Boosting Creativity Techniques
This cluster centers on personal tips, methods, and experiences for enhancing creativity, such as embracing boredom, constraints, improvisation, mind wandering, daily idea generation, and cross-disciplinary thinking.
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If you are concerned about your creativity, I highly recommend looking into improvisation.Although I am on the young side, I have devoted an evening a week to take improv classes. One of my previous professors did his Phd on how improvisational techniques can help with product design [1].P.S. Spaghetti !?! Maybe tomorrow...[1]https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/61610</a
Creativity is a weird resource. You don't consume it, you refill it by using it.The more creative things you do, the more creative you become. I see this a lot in writing. When I'm on the wagon and writing every day, the ideas keep coming and flowing and I start thinking "Maybe I should publish twice a day? There's no way I can limit myself to just once"But then I fall off the wagon and I publish/write once a week. It becomes a struggle. Ideas don't flow.
But I feel like some creativity comes from breaking existing patterns
Sometimes creativity comes from constraints.
Feed your muse by consuming creative things, and then repetition.
Yep, getting bored is important for creativity.
I agree with the GP that letting your mind wander in those situations is often better for creativity than trying to fill every minute with activity.
I'm also not creative. Two (unoriginal) ideas:1. Do cross disciplinary things, a lot of creativity is really just porting common knowledge to another domain2. Be contrarian. Assume everything you hear is wrong, unless you can connect it back to first principles you understand. You'll often end up being correct, and discovering some insight that the crowd hasn't come upon yet (the downside of this is people will think of you as a heretic)
John Cleese talks about the same as you're saying in his lecture on creativity: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-crea...The videos in that link seems to be down, but the whole talk is worth a watch: https://vimeo.com/12
In my experience (and this is going to sound weird), creativity comes from having constraints to work in. "I need an X, and it has to do Y" leads to much more creative solutions than "Let's think up a thing to do!"