Mini-c creativity
A year's (lifetime's?) worth of brilliant creativity advice from researcher, professor and writer James Kaufman in Aeon magazine this month. In fact, if you read this article end to end and figure out a way to enact everything* in your own life, I can almost guarantee your creative life will improve.
Aeon and its sister publication Psyche are awesome and you should check them out, but summing up in the meantime:
* Mini-c creativity: To progress your own creativity, think about how mini-c creativity shows up throughout your day. Those step-by-challenging-step blips of insight, hard work, or creative joy that. Are. Everything! to our creative lives. The silly songs you make up, or the recipe workarounds. You are pulling off dozens of improvisational creative genius moves every day of your life. Creativity is all about connecting disparate dots, and each mini-c moment is a dot. Notice and celebrate them!
* Creativity is not just about the arts: I'm fully prepared to die on this hill. AI can draw, compose music, and write. But can it get your child to eat their broccoli, or enact a marketing plan for your sustainable cement company, or invent Velcro? Or, a better way to open an aluminum can? (Nod to my pop-top inventing great-uncle, Ernie Fraze.)
* Creativity doesn't arrive on a sparkly thunderbolt: It's not about being a tortured genius, neither is it about lazing by the pool as ideas jump on the paper themselves. Take it from a professional writer: Creativity requires (a frankly annoying amount of) slow and methodical hard work, organization, and focus.
* Creative self-awareness can be supported by sharing your work (some day!): You know how I said creativity is all about connecting dots? Make sharing your work less scary by thinking of your friends, classmates, teachers -- your supporters *and* your critics -- as interactive dots in your creative process (as you can be in theirs!).
(Me again)
* To digest ideas about creativity, I like to have people do exercises. Here's one of my favorites I assign to pretty much every student, client, workshop participant, Uber driver, etc I meet:
Create your own 'Noticing Wall': Write. Things. Down. (!!!) Why? Creativity requires dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of thoughts and ideas that need to bounce off each other. Far too many dots to hold in our brains at once. So, in your weekly planner, journal, or a designated 'Creativity Notebook,' add a back page. This is your 'Noticing Wall.' When you have one of those mini-c blips that make you say 'Hmm' or 'I never thought about it that way'? Add them!