How to Create a Creativity Habit

We all know how important habits are for our progress — we’ve probably heard about meditation, journaling, exercising, etc, but I’ve started experimenting with a new habit focused on letting my creative thoughts come out. In a book called Creative Confidence by the Kelley brothers, we learn about the importance of believing in your ability to create change in the world around you. This growth mindset and confidence in your ability to make an impact are at the heart of innovation and creativity. So, I wanted to make some tweaks to make it easier for thoughts and ideas to consistently flow. I decided to make a habit of consistently writing down any ideas I had to get them out of my brain and onto paper and to reinforce these creative pathways.

Bias to action is a key principle in creative confidence. We need to be able to resist the temptation to keep ideas in our heads because when that happens, we usually forget them or instinctively convince ourselves out of them. Mel Robbins has a Ted Talk about the 5-Second rule. That’s the amount of time you have from when an idea pops into your head until your brain manufactures reasons why it’s a bad idea. That means you have about 5 seconds to take some sort of action on the idea or it goes away. And the simplest way to do this is to write it down — whether or not you have the ability to make that thing happen right now, you can keep the idea…