Many people are afraid of losing their creative side. The thing is, you don’t have to be a creative genius to be creative, you’re already in it. In my opinion (and that of many others) we are born with creativity. Everyone has the ability to create their day, a lie, or even a simple thought. Being creative is as simple as that.
You can’t lose your creativity, but you can lose your inspiration. That’s why we think some people are more creative than others.
Creativity vs Inspiration
Creativity and inspiration aren’t the same. Creativity is the ability to think of new ideas and concepts, while inspiration is a feeling that makes you want to create something.
A creative person may not have an inspiring environment, but an inspired person will never lack creative ideas, because inspiration comes from outside, creativity from within.
Creativity
Creativity can seem like a mysterious quality.
You can’t really see it, and people who’ve it often seem to use a different brain than the rest of us. But if you put it very simply, creativity is the inner ability to create something new.
Creativity is associated with the right frontal lobe of the brain, which refers to a group of cognitive abilities, including the ability to organize, initiate, plan, and use your emotions to achieve a goal.
Put simply, creativity is the inner ability to create something new. Everyone has the basic ability to be creative simply because they’re alive.
Creative Process
Creativity is often misunderstood as some kind of divine inspiration as if it comes to us from outside or from above. But in truth, creativity is a process of selection and combination. It’s more akin to baking a cake than discovering a new galaxy.
Related: Why Creative Process Matters
The first phase of the creative process is “incubation.” This is where you play around with the problem and let your creative mind wander. The great thing about incubation is that, unlike most forms of free association, it doesn’t diminish over time.
In this way, incubation resembles what mathematicians call chance. A mathematician asks a question and plays around until she or he finds a creative solution. If she or he gets a creative block, she waits a certain amount of time and then tries again. She uses free association to solve problems, just as you use free association to solve puzzles or write stories. This explains why mathematicians sometimes seem eccentric: they do what works, not what looks good.
The second stage is inspiration. Creative inspiration comes from noticing something striking about your problem or its environment, or sometimes something unrelated helps you find the association.
Sometimes the creative process goes the other way around. First comes inspiration and then creativity. One thing is certain: inspiration and creativity need each other.
Related: Where Does Creativity Come From
Inspiration
Inspiration is what triggers creative thinking. It comes from external factors – friends, teachers, colleagues, and other sources – that influence how we think about problems in general. Most of all, it helps us find new ways of thinking and creating. It’s the thing that gives you a new perspective on the old thing.
But creative inspiration isn’t something you’re born with and carry with you, but it’s triggered by everything and everyone you see, feel or hear around you. It comes from the interaction between you and something or someone else, whether it’s your friends, the culture in general, or a problem you’re trying to solve. The quality of your inspiration depends on how well you interact with the thing that inspires you.
How You Get Inspired
When you’re inspired, it’s like opening a door to a room where you’ve all kinds of different things you can use to come up with new ideas. When you’re not inspired, there’s no easy way to get into that room. You’ve to “work” – a painstaking process of slowly putting things together from scratch.
Trying to stay inspired can be a challenge. It’s hard to force yourself to come up with new ideas when you feel like you’re running out of ideas. This can leave you feeling frustrated or unproductive.
If you feel like you’re running out of creative juice, chances are your inspiration is waning.
You can get inspiration from:
Travel
Traveling is one of the best ways to get inspired. When you travel, you see things in a new way and meet people from different cultures who can teach you new skills and impart knowledge from other parts of the world.
Seeing the world opens our perspective on other people and places. We realize that the world is much bigger than we knew before and that there are many things we haven’t tried yet.
We also realize that there are many ways to do things and that different points of view are valid. We learn to accept the opinions of others and also to share our own ideas with others.
No matter where you go, San Francisco, Paris, the desert of Morocco, or even the city next to yours, you’re sure to increase your divergent thinking and creative potential.
Music
When you listen to music, you get a great feeling of inspiration. It can make you do something great or new in your life.
Music is easy to listen to and it takes your creative mind off your problems for a while and gives you new energy. It’s a kind of therapy. It helps us express our feelings, and as a result, we feel better about our lives and are more optimistic about the future.
Listening to music while working or studying can help increase productivity and focus concentration and creativity on the tasks at hand without being distracted by personal worries.
Music can also help us improve our mental health and reduce anxiety and depression.
Reading Books
Reading is inspiring because it’s full of ideas.
If you read science fiction and fantasy, you might notice how many of the stories contain a single new idea or a few closely related ideas that make up the bulk of the plot. And even in real stories about real people’s lives, the most important thing that happens – falling in love, becoming famous, going to war – is related to new ideas.
