6 ways to hone your creative edge

It’s 15:45. I’m sitting in the office lounge on the 17th floor. In front of me is Odaiba stretched along the coast, framed by a sea of Tokyo skyscrapers. I have a meeting in 15 minutes to talk about the blog post I still haven’t finished. I tap fiendishly on my keyboard, racing to finish the draft before the meeting, but I find myself typing something, then, like clockwork, immediately holding down the delete key, reverting whatever progress I so painstakingly made. Fantastic — I hit a creative block! Work has been busy and my creative juices are tapped out. Apt, as creativity is the very thing I’m trying to write about.

The Well Will Go Dry

Discovering and honing my creativity is an essential part of what I do: coming up with new software services and products. It lets me turn dull presentations into captivating narratives; elevate routine stakeholder meetings with better storytelling; empathize with users to design more playful product experiences; and reimagine businesses from product-first to service-first.

In addition to my full time job, I also have a hobby of storytelling through illustrations. I love doing both, but they require endless effort to stay creative.

However, creativity is finite. It’s effectively like a well. If you constantly draw water without letting it replenish, you will undoubtedly run out, like the anecdote I opened with. At some point, I realized I couldn’t keep drawing from it. I needed to fill it back up — that’s what brought me to discovering how to replenish my creative energy.

The below are borne from my personal experience. I’m aware that what’s suggested here might not work for you so focus instead on the principles of my suggestions as you explore your own ways to tap into your creativity!

My 6 Principles

Before sharing how to refill your creative well, I want to impart that creativity isn’t a resource innately found in a select few:

“…the ability to be creative resides in everybody. And we know that because the neural circuits that underlie creativity have been somewhat defined and the steps and processes within the brain and body that lead to creativity are well known.” — Huberman Lab

In other words, believing that you have creativity is the first step in being creative!

Then, it is the simple matter of knowing how to manage this resource effectively.

Divergent and Convergent Thinking

I’ll allude to these concepts in the tips below, but one way to interpret creativity is our brains thinking divergently (going off in many different directions, exploring new things) and convergently (forging new connections, sense-making). The key is to balance these two types of thinking based on what you want to achieve:

Divergent Thinking involves generating multiple ideas and possibilities. It requires a relaxed state of mind where free thinking can flourish, and ideas can be entertained without judgment.

Convergent Thinking involves filtering ideas and synthesizing conclusions to find new connections and form new concepts. This requires focus and concentration.

1. Expose yourself to novel concepts: creativity stems from your reservoir of knowledge and experiences you’ve accumulated. To come up with new interpretations or see new meaning in things, you need to continually collect new raw materials for your brain to work with.

— Activities to try —

• Travel to places you’ve never been, especially to a foreign country. When we are exposed to a foreign culture, we are also exposed to novel concepts. For example, when I traveled to Finland, I struggled with door handles wherever I went because I didn’t share the same mental model about how doors open and close. It got me to think about how a door handle could imply its use simply by its shape, just like the buttons I design in product interfaces.
• Tune into your surroundings: observe what people are doing and how things work. If you don’t know how to start observing, you can try taking a photo that represents an interesting discovery of your day. You will notice that in order to capture that moment, your brain will start to pay attention to many more details around you.
• Ask why. Sometimes we are too stuck in the way we view our world. Asking why allows us to challenge our assumptions. The trick is to keep asking why until you cannot go any further. Here is an example:

“Why do you want an app for making reports?”

“Because our staff relies on reports to circulate information.”

“Why do you need to circulate information?”

“Because other staff who haven’t worked on the same incident need access to what has been done.”

“Why is that important?”

“So that they can learn from each other’s experiences.”

“Why do you need them to learn from each other?”

“So everyone can perform the same procedure the same way when handling a similar incident.”

Superficially, they want a report-generating app, but digging deeper, they are actually after a solution that allows everyone to perform at the same standard. Without asking questions, we might have fixated exclusively on reports, but knowing what they truly need, we can reimagine the solution more creatively!

• Interact with children. I find it inspiring hanging out with children. Their worldview has not been fully shaped yet, and that’s why they ask extremely obvious questions that get to the heart of the issue — a great way to practice asking why.
• Play with tangible objects or materials, such as clay, lego, or some paper and a pen. Your body is filled with sensors that feed information to your brain. New sensory input means new memories, which in turn become the data bank for divergent discoveries.

2. Create a relaxed state of mind: to connect ideas in a novel way you must first let the ideas flow freely, without judgment. This is essential for divergent thinking, which is the starting point for any creative discovery. Sometimes, this means getting up from your desk and stepping away from the task at hand. It may seem counterintuitive — when you are trying to be creative, you want to just focus on creating — but for that creation to happen, you must first relax, and let your mind wander. You need to suppress what you know to be true so you can discover what could be instead.

