Sometimes people tell me that they do not feel they are particularly creative. I assure them that they are born with vastly more creativity than they could ever use. Their job is to stir up and unlock their inherent creativity.
I like to use this illustration: Imagine that you have poured yourself a cup of coffee and put sugar in it. You then put the cup to your lips, but the coffee still tastes plain and unsweetened. What has happened? The obvious answer is that you forgot to stir the coffee in the cup and mix the sugar throughout the drink.
Your creativity is very much the same. It is like the sugar at the bottom of the cup of coffee. It needs to be stirred up so that it dissolves and spreads through the entire cup of coffee.
Like stirring the sugar in the coffee, your creativity is naturally stirred up by three factors, all of which are under your control.
INTENSELY DESIRED GOALS
The greater clarity you have about what it is you really want and the more positive and excited you are about achieving that goal, the more creative you will be, and the more ideas you will come up with. The more you want something, the more likely it is you’ll find creative ways to accomplish it. This is why it is said that “there are no noncreative people, just those without goals that they want badly enough.”
Determine the one goal that, if you achieved it, would have the greatest positive impact on your life. Write it down clearly on paper so that a child could understand your goal. This very action of deciding what you want more than anything else will almost instantly trigger ideas for actions that you could take to achieve that goal.
PRESSING PROBLEMS
These are some of the greatest stimulants of all leading to greater creativity. If there is a problem or an obstacle that is stopping you from achieving something that is important to you, you will be amazed at how creative you can become in your ability to remove it.
Clarity is essential to creative thinking. Here is a way of gaining greater clarity: First, decide on your goal or objective. What is it that you really want in a particular area of your life? Then ask, “Why aren’t I already at this goal or objective? Why haven’t I already achieved this goal?”
Then ask, “Of all the reasons why I have not yet achieved my goal, what is the biggest and most important reason?”
Once you have identified the biggest single obstacle or difficulty that is holding you back from achieving your most important goal, your mind will start generating idea after idea to solve that problem or remove that obstacle.
FOCUSED QUESTIONS
Your ability to ask yourself, and others, questions that force you to think deeply about your situation is a major stimulus to creativity. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins says that a mark of great companies is that the executives are willing to ask themselves the “brutal questions” that force them to think deeply about their situation.
Peter Drucker is famous for saying, “I am not a consultant. I am an insultant. I do not give answers; I merely ask people the hard questions they need to consider to find their own answers.”
Throughout this book, you will learn a series of questions that you can ask and answer to unlock more of your creativity and allow you to penetrate to the core of a subject. The more precise and focused the questions you use, the more rapidly your creative reflexes operate to generate workable answers.
Test Your Assumptions
One of the most powerful ways to trigger creativity is for you to test your assumptions continually. Be sure that the goals, problems, and questions that you are generating are the real ones for your life and situation. It does you no good to focus on the wrong goals or on the wrong problems.
Continually ask yourself, “What are my assumptions?” Remember, many of your assumptions about your life, work, customers, money, the market, and other people are wrong or partially wrong. Sometimes they are completely wrong.
What are your obvious assumptions? What are your hidden or unconscious assumptions? And most of all, what if your most cherished assumptions were wrong?
False assumptions lie at the root of every failure. Whenever you are facing problems, resistance, or difficulties, ask yourself, “What are my assumptions? What if my assumptions are wrong?”
ACTION EXERCISES
1. What one goal, if you achieved it, would have the greatest positive impact on your career or business?
2. What major assumption are you making in your business or personal life that, if it turned out not to be true, would require you to do something completely different?