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Chapter 1
Why creativity?
This opening chapter is here to give you some background to what the whole creativity business is about, and why you need to bother with it. If you are the sort of person who skips introductions to get to the real thing, thatâs fine; I just ask that you hang on in with me for a couple of paragraphs before skipping to Chapter 2. Iâll let you know when itâs safe to go.
I have been teaching people about creativity for over ten years now â all the way up from junior school children to board members of big companies â and Iâve found that it helps a lot to get a feeling for what creativity is about, and why the techniques that help you be more creative work, before getting into the detail of what to do to be more creative in your studying. Itâs partly because some creativity techniques can seem weird unless you know why youâre doing them, and partly because knowing what the techniques are for, and how they work, will help you know how and when to use the techniques youâre going to come across.
OK, now itâs up to you. Read on if you want to put those techniques in context (which Iâd really recommend); skip to Chapter 2 for the fast track.
Whatâs the point?
One thing is for certain: thereâs no point wasting your time learning how to be more creative if you arenât going to do anything with it. This isnât one of those boring academic âlearning for the sake of itâ subjects; itâs a practical skill thatâs going to be intensely useful in school or university, at work and in your everyday life. Itâs also a skill that isnât going to lose value over time. It will stick with you for ever.
Creativity lets you do two things: solve problems and come up with new ideas. I tend not to bother too much about the difference between these. You can be solving a problem that amounts to âI need a new ideaâ, or getting an idea on âhow to solve my problemâ. Some creativity experts spend ages agonizing over the difference between the two, or between creativity and innovation. Forget it. Lifeâs too short. As far as Iâm concerned, itâs all the same thing. Creativity.
Itâs easy to get stuck with the idea that creativity is about âthe artsâ. If you think like that, the closest that creativity gets to the real world is advertising (where some employees are actually referred to as âcreativesâ). But creativity is not all about writing literature and painting pictures (and advertising). Itâs about having ideas, about changing things, about making things happen. And that comes in useful everywhere.
To start with â and I think most importantly â itâs a personal thing. Creativity is about doing something original, something that comes from you and no one else. There really is nothing that gives the same buzz as being creative. It could be one of those arty things, like writing something or taking a great photograph. But it could equally be thinking of a great new way to make money, or a clever new tactic on the football field, or some way to change your room so itâs a better place to be.
As well as helping with these personal issues, creativity is going to be incredibly valuable with your work, whether itâs schoolwork or the money-earning kind. It might involve finding a new way to do something (or an entirely new thing do). It might mean coping with a really irritating problem. It could be a way of saving money or beating the competition.
Creativity gurus like to say that creativity is about differentiation. This is just a way of saying that creativity helps you stand out from the crowd (but by using big words like âdifferentiationâ, the guru can charge ÂŁ300 an hour for telling people). Creativity is a way of making yourself different, or your company different, or what you are different, or what you sell different. And that can result in anything from cheering yourself up to surviving in a life-threatening situation.
If you want the single-phrase summary, you could do worse than say that creativity is what makes life worthwhile. How could anyone doubt thereâs a point to it?
Can you do anything?
OK, we need creativity, but that doesnât mean that thereâs any reason to write a book (or to read one) about it. Breathing, for example, is also kind of essential for life, but a whole book on breathing would get dull pretty quickly. Imagine something like this:
The Studentâs Guide to Breathing
By Brian Clegg
Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep doing it â not too quickly, not too slowly. Donât bother to think about it: your body will look after it.
The End.
It doesnât have the feel of a bestseller. The reason thereâs not much of a book in breathing is that you donât have a lot of choice, itâs just something that happens. If the same were true of creativity, then again the book would be short and not worth spending your money on. The ânaturalâ approach to being creative, the creativity equivalent of âjust breatheâ, is waiting for the big light bulb to go on over your head.
Aside: Metaphors
When I talk about a big light bulb going on over your head, I am speaking metaphorically. Unless you are a cartoon character, there is no big light bulb over your head; it just represents an idea arriving. Keep an eye out for metaphors; theyâre very useful in creativity and weâll come back to them later.
