Branching out and unlocking your creativity

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Where did my creativity go?

“I’m not a creative person” is a phrase that we hear all too often. Contrary to popular belief, creativity is a skill that is innate in everyone. It can be learned and practiced by anyone, but it lies dormant in some persons. Kids are always far more creative than their adult counterparts. They play in the yard with their imaginary friends, come up with crazy ideas, and go on all sorts of adventures. Unfortunately, our schooling system robs many of these kids of their creativity.

It turns out that creative thinking is one of the most important facets of the human mind. Creativity is heavily involved in so many facets of life and advanced learning techniques. Persons such as Leonardo DaVinci and Albert Einstein were so great because of their creative thinking. Our schools don’t place nearly enough importance on this. My goal here is to help all you unlock and train the creativity you have within you.

If you take a trip to the World Memory Championships, you will find people performing crazy feats of memory. Feats such as quickly memorizing many decks of cards, hundreds of digits, and 50 lined poems. You might think that these people are just superheroes with an innate ability for rote memorization. However, their abilities are actually due to their trained creative capabilities and visual memory. The ability to translate abstract information into crazy, exaggerated, and detailed visual images makes it very easy to learn large amounts of information very quickly.

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Branching out.

Many school systems all over the world are largely outdated. They teach you to think too robotically and linearly. Imagine the school building a tree, but instead of having branches it’s just one big column. This is exactly how traditional schooling teaches you to think, it’s why people might not think of themselves as creative. Instead of imagining things from multiple perspectives, they just see the column. Creativity is your most powerful tool, it allows you to branch out so you can innovate and learn effectively. Everyone has the skill in their mind, sometimes it just needs to be found and trained.

Linearity is the enemy of creativity. Thinking just from point A to B doesn’t allow for any original thought or innovation. If you want to have a more creative thinking process you can do a couple of things. Firstly, you should imagine things from multiple perspectives. How can an object be used differently or how can this process I work on be made more efficient? Thinking creatively is a lot more fun and will change your sense of happiness and career.

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A creativity exercise.

I’m going to share with you guys one of the best exercises I found for training your creativity. The process is really simple, and the goal is to make your mind think from multiple perspectives. If you want to see some results, I would suggest doing this as a part of your daily routine for 5-10 minutes.

1. Think of any object or idea (pencil, car, eraser, suitcase, electricity, etc)
2. Start writing out all the uses you can think of for that object.
3. You will start to run out of ideas, so ask yourself a few perspective questions.
   a. What material is the item made out of?
   b. How could the item or idea be used for various activities? (Sports, gaming, gardening, etc)
   c. Are there any items that look like the object you are thinking of?

Those are just a few examples questions you can ask yourself. It’s easy to apply the exercise and come up with new questions once you run out. When doing this, you should aim to eventually come up with 40 potential uses quickly. I’m sure you’ll come up with some crazy ideas easily after a few tries. Like the tree, instead of being just a solid column, you will start to branch out and show your true creativity.

P.S I hope you all enjoy puns.