By: William Tighe
What exactly are your creative muscles?
“Creativity consists largely of re-arranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know.” - George Keller
You create when you take two objects, words, sounds or thoughts and combine them. You create art by combining paint with a canvas. You create a sentence by combining words. You create a song by combining sounds and you create a blog post by talking out of your ass.
But just because you create something doesn’t mean its particularly creative, right? What makes a creation creative is whether or not it provides enough value, beauty or excitement to make it remarkable or worth remembering. That means our creative muscles are not only our ability to rearrange what we know (like George Keller said), but to rearrange what we know into a new creation with enough value, beauty or excitement to be deemed worthwhile. Whether it be worthwhile in only our eyes or in the eyes of others makes no difference.
Steve Jobs didn’t create the telephone, the Internet or the camera, but he rearranged them into a metal box that we now can’t go more than a few hours without looking at. There is no doubt Steve Jobs flexed his creative muscles to create the iPhone.
That begs the question: Is the strength of Steve Jobs’ creative muscles a stroke of divine intervention? Or something trained over time?
Well maybe it’s a little bit of both
Tina Seelig, the executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, says, “Like every other skill, some people have more natural talent than others. However, everyone can increase his or her creativity, just as everyone can increase his or her musical or athletic ability, with appropriate training and focused practice.”
Certainly, DNA dictates our brain’s inherent ability to utilize its neurons to rearrange what it already knows in a new way that somehow makes sense. This is similar to when your DNA dictates whether you have a high or low metabolism, thus affecting your ability to loose weight. Our bodies are predisposed to perform certain actions better than others. But that doesn’t mean we can’t train ourselves to become more proficient at these actions. You can train your metabolism to speed up by eating healthier and working out. Similarly, you can train your creative muscles to draw on what you know and rearrange what you know in a valuable, beautiful or exciting way — a remarkable way — by doing it often.
The Workout
This workout consists of two exercises.
The first exercise you already do quite often. The second exercise you have to dedicate some time to. As it goes with athletic training, the more time you dedicate to it the better you will become.
Let’s first remember what George Keller said, “Creativity consists largely of re-arranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know.”
The first exercise is to expand your personal database of “what you know”. You do this all the time when you try new foods, travel, read and so on. The best way to expand your database of what you know is to experience new things. Expanding your database of what you know means you have more possible variables to rearrange embedded in your creative arsenal.
With a loaded knowledge database, we must train our ability to rearrange it. Before we jump into the exercise, consider these two statements:
a newspaper can provide you with something to read
a megaphone can provide you with something to project your voice
Assuming you’ve interfaced with both newspapers and megaphones before, you “know” 4 different things from these two statements. You know what newspapers are, you know things can be read, you know what megaphones are and you know the effects (and potential value in certain circumstances) of projecting your voice.
Now consider these two statements:
a newspaper can provide you with something to project your voice
a megaphone can provide you with something to read
See what we did there? Essentially, we’ve just rearranged what we “know”. One of these statements has meaning, the other, not so much.
Let’s say you’re in a crowded area and need to get someone’s attention but they just can’t quite hear your voice on its own. As fate would have it, you don’t happen to be carrying around your personal megaphone at the moment, but ah ha!, you are carrying today’s newspaper. You are able to rearrange what you “know” about the details of both newspapers and the process of making your voice louder. You would be able to rearrange past experiences and “know” that a newspaper, when rolled up into a cone, can project your voice quite loudly. You get your friend’s attention and your new creation to project your voice proves to be quite valuable. This value has meaning to you. It’s an example of genuine creativity.
That’s a long-winded way of introducing the second exercise: Take any object, like a newspaper, and write down 5 different ways you can use it. (A megaphone, a flyswatter, a source to cite in your paper, a way to get your news, something to draw on) Next day, do the same but with a new object. Next month, think of 10 different ways to use an object. Repeat this process until you too are creating something with enough value (either internally to yourself or externally to others) as the iPhone.
That, my friends, is unequivocally the best workout to exercise your creative muscles. Try it out and let us know what you think!