So, on flashes that big light bulb. You sat in your bedroom, or garage, or at your desk and waited . . . and if you were lucky, you eventually had an idea.
Thatâs great if youâve got all the time in the world and nothing better to do than sit around waiting. But that doesnât apply to most of us. So, for a long time people have been looking for ways to improve on the basic capabilities of a human brain when it comes to dreaming up ideas, and over the past 50 years a strange collection of people including psychologists, business people and advertising executives (individually â they tend not to talk to each other) have come up with some genuinely effective ways to get systematic about the business of creativity.
Aside: How long is a long time?
Itâs true that 50 years is a long time, but people have been finding ways to improve on their brainâs basic capabilities much longer. Some of the memory techniques mentioned in this book go back to ancient Greek times, while Leonardo da Vinci had a way of dreaming up new ideas that involved drawing squiggles with his eyes shut, then looking at the squiggles and imagining what they could be. (No one said it was a good way, but then he was Leonardo, so his squiggles were worth taking a look at.)
Altogether, Iâve found five different ways you can improve on the creativity of the brains you begin with. They are:
- Culture â no, Iâm still not talking about the arts. This is the culture of where you live and work (or go to school or university if you donât consider that working). If you are somewhere that supports new ideas and helps you try them out, then you are more likely to be creative than if the typical response to a new idea is âkeep quiet and get on with what you were supposed to be doingâ.
- Techniques â these are clever little methods to stimulate your brain into action. As theyâre probably the least ordinary of the five ways, Iâll come back to them separately in a moment.
- Environment â where you are and how you feel can make a lot of difference to how good your ideas are. Itâs much easier to get good ideas when you are relaxed and comfortable (though not too relaxed and comfortable, or youâll end up asleep).
- Practice â this is lifeâs way of telling you thereâs no such thing as a free lunch. We all start off with different abilities, but most of them get better with practice, and creativity is just like playing tennis or driving a car in this respect. The more opportunity you get to try out techniques and to come up with new ideas, the easier it becomes to fire off a pile of ideas at a momentâs notice.
- Fun â thereâs a strong link between creativity and fun. Thatâs not to say that as long as youâre having fun you are being creative; just having a great time with your friends doesnât mean you are oozing creativity. But if you are being creative you are likely to be having fun, and if you are in a place where fun is frowned on, it can be hard to be creative.
By working on these five aspects, anyone can get more creative. Some folk will tell you that there are creative people and the rest. (And most of the world falls into the âthe restâ category, though, interestingly, people who have this theory almost always put themselves into the elite creative people group.) Donât listen to these âthe common rabble arenât capable of creative thinkingâ types. Itâs true that some people find it easier than others to come up with really great ideas, but everyone is capable of fresh thinking, and everyone can get better at creativity with the right techniques, environment and plenty of practice.
Getting the technique
This book uses techniques a lot, so itâs worth getting an idea of what they are and why they work. There are some specialist mind techniques, like those we use to help remember things better, but most creativity techniques are ways of getting you to look at things differently and make new connections in your brain.
New connections are essentially what ideas are. Your brain is a huge network of interconnected links â new ideas come from setting up different connections, a bit like putting someone through on one of those mechanical telephone switchboards you sometimes see on old movies. (This is a metaphor too! The brain is a lot more complicated than this.) Generally we like to do things in a certain way. Weâre comfortable with it. Itâs what we know works. But itâs a bit like being in a tunnel. You donât just get tunnel vision, youâre living in this tunnel. You can only go places that are inside the tunnel. The tunnel for your ideas is formed by all the assumptions you make about how things are in the world. Thatâs fine if you can come up with an idea thatâs in your tunnel, but most of them wonât be. Theyâll be out there, in the big wide world outside the tunnel. Techniques are pickaxes to break out of tunnel vision caused by your assumptions and lack of original thought.
