(“In the Garden, Contemporary”; courtesy of katxn)
1 – 4. Read Roger van Oeck’s blog Creative Think – Fun Ideas to Stimulate Your Creativity. Roger is best known as the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
5. Look at some of the things they do at Google–a company known for innovation–to stimulate their employee’s creativity:
- Employees Shooting Pool in the Google Lounge
- The Google Idea Board
- The Google Treadmill Pool
- The Google Slide
6. Read my post, Coaxing Creativity. Here’s an excerpt:
As Jack Foster explains in his book, How to Get Ideas
7. Marketing guru Seth Godin has an article on “Real Creativity” on his blog, Seth Godin’s Blog.
8. Here’s a great approach to being more creative:
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, music, you automatically explode every morning like old faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
– Ray Bradbury
9 – 16. SARK is a fabulous author who writes wonderfully creative books that will inspire you to be an artist of life. She claims to be a recovering procrastinator, so she coined the term “micromovements” which consists in taking tiny, tiny, baby steps to be able to still be a procrastinator and at the same time be able to live her creative dreams. You can visit her at http://www.planetsark.com. Some of her books are the following:
- Creative Companion: How to Free Your Creative Spirit
- Sark’s New Creative Companion: Ways To Free Your Creative Spirit
- Make Your Creative Dreams Real: A Plan for Procrastinators, Perfectionists, Busy People, and People Who Would Really Rather Sleep All Day
- The Bodacious Book of Succulence: Daring to Live Your Succulent Wild Life
- Succulent Wild Woman
- Living Juicy: Daily Morsels for Your Creative Soul
- Inspiration Sandwich: Stories to Inspire Our Creative Freedom
- Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper: Gifting the World with Your Words and Stories, and Creating the Time and Energy to Actually Do It
(“Creative Life Chunky Book”; courtesy of katxn)
17. Here’s another post by me on How to Be Creative.
18. Visit interesting websites to get ideas. Here’s a list of 17 Obscure Creativity Sparking Websites.
19. Melissa Donovan offers great tips on her blog, “Writing Forward”, on How to Face the Blank Page When Your Muse is on Vacation.
20. Here’s a list of 100 Simple Ways to Be More Creative on the Job. Here are the first ten:
- Find the most creative people at work and ask for their ideas.
- Brainstorm daily with a co-worker.
- Tape record your ideas on your commute to and from work.
- Present your biggest challenge to a child.
- Take your team off-site for a day.
- Listen more carefully to your inner muse.
- Play music in your office.
- Go for a daily brainstorming walk.
- Ask someone to collaborate with you on your favorite project.
- Exercise during your lunch break.
21. In the book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
22. Hugh MacLeod, an advertising executive with a flair for the creative gives his 26 tried-and-true tips for being truly creative in How to Be Creative (it’s a free PDF download). Some of these are:
- Ignore everybody.
- Put the hours in.
- Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
- Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
- Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
23. Skellie, owner of the blog “skelliwag.org”, compiled an excellent list of 110 + Resources for Creative Minds.
24. Here’s a great squidoo lens on the Creative Life. You can also visit my squidoo lens, How to be More Creative.
25. If you want to be more creative, get enough sleep. An article on CNN, “Study confirms sleep essential for creativity”, indicates that German scientists explain that they can demonstrate that our sleeping brains continue working on problems that baffle us, and the right answer to a problem may come more easily after eight hours of rest. Need help getting enough sleep? Read my post: Sleep Extravaganza: 40 Tips, Tools, and Resources.
26. Laugh. Daniel Goleman, author of “Emotional Intelligence”, had the following to say about laughing and creativity:
“The intellectual benefits of a good laugh are most striking when it comes to solving a problem that demands a creative solution. One study found that people who had just watched a video of television bloopers were better at solving a puzzle long used by psychologists to test creative thinking.”
27. Here’s a post I wrote over at “The Change blog” entitled 4 Steps to Unleash Your Creative Genius.
28. Wake up your right brain, your creativity center. Because the right brain hemisphere controls the left side of your body, you can activate this creativity center by breathing out of only your left nostril, jumping up and down on your left foot, and writing with your left hand. You can also do something artistic such as drawing, playing a musical instrument, creating mandalas, and so on. In addition, meditation stimulates the right brain hemisphere.
29. Create a photo-a-day challenge. Commit to a time frame where you will devotedly take one shot a day, such as 3 months. Take your camera with you everywhere and go outside the box with your images. Be creative and emotionally motivated in your shooting!
30. Here’s a Lifehack article on How to Be a Creative Genius.
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