The Creativity Challenge

Design, Experiment, Test, Innovate, Build, Create, Inspire, and Unleash Your Genius

Tanner Christensen

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781440588341
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Creativity

As seen on Inc. com Discover your "Aha" moment--right now!What's the best way to become more creative? Just change how you think! This book challenges you to go against your default ways of thinking in order to write, design, and build something extraordinary. Featuring more than 100 challenges, exercises, and prompts, each page guides you as you push past the way you normally see the world and uncover all-new possibilities and ideas. The Creativity Challenge teaches you that you already have immense creative potential in you--you just need to tap into it.Whether you're feeling stumped or uninspired, these creativity prompts will help you ditch typical thinking patterns and finally unleash the possibilities hidden within your mind.

CONVERGENT
1. PEOPLE WATCH

Research from New York University and Tel Aviv University has shown that you’re more inclined to think creatively when you imagine yourself removed from a problem or situation. Imagining yourself in the mind of somebody else, for example, is a simple way to trick your brain into seeing things in new ways. The act of people watching is one way to do just that. As you watch strangers, you can imagine how they might handle a situation. That thought process allows for ideas that would otherwise be unrealistic or limited by your personal way of thinking. After all, you might not act a certain way, but a stranger could. Imagining how a stranger might act makes it possible for you to think of more radical and imaginative ideas than you might be used to, simply because it’s not you acting them out, but someone else you’re watching.

YOUR CHALLENGE:

Go to a public place, like a shopping center or university library, and quickly write a short story for some different people you see walking about. Combine the different traits and actions of your “characters” into one compelling story.

DIVERGENT
2. LIST 100 ALTERNATIVE USES

In 1967, a man named J.P. Guilford came up with a fun creative test called Alternative Uses. The test works like this: You think of an object—like a chair, a hat, a book, or really anything—then try to list as many possible uses as you can for that item. The alternative uses you think up allow you to see the object in an entirely new light, simply because you’ll have to strain your brain to come up with a number of original ideas.

For example: this book (or the device you’re reading it on) could not only be used as a book, it could be used as a hat, as a doorstop, or as a way to abruptly and painfully get someone’s attention after throwing it at them (please don’t do that, though).

YOUR CHALLENGE:

Come up with a list of at least 100 different uses for this book (or whatever device you’re reading it on). You’ve already got three ideas to start!

LATERAL
3. WRITE ABOUT A UNIQUE SITUATION

Writing requires you to physically move your hand or fingers, using fine motor control. Writing also means that part of your brain is reading back the words as you write, using a completely different part of your brain (the visual and mental processing parts) than the motorized area. Reading as you write allows you to recapture and rethink the words as they come out onto the paper or screen.

Because of these two distinct functions, when you constrain yourself to write about a specific topic (say, a unique situation that recently occurred in your life, like catching up with an old friend or trying that new coffee place down the street), your brain approaches the task in a way no other approach allows it to: by using different parts of processing at the same time. This allows you to see the event that occurred in a more creative and imaginative way, raising themes and ideas you might originally have missed during the experience.

YOUR CHALLENGE:

Write about a unique situation you recently experienced in your life. Write at least two full pages detailing the experience without worrying about grammar or perfecting what you write.

AESTHETIC
4. CHANGE ONE THING

We tend to fall into routines easily. Day in and day out, we do, say, see, and think more or less the same things repeatedly. We lose sight of how each small piece of a whole affects the outcome. One exercise you can use to break routine and see things in new ways is to change the aesthetic elements of something you encounter on a regular basis. For example, imagine what would happen if your keyboard were 1,000 times bigger, or if your hands were 1,000 times smaller.

Imagining what would happen if you changed one thing you do on a daily basis—and thinking about how that change would affect everything else—is a clever way to conquer seemingly impossible scenarios and consider how even the smallest thing you deal with impacts everything else you do.

YOUR CHALLENGE:

Imagine what would happen if something in your life—your computer, your hands or eyes, your clothing, etc.—changed aesthetically (if it were much bigger, or smaller, or a different shape). Act out how you would behave if the change were real.

EMERGENT
5. ACT LIKE YOU’RE THREE AGAIN

Three-year-olds don’t have to deal with the same rules and realities adults do. Because of that, children tend to be more imaginative and creative with their ideas. They see possibilities where the rest of us see rules, boundaries, or impossibilities. That’s why they’re famous for writing on walls—you see a perfectly painted living room that shouldn’t be touched; they see a blank canvas. Even if it’s just for 30 minutes, seeing life from the angle of a semi-careless child can give you a new perspective on how you spend your time and deal with household problems or work challenges. For that reason alone, it’s valuable to imagine yourself acting as you would if you were just a child: free spirited, boundless, uncontrollably creative, and unafraid to try new things.

YOUR CHALLENGE:

Act as if you were three years old for a day (or at least part of a day). Jump on your bed, be extremely picky about what you eat, and tackle the day the same way you did when you were three years old. Share the experience with a friend for bonus points.

CONVERGENT
6. SET AN UNREALISTIC GOAL

Pressure can be a debilitating thing, particularly for creative efforts. But an interesting thing happens if you give yourself even more pressure, to the point of making something you want to do seem impossible: All doubts, fears, and second-guessing go out the window. This freedom to try, in turn, makes a great environment for creative thinking, because you know the end result isn’t likely to happen, so you’ll give it everything you’ve got, knowing you’re going to fail regardless of what you do. You may even surprise yourself by actually achieving the impossible.

YOUR CHALLENGE:

Set an unrealistic goal for yourself today. An unrealistic goal could be to come up with 1,000 ideas in one minute, to write 20,000 words by lunch, or to talk with a friend for 13 hours without stopping.

DIVERGENT
7. REVERSE-BRAINSTORM

Brainstorming is a helpful way to explore how ideas are connected, by drawing them out and seeing how they relate to one another. So what’s a reverse brainstorm? It’s a way to explore how seemingly unrelated ideas might be connected. By uncovering everything that’s not associated with something you want to do, you uncover things you may have otherwise overlooked by being too intently focused on what you do want to do.

For example: if you wanted to reverse-brainstorm how to write a book, you would think of all the ideas related to not writing a book, such as:

• Not buying a notebook or pen,
• Not thinking of story lines,
• Not sitting down to write, etc.

YOUR CHALLENGE:

Reverse what you want to do (e.g., not write a book, not be more creative, not learn a new skill) and list out what it would take to make that happen (not buying tools to write, being as boring as possible, not asking for help, etc.). Then reverse the ideas you come up with to see if any stand out as solutions to what you originally wanted to do.

LATERAL
8. THINK BIG TO SMALL

If you stop to think about all of the tiny parts that make up any one thing, you could be thinking about it for quite some time. There are almost an infinite number of things that influence and impact any larger thing, right down to atoms and smaller mo...