— Activities to Try —

• Take breaks & move your body: try a routine of taking a 15-minute break for every 45 minutes of focused work. When I need divergent thinking, I try to think while in motion. Resist the urge to organize and record, letting the ideas pass through you in an unstructured fashion, and only jot something down if absolutely necessary. When you return from the break, you’ll find it easier to link these ideas into something new.
• Avoid focusing on a single visual point: if your work involves staring at a monitor for a long period of time, your eyes are fixed on a single object. This prevents you from thinking divergently. Close your eyes and let thoughts come and go as they please. When your visual system isn’t focused on one specific thing, your imagination flows more fluidly. Ever wonder why we get such good ideas in the shower?
• Be bored: modern-day distractions unwittingly force ourselves into convergent thinking, quickly catching and suspending our attention; however, it’s extremely important to allow yourself to be bored so your mind can wander. Put down the phone and let yourself have nothing to think about. Ponder the sky and let your thoughts drift.
• Let it go. Some people believe that you can squeeze out ideas when you sit in front of a computer long enough. It doesn’t work. And those ideas are unlikely to be good. When you’re out of good ideas, it means your brain needs more time to synthesize, more time to make new connections. This isn’t something you can do stubbornly staring at your monitor. Instead, just let it go: do something relaxing for yourself. Find another time and day to focus. Come back when your brain has done all the work in the background, and believe that the “a-ha” moment will come.

3. Create focus time: it’s important to remember how to manage your time after downloading different types of input into your brain, especially when it comes time to converge on your final output — a blog post, illustrations, a quick product mockup — whatever it is. New observations, novel concepts — these are great for creativity, but also consume your cognitive load. If you overheat, then there’s definitely no hope for another out-of-the-box idea.

—Activities to Try —

• Get a sense of your limit: remember the well? It applies to your attention span as well. It’s important to get a sense of how much you can focus over a certain time span. For example, I know my focus time caps at 2 hours. After that, I need a long, relaxing cool down of about 30 minutes for my brain to focus again. As long as I maintain this pace — balancing focus and down time — I can work continuously throughout the day.
• Time box: for those who haven’t figured out your limit for a focus time, you can start by time-boxing yourself, and observe how you feel. Mandate to yourself that you’ll finish in the next 60 minutes and don’t let yourself keep going beyond that. Reflect on the quality of your work or output. If you notice yourself getting stuck after an hour, that’s perhaps your limit for focus time.

4. Make it tangible: give form to your thoughts: a sketch, short prose, messy scribbles on post-its, an ugly clay figure — anything works. We can work better when we visualize our thoughts. When we have something tangible to see and touch, we can more readily reorganize and rearrange the information in our heads.

5. Leverage others’ brains: this doesn’t mean you should steal other people’s work! Rather, collaborate with a diverse group of people. While most creative jobs (author, artist, songwriter) appear solitary, they typically have someone around them to help them bounce ideas off and get feedback from. In my case, my teammates often fill that role, and I leverage them where I can.

— Activities to Try —

• Constant feedback: don’t wait until you finish your masterpiece — get feedback frequently even when things haven’t fully taken shape yet. Articulating your thinking to another human being will help you structure your ideas better, and may help you find a different angle to look at things.
• Work with diverse teams: working with people from different cultural backgrounds and domains means you get to have more perspectives to come up with alternative ways to solve a problem. What you think as obvious or apparent might not be to them and is a great source of inspiration.
• Get ChatGPT to help. While I don’t encourage you to use ChatGPT to compose something from start to finish, it can be a useful tool to get started, especially for those who find it difficult creating from scratch. Think of it as your partner to bounce ideas off of!

6. Go to sleep: it might sound counterintuitive, but sleep is crucial for creativity. It’s during sleep that your brain processes new information and forms connections. This is perhaps the most important activity that you can do to foster creativity (and hopefully the easiest).

Creativity Matters

So why bother putting all this effort into managing (activating, sustaining, and replenishing) our creative energy?

Recently, a project called “The Tokyo Toilet” is transforming the look of the city. They turned smelly, gloomy public toilets into eye-catching functional artwork. Each toilet is unique: one turns opaque then fully transparent when you step in and out; one has bamboo walls that look as if you are in a forest. People no longer go there to just “do their business,” they go there for the experience.

These works are a great example of the importance of creativity — how it reinvents everyday experiences and breathes new meaning into things we interact with.

Creativity is innate in all of us. You too can use it to inject playfulness and upend the mundane routine around you, even in small, incremental ways. However, it’s a finite resource requiring a conscious effort to manage and upkeep, a constant balancing act of how much you draw out and how much you put back in.

If you’re curious, I didn’t finish the draft in time for the blog meeting. It took me a couple more weeks to go from draft to publish-ready. During that time, I spent most of my days not writing. I strolled the city, doodled ideas on an iPad, talked to my coworkers, gazed at the sunset, drank some wine, and strolled some more. I focused on letting the ideas ripen on their own. Then, I sat down in the mornings, when I know it’s easier for me to focus, timeboxed myself for three hours, and jotted down all the thoughts into bullet points. From there, I strung the content together based on feedback I received. And bit by bit, the pieces came together into what you’ve just read!