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A Guide For Creative Thinking
Einstein once
said, “Every child is born a genius.” But the reason why most
people do not function at genius levels is because they are not
aware of how creative and smart they really are.
I call it the “Schwarzenegger effect.” No one would look at a
person such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and think how lucky he is
to have been born with such tremendous muscles. Everyone knows
that he, and people like him, have worked many thousands of
hours to build up their bodies so they can compete and win in
bodybuilding competitions. Your creative capabilities are just
the same. They actually grow as they are used.
But you
don’t need to spend thousands of hours to increase your
creative-thinking abilities. By practicing a few simple
exercises and applications, you can start your creative juices
flowing, and you may even amaze yourself at the quality and
quantity of good ideas that you come up with.
Let’s start
off with the definition of creativity. In my estimation, after
years of research on this subject, the very best definition of
creativity is, simply, “improvement.” You don’t have to be a
rocket scientist or an artist in order to be creative. All you
have to do is develop the ability to improve your situation,
wherever you are and whatever you are doing. All great fortunes
were started with ideas for improving something in some way. In
fact, an improvement needs to be only 10 percent new or
different to launch you on the way to fame and riches.
It has been estimated that each year, driving to and from
work, the average person has about four ideas for improvement,
any one of which could make him or her a millionaire. The
problem is not that you don’t have the ideas you need to
accomplish anything you want but, rather, that you fail to act
on those ideas. Most people dismiss their own ideas because they
think that those ideas cannot be very valuable if they were the
ones who thought of them.
Thomas Edison, arguably the
most successful creative genius in human history, once said that
creativity is 99 percent perspiration and only 1 percent
inspiration. Extensive research on creativity tends to bear him
out.
There are four generally accepted parts of the
creative process: There is preparation, where much of the work
is done. There is cerebration or rumination, where you turn the
matter over to your subconscious mind. There is realization,
where the idea or ideas come to you. And finally, there is
application, where you work out the creative idea and turn it
into something worthwhile. Of the four, preparation seems to be
the most important, and it involves gathering the right data and
asking the right questions.
Your success in life will be
determined largely by the quantity of ideas that you generate.
It seems that the quality of ideas is secondary to the quantity
and that if you have enough ideas, one or more of them will turn
out to be prizewinners.
You can begin building your
creative muscles with focused questions. Some that you might
think of are the following: What are we trying to do? How are we
trying to do it? What are our assumptions? What if our
assumptions are wrong?
All improvements begin with
questioning the current, existing circumstances. If you are not
making progress for any reason, stop and think, and begin asking
yourself the hard questions that will stimulate your mind to
consider other possibilities.
When they were doing the research to land a man on the moon,
scientists were stumped for months and even years. They could
not figure how to send a rocket to the moon with enough fuel to
land on the moon, blast off, break the moon’s gravity and come
back to earth. The problem was that if the rocket had that much
fuel to start with, it would be too heavy to take off from the
earth in the first place. Finally, they began to question the
assumption that the lunar rocket ship had to land on the moon.
When they questioned that assumption, the scientists concluded
that a main rocket could orbit around the moon while a smaller
module dropped to the surface of the moon and then rejoined the
orbiting rocket for the trip back to earth. The mental logjam
was broken, and the rest is history.
Asking focused
questions-hard questions that penetrate to the core of the
matter-is the real art of the creative person. The next step is
to have the courage to deal with all the possible answers. Once
you have come up with a possible solution, ask yourself, “What
else could be the solution?” If your current method of operation
were completely wrong, what would be your backup plan? What else
would you or could you do? What if your current procedure or
plan turned out to be a complete failure? Then what would you
do? And what would you do after that? All of those questions
will force you to think further and come up with better answers.
