This new book, Imagine, demonstrates the first step to take if you need to find a creative solution to a problem. DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN EVERYBODY ELSE. A product of our effort is considered creative when it is different than those things that have come before it. A book about creativity that delves into what the experts have to say about the topic in the context of the stories about the birth of innovative ideas has been done before. The experts, especially those that use fancy instruments to watch blood move around in the brain, are intensely focused on the individual. They're in constant pursuit of this getting to the bottom of why some people are creative and others are less so. What individual factors are at the root of these differences in creativity? All of those creativity books that are listed in my reading lists explore similar questions in varying levels of detail.
Is the individual the best place to look for the origin of creative thought? Sure people are the protagonists in the stories of creativity that continually pop up in books and articles about creativity. A person invented the post-it note, but the post-it note is really nothing more than the solution to a problem. The problem presented itself, how can you use small pieces of paper to mark pages in a hymnal?, and somebody with the appropriate experience was able to apply a fragment of their history to that problem.
Creativity is not a trait. It's a consequence of the interaction between a situation and the individual's life history. That life history includes everything that person has ever experienced. The more variable your experience, the more material you'll have to pull from when you're searching for a solution to a novel problem. That experience includes everything from which books you've read, where you've lived, the kind of food you eat, conversations that you've had, movies that you've watched, the content of your dreams, every moment of your life. The more of that experience you remember, the better. The more you're able to let your mind wander, the more receptive you'll be to random thoughts generated by elements of the problem bumping into elements of your problem.
To be creative, you must seek a problem and make the conscious decision to pursue a solution. If you're never thinking about a new way to clean floors, you're not going to come up with The Swiffer. If you're not immersing yourself in a problem, even something as mundane as cleaning the floor, you're never going to find a novel solution to your problem. If you're only working on one problem and nothing else, you're limiting your opportunity to happen onto a solution for some long standing problem. If you're not reaching out, tapping into other people's experiences, it will take you that much long to find a solution. If you don't have time to think about the problem, to stir the pot that holds your experience and elements of the problem, that magic combination that will get to the answer you're looking for will probably never present itself.
All of these random things that creativity researchers love to write about are never pulled together into a coherent picture of creativity. There's plenty of talk around tactics (see that new book Imagine), but very little discussion of a strategy to direct those efforts under a guiding principle connecting those disparate tricks (edit your work in a blue room). You can't schedule creativity into your day. The foundation of your ability to be creative is the entirety of your life. Creativity rests on experience. No experience, no creativity. You can't be creative if you don't pursue problems that require novelty (or seek novel solutions to situations that may be associated with a well-established and accepted routine).
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