Realize Your Creatice Potential
The heart of all new ideas lies in the borrowing, adding, combining or modifying of old ones. Do it by accident and people call you lucky. Do it by design and they’ll call you creative. All of us have the ability to creat ideas almost at will. The problem is to understand and utilize the processes that allow us to do it most efflciently and effectively.
It’s generally agareed that the act of developing new ideas involves some five steps.
FIRST INSIGHT. You have a problem you want to solve or an activity you want to do you want a better job, the house needs redecorating, your company produces a waste material you would like to turn into a profitable byproduct. All of these are examples of first insight.
PREPARATION. Now you investigate all the possible ways in which this germinal idea can be developed. Get as much information as you can about the subject, read, take notes, talk to others, ask questions, collect information. Be receptive to your own senses. Picasso once remarked, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place, from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” These ideas form a springboard for launching our own imagination.
INCUBATION. Now let your subconscious take over. Take a walk, take a nap, take a bath, work on another project or hobby, sleep on it. As author Edna Ferber once noted, “A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it’s ready to serve.”
ILLUMINATION. This is the climax of the creative process. An insight pops into the mind, and suddenly everything falls into place. Charles Darwin gathered information for his theory of evolution. Then one day when he was riding in his carriage, it all came together. “I remember,” Darwin wrote, “the very spot in the road when to my joy the solution occurred to me.” Illumination is the most exciting and joyous phase of creative process.
VERIFICATION. Yet for all of its wondrous insights, illmination can be terribly unreliable. Intellect and judgment are brought into play, and your hunches and inspirations are logically confirmed or denied. You back off and look at your ideas to make them better and often come up with new and better insights in the process.
Summing up, the key to understanding the creative cycle is to realize that there are five distinct phases. There is the initial desire to create, followed by a lengthy period of investigating and information gathering. Then there is the period of incubation where the subconscious efforts surface. And finally, there is a period of refining and verifying the ideas created.
In addition to giving your self an incentive, you must also create a sense of urgency. There is a natural tendency to procrastinate in all of us. Create the necessary pressure by giving yourself reasonable but challenging deadlines for coming up with new ideas. Then be sure to stick to them.