The second way to build your mental muscles is with intensely
desired goals. The more you want something and the clearer you
are about it, the more likely it is that you will generate ideas
that will help you to move toward it. That is why the need for
clearly written goals and plans for their accomplishment is
repeated over and over. Any intense emotion, such as desire,
stimulates creativity and ideas to fulfill that desire. And the
more you write down your goals and plans, and review them, the
more likely it is that you will see all kinds of possibilities
for achieving those goals.
The third generator of
creative-thinking muscles is pressing problems. A good question
to ask is “What are the three biggest problems that I am facing
in my life today?” Write the answer to this question quickly, in
less than 30 seconds. When you write the answer to a question in
less than 30 seconds, your subconscious mind will sort out all
extraneous answers and give you the three most important ones.
When you have your three most pressing problems, ask yourself,
“What is the worst possible thing that can happen as a result of
each of these problems?” Then ask yourself, “What are all the
things that I can do, right now, to alleviate each problem?” If
you have a problem that is worrying you for any reason, think
about what you could do immediately to begin alleviating that
concern. This is a prime use of your creative powers.
So
a key to success in creative thinking is clarity. Take the time
to think through, discuss and ask questions that help you to
clarify exactly what you are trying to accomplish and exactly
what problems you are facing at the present moment. Just as
fuzzy thinking leads to fuzzy answers, clear thinking leads to
clear answers.
A second key is concentration. Put
everything else aside, and concentrate single-mindedly on
focusing all your mental powers on solving one single problem,
overcoming one particular obstacle or achieving one important
goal. The ability to concentrate on a single subject without
diversion or distraction is a hallmark of the superior thinker.
A third key is an open mind. The average person tends to be
rigid and fixed in his thinking about getting from where he is
to where he wants to go. The creative thinker, however, tends to
remain very flexible and open to a variety of ways of
approaching the problem. The average person has a tendency to
leap to conclusions and determine that there is only one way to
achieve a particular goal. The superior thinker, on the other
hand, tends to be more patient and willing to consider a variety
of options before moving toward a conclusion.
There is
one other creative concept that can be very helpful when it is
used in combination with what we have already discussed, and it
is called the “limiting step.”
Between you and any goal that you want to achieve or any
problem that you want to solve, there is almost invariably a
limiting step or a “choke point” that determines the speed with
which you move from where you are to your destination. This
limiting step may be another person, a particular obstacle, a
specific difficulty, or even a lack of some information or
skill. Invariably, there is a particular factor that determines
how fast you get there. Your job is to think about it and decide
what it is, and then go to work to remove it.
For
example, if you are in sales, your limiting step may be the
number of prospects you have. If this is the case, then your job
is to do everything possible and to use all your creative
capacities to increase your number of prospects until it is no
longer a problem. Then, of course, there will be another
limiting step, and your job is to go to work on that.
If
you have a business, your limiting step may be the number of
qualified people who are responding to your advertising. If this
is the choke point that hinders the amount you sell and the
speed at which your company grows, it behooves you to
concentrate your mental powers on relieving that bottleneck. You
must concentrate the very best thinking abilities of yourself
and others on increasing the number of qualified prospects that
your advertising and promotional efforts attract.
In
relationships and misunderstandings between people, there is
almost invariably a sticking point or subject area that needs to
be resolved in order to bring about harmony again. Your job is,
first, to identify this limiting step and then, second, to find
a way to alleviate the difficulty to the satisfaction of
everyone involved.
You are a genius, and you were born
with the potential for exceptional creativity. But creative
abilities are latent. They are like muscles that grow with use.
You can increase your creative powers by using them, over and
over, in every situation, deliberately and specifically, until
creativity and a creative response to life is as natural to you
as breathing in and out is. There are very few things that you
can do that can have a more powerful positive impact on your
entire life than becoming excellent in creative thinking. And
you can if you think you can.
About Brian Tracy
Brian Tracy is a leading
authority on personal and business success. As Chairman and CEO
of
Brian Tracy International, he is the best-selling
author of 17 books and over 300 audio and video learning
programs. Copyright © 2001 Brian Tracy International. All Rights
Reserved.
Related links
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