Get Cre8ive

Published on this site: November 28th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

Every human is creative. There, I've said it. However, you must understand that creativity and artistic ability are not one and the same. Once you get past that hurdle, it's easier to find your creative muse.

Roger von Oech, in his book A Whack on the side of the head, says that there are 10 mental locks that may keep us from freeing our minds to be creative.

One of the biggest "locks" in my view is the fear of appearing foolish. Not all of your ideas are going to be great. You should grade yourself on the quantity of ideas you come up with, not the quality of each idea. You are not going to hit every idea out of the park.

Baseball provides a good analogy for ideas. Ty Cobb has the best lifetime batting average of anyone at .366, or about 36 percent of his at bats. That means he did not get a hit 64 percent of the time. Would you call him a failure?

How about Thomas Edison? He admits that he "learned" thousands of ways not to make a light bulb before hitting on one right way.

How do we avoid the mental locks? You need to forget what you know. Otherwise, your brain will be cluttered with answers from everyday life. Consider Johann Gutenberg. The wine press and the coin punch were in existence during Gutenberg's time. But he was the first to " forget" that one was used only to smash grapes and the other only to leave an image on a coin. By combining the two devices he invented the printing press.

How do we manage to forget what we know? You need to shake up your brain with exercises that challenge your assumptions - a virtual whack on the side of the head.

If you want to be creative, then you must pump a little mental iron to get more ideas flowing. Because nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.

Harry Hoover - is managing principal of Hoover ink PR. He has 30 years of experience in crafting and delivering bottom line messages that ensure success for serious businesses like Bank of Commerce, Brent Dees Financial Planning, CruisingTheICW.com Focus Four, Levolor, North Carolina Tourism, TeamHeidi, Ty Boyd Executive Learning Systems, VELUX, and Verbatim.