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Got Creativity or Hot Air?

Written by: H. Bernard Wechsler

Article Overview: We live in the Knowledge Economy, and without Creativity, you got nothing. Are there secrets to discovering how-to- be seen as a creative hot-shot?

Got Creativity or Hot Air?

Got Creativity?

Speed Reading Rules Kids are constantly creating, daydreaming or asking questions. They can transform

a boomstick into a baseball bat, rhythmically beat on pots and pans and enjoy their

music, and find the resources to build a treehouse without money.

By the end of their first year in school, creativity is mostly washed out of their

brain. It is a necessary process of socialization (not acting out) and learning to stick to a task to completion. School and the teacher is not the villain, they are performing a necessary process of civilization and fitting in.

What about adults? Our experience with school students and executives is we all

have the capability and potential to be creative, but we are scared to death of

criticism and being wrong so we sit there and shut up.

Everybody? The exception to the rule of stifling our creativity (Latin: to make)

and imagination are writers, artists, musicians, and internally driven Big-Mouths.

What the secret of being creative in your career and getting promotions and more

dinero?

Kids

What knocks kids off their creativity track?

a) "Johnny, pay attention and stop DAYDREAMING?"

b) "Maria, sit there and listen, and stop asking all those useless QUESTIONS."

c) "Danny, you have five-minutes to finish the exam. If you FAIL, you don't graduate. Stay on task or your life is over at eight-years old."

The answer to loss of creativity is Fear of Failure and Fear of Criticism.

The number one desire of humans is a desire to be APPRECIATED, and valued as important, useful to our environment. Criticism creates a fear of failure and is the opposite of appreciation.

Two Elements For Creativity

One, we must give ourselves permission to follow our instinctual CURIOSITY. Parents say NO, five-times more often than YES. We are subliminally taught

to disregard our own opinion, and accept the judgment of others. Follow your natural curiosity.

Second, successful people learn early to have a tolerance for FRUSTRATION.

A student asked me to read her manuscript. She was a superstar in writing Hollywood scripts, but this was a book totally outside her area of proven success.

She showed it to her agent who said, "It was OK, but in my opinion it will never make a dime. Why not stick to what you know, write another script."

Look, he got 10% of her earnings so he really wanted her to succeed. She was not

insulted or deterred, and continued to market her book.

Guess what, she was turned down for publication by 14 other major companies.

She continued to write scripts, but never gave up. She started selling the book

one-at-a-time by making photocopies. Ugly.

Yes, it is one-in-a-million, but later found a publisher and sold a total

of three-million copies internationally of the book no one wanted.

Oh yeah, I thought it was boring too.

Four Ideas on Creativity

Robert Epstein, teaching at University of California, at San Diego lists

four methods leading to creativity.

1. Capturing the original idea before it flies out of your mind and is lost

forever. PDA, Memo Recorder, leave a message to you on your voice mail,

send yourself an Email. Simplest of all, have a pen and paper next to your

bed for capturing ideas after you finish dreaming.

2. Surround yourself with people, places (museums), and things that value

new ideas, inventions and things untested, but with potential.

3. Challenging yourself to grow new ideas. Use-it-or-lose-it applies to your

PFC (prefrontal cortex), the site of cognition and new ideas. Find small challenges

to succeed at like finishing crossword puzzles. Write a fairy tale for your kids.

Try rewriting an article in Psychology Today for your friends.

4. Broadening means trying to learn from people and media outside your

comfort zone. Change your environment and let it lead you into new questions and research. The greater your diversity of knowledge, the greater your creativity.

New Research

The number of hours you watch tv, play video games or watch You Tube stories about dogs and cats, the lower your total of time devoted to Daydreaming.

So what? Daydreaming is a direct source of your creativity and imagination for

new ideas.

Sending your kids off to their room to watch tv is a negative because they

never learn to use their own imagination as a source of amusement and entertainment.

Two parts to successful daydreaming: give permission to your mind to drift into

valuable daydreaming, and actively pay attention to your imagination to latch

on new useful ideas.

Default Network

When you are not actively using your left-hemisphere for reasoning, logic and

planning, your brain rests in its Default Network. It is not sleeping there, but

trying to solve your problems at a subconscious level, and thinking up new ideas.

