good enough or not.
Before you start evaluating your ideas, let your group or mentors judge your thoughts with all the risks and challenges.
There are always significant advantages in considering different viewpoints.
Work through your group and determine the top ideas. Spend some time every week to see if you can really improve your concepts or scores for each of the criteria.
A group decision with the right level of expertise, always tells you the preferable option for your company. Put these two questions as a baseline:
- How well does your idea fit the company and culture?
- What value proposition does it bring to your existing or new business?
True innovators always generate great ideas, but it takes the wisdom and conscience of others to recognize its actual value.
6. Prioritize On Your Self-Reflection
Various studies have shown that when you are focused on your strengths, you’ll grow much faster rather than trying to improve upon your weaknesses. It also builds your confidence, makes you happier and less stressed.
Knowing about yourself is a much harder task than knowing others, as there are so many intricacies that you overlook about yourself. Most people find it difficult and maybe even unproductive to try and see their own strengths.
Because, usually, most people don’t bother enough to build the habit of self-reflection. For example, we tend to watch our favorite Netflix series or catch a glimpse at the social media feeds before we fall asleep. We rarely do think of how our days went, and if it didn’t end right, how can we do better the next time. Over time we fall so deep into the trap of societal rat race, which overshadows our real purpose in life.
During my student life, our college Charmain had a simple question that he always shared with his students,
Ask yourself, “Am I doing the right thing?”
There was never a time when he’d miss those lines in his speeches because he knew how the power of self-reflective questions affected our internal thought processes. The majority of our thinking happens at the subconscious and unconscious levels. But by asking questions, we bring our internal thought processes into the spotlight, and we get one step closer to our true self.
It’s never too late to find your self-reflection and find what you are good at. Even during my college life, I never enjoyed coding, and never did I thought about being a programmer and earn a living from it.
That was the challenge I thought of on my own, and I gave it a try. Gradually over time, I profoundly fell in love with programming, and I have never looked back ever since.
During the initial phase, I looked forward to learning as many programming concepts as possible. Sadly it didn’t go well, as it brought a lot of confusion. Learning C#, Java, Python together, and trying to understand different frameworks simultaneously felt somewhat cumbersome.
It wasn’t until my manager asked me to focus on one core language, particularly the one I mostly used on my projects, which opened my eyes. Her constant feedback and support to see what I am doing well and the areas of focus for my career development have really helped me prioritize my reflections and focus on the required skillsets.
If you find it hard to see your strengths, ask your friends, family members, boss, coworkers, or a mentor to tell you what your strength is. You may not get the perfect answer, but you might discover new things that you haven’t thought of on your own.
7. Frequent Testing For Your Best Ideas
One thing I am gaining a lot of exposure to is developing automation suites throughout one and a half years in the programming journey. In software industries, the endproducts are heavily relied on how well the testing of the product goes.
Automation brings the necessary agility to test and respond accordingly during frequent code deployments and migrations.
As soon as the developer comes up with new products, we need to immediately think about the efficient testing strategy to ensure the best test coverage and produce reliable results. It has enabled me to develop frameworks and prototype for the existing product and helped me to take further initiatives.
There were plenty of instances when I had created a mock-up of those prototypes and built something different. It’s the right learning curve to get started with your new products.
For the initial product prototype, it does not necessarily need to qualify as a fully functional one — Dave Birss
For example, if your idea is a physical product, make a mock-up using a clay, tape, or sun board sheet.
Even if your digital product can be mocked up with some physical objects like paper, this is the first step. Then gradually, you can proceed with more functionality and variations.
The more you prepare and play with your prototype, the more you will explore it, and further down the line, it will bring the possibility of higher innovation.
You could also collaborate with teams for reframing your ideas and enhance your products.
If you go through this kind of preparation, no doubt, there’s a far higher chance of selling your ideas and who knows, your design may be the Next Big Thing!
Wrapping Up:
If you have read this far, or even if you have skimmed it, I am sure you know what it takes to be creative. Every step mentioned in this story is correlated to one another, so if you master any, others will automatically follow. Having a solid understanding of creativity isn’t powerful until you begin to apply these techniques and turn it into habits.
It’s something that I’ve been practicing for a while. I know it’s an endless journey, but there are always small milestones to be reached and little joys to be had.
Thanks to all the readers, and best of luck with your creative ideas! Happy Learning!
Creativity is always associated with changes, positivity, and growth. But think of this: Could the opposite be true? Could one be creative in grim situations? Could crisis foster creativity? For me, one person that comes to mind is Jay Z — an American Rapper Artist. His upbringing is a great example of this seemingly contradictory notion.
What example comes to your mind?
Learn More:
If you wish to learn more about Creativity, Drew Boyd and Dave Birss are one of the global leaders in creativity and innovation. Over the years, I have learned a lot from these individuals.
Feel free to get check out plenty of their courses on creativity and innovation.