A good book gives you a dozen ideas you hadn’t thought about before. A great book gives you a dozen ideas you already knew about but are now looking at in an interesting and different way.
Reading is a great creativity booster because it makes you more knowledgeable and articulate. It does not only enhances our creative spark, but it also helps us improve our creative writing.
Watching Videos
There are many reasons why watching an online video can be inspiring. It could be the person saying something or the way they say it. Or it could be the video itself.
Videos can inspire people in a variety of ways, from entertainment to instructional.
Practical videos, such as how-to guides, are especially inspiring for people who’re just starting out in a particular field, but that’s not all.
A video can inspire someone even if they’ve been in the field for years and have seen the video before. That’s because of the effect it’s on you when you see a person who seems to know what they’re talking about. It makes you feel like you can really do it yourself, and can inspire you to do things differently.
Socializing
People are fascinating creatures! We’re all so different that every social arrangement when we come together is unique, fruitful fertilization of ideas, humor, and worldviews.
When we socialize, we learn from feelings, people, and places. We cannot force ourselves to be inspired in some areas of our lives while remaining completely uninfluenced by others.
Socializing is also an opportunity to share ideas, learn from each other, and unleash your imagination. It’s a way to get feedback on your ideas, which helps you expand your horizons. Socializing can inspire you to new insights and help you create incredible things.
Getting Outside
When we go outside, we’ve more energy and can focus better because our brain chemistry changes. The world seems more interesting after a trip outdoors because our brains have changed to be more likely to notice new things.
Isolatation
Isolation is also inspiring when you’ve too many distractions around you.
In this case, isolation is inspiring because it helps you realize what’s most important in your life.
It helps you focus on things that make you feel alive.
It helps you understand who you’re and what you’re doing here. It helps you gain perspective. It gives you time to think about what you want and how to achieve it. Isolation separates the wheat from the chaff, making it easier for you to see which areas of your life are worth your time and which aren’t.
Isolation inspires because it allows ideas to flow uninterrupted by distractions. If a distraction is constantly tugging at your attention, your creative mind will eventually begin to associate that distraction with every thought or activity it can’t immediately complete, so it introduces the distraction into everything else – like a virus infecting every file it touches.
By eliminating the different things that distract your creative thinking, isolation stops this contagion effect so that after a period of isolation, your mind can better focus on a creative solution.
Isolation doesn’t mean you’ve to lock yourself in a room for days, but you can isolate yourself from distractions that interfere with your creative work.
For example, if you’re trying to write creatively and can’t focus because you’re constantly receiving text messages, it can affect your creative flow and imagination. More likely, you’ll end up with a major creative block. Instead, turn off your phone for the time you need to revive your creative energy.
Dreaming
Dreaming is inspiring because it allows our minds to connect with our deepest desires and fears. It allows us to think about what we want from our lives, not just what’ll happen next.
Dreaming is a form of time travel.
By thinking about what’ll make us happy, rather than just what’ll happen next or what we need to do now, we free our minds. We travel to an uncertain future that’s not determined by the past or present. This makes dreaming inspiring and even a creative act.
It’s the best way to cultivate our imagination.
Dreams can propel you beyond your creative pursuit and feed your imagination in a different way than most creative individuals can imagine.
Other People’s Ideas
When we listen to other people’s opinions, we may find their ideas inspiring. It’s good to be open-minded and listen to other opinions. But there are also some advantages to being narrow-minded.
The advantage of being open-minded is that you can get new ideas from other creative people and be inspired by them. If you don’t pay attention to new ideas, your own ideas will never improve.
There are many creative people who can help you reach your creativity peak if you pay attention to other creative ideas.
Creative people are everywhere, maybe you just don’t see their creative spark yet, you just need to start seeing them in a different way, pay more attention to them.
Changing Your Patterns
Changing your thinking patterns can have an important impact on your creative ability, and it can also help you change your creative accomplishments.
Because the way we do things is usually so deeply ingrained in our lives and habits, we’re not just trying to do something new. We’re actually trying to undo something old.
And because the old already exists, we can’t just decide to end it. Even if we want to. We’ve to actively create a different way of doing things.
So even simple changes can be difficult. It’s like trying to learn to write with your other hand. The words are the same, but your whole body is doing something different. And your brain has to get used to processing things differently.
Related posts:
Psychology of creativity by psychologist dean keith simonton
UC Berkeley psychologists explore age-related creativity decline