Dr. Marcus Raichle, Washington University, lead researcher has discovered the

three structures of the Default Network.

First, your medial Frontal Cortex, next, your Parietal Cortex, and third, your

Cingular Cortex.

When you go into Beta cycles per second (Hz), left-hemisphere consciousness,

which includes language and cognition, you Deactivate your Default Network,

and turn your attention to the present and stop daydreaming.

Folks with Alzheimer's do not have the ability to deactivate and lose the present

because their Attention and Concentration is focused on their daydreaming.

Endwords

Team meetings are mostly a waste of time because more than 50% of the members

dread loss of face and sit there and shut down. Fear of criticism silences some great ideas from surfacing to fruition.

Answer: a 15 minute meeting should consist of 5 minutes of group talk to discuss the problem and decide what a solution should contain. Next, 5 minutes (alone) where each member keeps her/his own counsel, and jots down ideas to share later.

Finally the team reassembles and discusses every one's individual ideas to discover what fills the bill. Discuss, not judge the presented ideas.

The standard team meeting is 30-45 minutes all-together-now, where 1-2 members

dominate the presentations. It doesn't work because of varied personalities who

do not want to reveal themselves because of potential criticism. Try the new way.

Coda

Would it increase your personal productivity by reading and remembering three (3)

books, articles and reports, while your peers can hardly finish one? How about doubling your long-term memory? Ask us how.

Speed Reading Rules

See ya,

copyright © 2008

H. Bernard Wechsle

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Article Tags: baseball bat, big mouths, boomstick, br music, civilization, creativity, curiosity, exception to the rule, fear of failure, five minutes, imagination, judgment, pay attention, pots and pans, process of socialization, school students, speed reading, treehouse, two elements, villain



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Internet Marketing - Creativity or originality would be good words. you might want to try two words; after all, you are trying to suggest a complex idea that combines at least two concepts: marketing and internet. in other words, the concept has to evoke an action (marketing), how (honestly, responsibly?) and by what means you are going to carry that action out (internet). I hope this helps; Good luck!
Ladies Who Launch book party - I'm only abouat 6 hours from DC... but I'm not going to be able to make the signing... I wish 'em well, however. Anyway, I check their website periodically to see what's happening, and here's the press release for it: We've written about you in our book and now are thrilled to meet you in person! Our book LADIES WHO LAUNCH: Embracing Entrepreneurship & Creativity as a Lifestyle (St. Martin's Press; May 1, 2007; $24.95) has come out and we are coming to Washington, DC to celebrate you, women who want to say "YES!" to their dreams by launching a business, project or life! We'll be at Barnes & Noble, 555 12th St. NW, Washington DC, on Wednesday, May 9, 2007 and we would be honored if you would come out and meet us and the extraordinary ladies of the Washington, DC Ladies Who Launch Incubator program. We have invited several special guests including: Priscilla Stephan: Founder of Bakana Style Kalle Diarra: Founder of Arbre De Vie Products These ladies will talk more about how to launch, and, why launching, whether for entrepreneurial reasons or just for fun, leads to a happier, more fulfilling life. Being around like-minded, inspiring women is one of the best ways to get you moving toward your goals and dreams.
Re: What is Your Favorite Thing About Owning A Business? - I think my favourite thing about owning a business would be "independent creativity". Creativity only gives me a headache when I drink too much, GT! I must admit I enjoy the idea that the neighbours have no idea how I can earn a living spending so much time at home! I still do quite a lot of freelance teaching work here in Hiroshima, but compared to the average Japanese salaryman, I am at home a lot, either dealing with orders from my Japanese games site, or developing my "Internet marketing start-up" business... (or snoozing after a leisurely lunch)! I guess the neighbours suppose that it is my working-wife who earns all the money! And that is just how it should be! It depends how you define freedom... When a big order comes in, I don't always feel like fulfilling it, but of course, I do. I am constrained to do so; but since it was I who chose to post the ad in the first place, it was my free decision to make myself available to anybody who wants to throw some mula at me in exchange for the goods I offer! Freedom is never absolute in this contingent world. But I am free to promote, or pull the plug on, my business as I like and when I like... However, any decision I make out of my own free choice has implications that place constraints on that freedom. Oh what a fascinating dichotomy! DH


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