Youâll sometimes hear people saying, âWe need to think outside the boxâ. Thatâs just another way to say break out of the tunnel, but it has been mocked so often on TV shows that itâs best not to use it unless you are being ironic.
The strange thing about techniques is that theyâre mechanical. You just follow a set of instructions â often very simple instructions â and, magically, new ideas are created. Some people find this very strange. How can anything as wonderful and human as creativity be mechanical? The point is, itâs not the technique that does the creating, itâs you. The mechanical part is just a matter of knocking some barriers down â then the brain kicks in and does the real work.
Creativity techniques are used a lot in teams, especially at work. Most of this book will be giving you ideas on how to be creative on your own, but a lot of the stuff in here will also work for teams or committees or groups of friends. There are a few techniques that are really only relevant to groups. Probably the best-known creativity technique is brainstorming, which is intended for a group of people. Where necessary weâll bring group techniques in â but the main thing is to remember that ideas come to individual people. Groups are great at improving ideas and combining them to make new ones, but that first spark of originality has to come from someone. Make sure you get some thinking time alone, even if you are working with a team.
The brain, the whole brain, and nothing but the brain
Not only does an idea come from a single person, it comes from a single organ in the body. Thereâs no point trying to be creative with your liver; it wonât get you anywhere. This is brain work, pure and simple. Because of that, it helps to get to know a little bit about the brain, which weâll do without getting into too much gruesome detail.
The brain is a complex device, and one that doesnât come with a user manual. A very simplistic way of looking at the brain is to see it as a series of switches, rather like the bits in a computer. You have around 10 billion of these biological switches called neurons â in computer-speak, 10 giganeurons. That might not sound so much, but the comparison is based on an enormous error. The brain isnât anything like a computer. One of the big differences between brains and computers is that, unlike computer bits, each neuron is capable of interaction with hundreds or thousands of others. The way you can combine 10 billion things together, each potentially linking to hundreds of thousands of others, is astronomically huge. Weâre talking more configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Just to give an idea of how much connectivity there is in there, the dendrites that link the neurons in your brain are the equivalent of having around 93,000 miles of wiring in your head. Thatâs wiring that would stretch around the world four times.
It doesnât do any harm in trying to use your brain more effectively to be aware of its limitations and give it a spot of pampering. One simple way to get better ideas is to be aware that your brain isnât at its best every waking minute of the day. Everyone has times when they are better or worse with the brain (weâll come back to this in more detail later on). Most of us arenât too good at thinking effectively just after a heavy meal. The brain is a big consumer of blood, and when the stomach is making heavy demands on the circulatory system, the brain isnât always at its sharpest.
Most people arenât too bright when they are really tired, either â so last thing at night often isnât best. (Incidentally, this is nothing to do with falling asleep. When you are half asleep you often have some of your best ideas. The brain is better at making new connections when it can operate slowly, drifting from place to place, so a daydreaming state is a good one for having ideas.)
Thereâs something else you should know about your brain: youâve got two of them. A slight exaggeration, but not a huge one. Youâve seen pictures of the brain â itâs not unlike an enormous walnut in appearance. The two halves of the brain you see divided by a line down the middle are totally separate all the way down to the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves linking the brain to the spinal cord right at its base. Broadly speaking, the two sides of the brain control the opposite sides of the body. The left side of your brain is responsible for your right eye, right hand, and so on. (Some animals have even greater functional separation. A dolphin, for example, can sleep on one side of the brain at a time while the other side keeps alert to make sure everythingâs OK.)
However, one thing you can be sure of with the brain: just when you thought you understood it, it turns out be more complicated than you realized. For example, the idea of a left/right split in the brain is only partly true. Your right eye is also connected to the right side of the brain (though with fewer connections than go to the left). This cross-connection is used to compare the information from the two eyes, to help sort out distances in 3D vision. Some animals have much less cross-connection; their eyes act pretty well independently, and they donât worry too much about how far away things are.
This left/right divide was for a long time thought to be responsible for two very different ways your brain works. The left-hand side was said to be responsible for logical work, handling lists and words and numbers, tak...
