Garnering Creativity

Creativity may be an innate skill, arising from “deep thinking” or even a moment of luck. Given the serendipitous nature of how some of the best works in our time came to be, I like to ponder if a skill like creativity can be honed. While we occasionally create something new in a moment of epiphany, I believe creative works can be systematically constructed as well.

Honing creativity

If one views creativity as originating from having the ability to think out of the box and suffering from apophenia, then that can be honed and even systematically approached

Here’s how (habitual approach):

• Practice curiosity. Ask questions. Overtime, it will become innate, and you can learn to ask different questions when trying to cook up solutions to a problem. New questions = new perspectives = new ways to tackle problems.

• Increase your “ideas” pool to draw from. Read about weird stuff. Experience crazy shit. Learn about other people's creative ideas. Then, by randomly applying these knowledge and experiences in a different avenue, one can create something “new”.

• Be random. Practice clanging. Embrace your wild emotions. It will eventually affect your thinking to be as random, and henceforth creative

Or a more systematic approach:

1. Research thoroughly about the topic at hand. Find out all the possible and already tried solutions to a problem.

2. Think with 5W1H to figure out new perspectives or questions to throw a curveball and tackle the question in a different way.

3. Read up on other unrelated fields for their solutions to dual problems, and see if those ideas can be applied to your field.

4. Gain inspiration from daily life encounters.

Bounded vs unbounded creativity

I used to have so many wild thoughts, jumping between disciplines and having inter-generational imaginations. All this creativity was slowly diminished by my educational system. The very idea of having to learn facts, and remember and apply them, is in fact innately uncreative.

Think back to comic books, fantasies, and imaginations. The ability to dream and imagine is creativity. Of course, true creativity without bounds to reality might not be "useful" for problem solving, but it is creativity in its purest form. To wander, to be purposeless, and to just endlessly imagine and create… 

One benefit of the a rote learning educational system is the ways it teaches you to be precise in your intent, and structure your thoughts to work towards your goals. At the cost of having better mental discipline and focus, I lost my genuine wonder. I stopped questioning, ideating, and imagining.

The old wild creativity I had was unbounded. I could create amazing games for people, I had wild prank ideas, etc. This creativity is random, and great for being spontaneous and creating artistic art.

Yet, when it comes to more academic and focused questions, e.g. in tackling a physics research problem, this unbounded creativity was inefficient. My creativity was not channeled to the problem at hand, and was too random in nature.

Now comes the problem of balancing radical ideating with focused thought. Trying to narrow my scope of focus on a specific problem inherently limits my creative boundaries. I try to still preserve the childish wonder I have, but find the balance to focus the wonder and creativity on a research question.