Early this morning, I woke up to one great read on the Wake Up World online community. The article speaks about creativity and I felt it is an article both worth sharing and remembering for I agree with it and find it very motivational.

Here are my footnotes and favorite parts that I wish to carry along with me from the full article by Michael Michalko

“You are creative. Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker. This is why people who believe they are creative become creative. All creative geniuses work passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by the major poets than by minor poets. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Some were masterpieces, while others were no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were simply bad. When you go through the motions of trying to come up with new ideas, you are energizing your brain by increasing the number of contacts between neurons. The more times you try to get ideas, the more active your brain becomes and the more creative you become. You can synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The human brain cannot tell the difference between an “actual” experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with imaginary scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas about space and time. One day, for example, he imagined falling in love. Then he imagined meeting the woman he fell in love with two weeks after he fell in love. This led to his theory of acausality. The only certainty in life is uncertainty. When trying to get ideas,  do not censor or evaluate them as they occur. Nothing kills creativity faster than self-censorship of ideas while generating them. Think of all your ideas as possibilities and generate as many as you can before you decide which ones to select. The world is not black or white. It is grey. Never stop with your first good idea. Always strive to find a better one and continue until you have one that is still better. Trust your instincts. One professor said Einstein was “the laziest dog” the university ever had. Beethoven’s parents were told he was too stupid to be a music composer. Walt Disney was fired from his first job on a newspaper because “he lacked imagination.” Whenever you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail. You have learned something that does not work. Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral. They have no meaning. You give them meaning by the way you choose to interpret them. If you are a priest, you see evidence of God everywhere. If you are an atheist, you see the absence of God everywhere. Always approach a problem on its own terms. Do not trust your first perspective of a problem as it will be too biased toward your usual way of thinking. Always look at your problem from multiple perspectives. Always remember that genius is finding a perspective no one else has taken. Look for different ways to look at the problem. Take another role, for example, how would someone else see it, how would Jay Leno, Pablo Picasso, George Patton see it? Take a walk and look for things that metaphorically represent the problem and force connections between those things and the problem. Ask your friends and strangers how they see the problem. Ask a child. How would a ten year old solve it? Ask a grandparent. Imagine you are the problem. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Creative geniuses are inclusive thinkers which mean they look for ways to include everything, including things that are dissimilar and totally unrelated. Albert Einstein once famously remarked “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.” Full article here by Michael Michalko on Wake Up World.

It also is very interesting how it explains that if you go to experts for advice they most probably will be negative. Why? because they think they are the best at things, and they believe that the best is already out there. New ideas, are very new, to experts and to non experts, and it is very hard for anyone to visualize something that is completely new on earth as much as you; “the creative behind it can visualize it”. Therefore, always keep in mind that taking advice from experts is always a good thing, but trusting their inputs, no matter what, should not be stronger or more powerful than your instincts.

When you do fail, or when a mistake occurs, giving up is a choice, but wanting to find a solution is persistence to go over the mistake looking for a solution. Finding the solutions is your first step to a complete success. Michael Michalko sets a beautiful example in his article: “Once Thomas Edison was approached by an assistant while working on the filament for the light bulb. The assistant asked Edison why he didn’t give up. “After all,” he said, “you have failed 5000 times.” Edison looked at him and told him that he didn’t understand what the assistant meant by failure, because, Edison said, “I have discovered 5000 things that don’t work.” You construct your own reality by how you choose to interpret your experiences.”

So don’t give up, failing is only the beginning, it truly is. You have to measure what you believe in and how much you believe in it. There is a difference between trying to prove something and trying to create something. Trying to prove something is shallow and uncreative, trying to create something, stems from your inner creator. Trust your inner creator, trust that we are all connected to the Divine creator. Trust that through our believe we will be able to flourish our goals, but don’t expect to get there the first, the second or the third time, and if you did, don’t just think there is nothing better coming after or only better should come after. We create 100 things and between the 100 only 1 might be the one right thing.