Читать книгу How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas: Get Curious, Get Adventurous, Get Creative - Chris Barez-Brown, Крис Барез-Браун - Страница 14

You have some pretty amazing capabilities! As a human being you are naturally creative. And although our creative instincts tend to become suppressed, we have all the resources to change that around.

As time goes on, we are taught that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way of doing things. As a result, as adults our creativity often comes out more through luck than application. The ice-cream cone is a case in point. It was created by Ernest Hamwi in 1904 at the St Louis World’s Fair. He was selling waffles and next door to him was an ice-cream vendor who ran out of dishes. He rolled a waffle to put the ice cream in and the rest is history. Unfortunately, these lucky instances are few and far between.

As an example of the natural creativity of children, there’s a lovely story I came across recently about Johnny in a physics lesson. The teacher asks Johnny, ‘If I give you this barometer, how would you find out the height of that church steeple?’

Johnny, sure as you like, says, ‘That’s easy! I’d find the vicar and ask him if I were to give him this fabulous barometer, would he tell me the height of the steeple!’

The teacher says, ‘Wrong, Johnny. Tell me how you would really do it.’

So Johnny then responds with, ‘Well, I would climb to the top of the church, drop the barometer to the ground and count how long it takes to hit the ground. Knowing the accelerating force of gravity, I could work it out from that.’

At which point the teacher took a very dim view of Johnny’s future indeed. The problem was that the teacher was looking for one particular methodology to solve this question.

For him there was a right and a wrong answer. And yet Johnny had managed to create other great ways to solve it.

Throughout our lives we are trained to do the right thing, the right way. It begins with our parents, continues in school and gets reinforced at work and throughout life. We do need to learn how the world works, how to think logically and be effective in what we do, but by doing so we often lose the ability to be Johnny – to think tangentially and solve our puzzles in a creative way.

The great news is that we still have the same creative capabilities that we had when we were young – we have just forgotten how to use them.

Our brains are able to take in incredible amounts of information and automatically make unconscious connections between seemingly unconnected facts. Computers the world over are dwarfs to our giants. You can take information in so efficiently through your senses that you can even perceive the difference made by one single photon of light. This information is then processed non-stop by your incredible brain that works tirelessly.

We can then engage in a rich gamut of emotions that help us understand where our creative passions lie. We experience intuition. We even wake up in the middle of the night and have ideas come to us as if by magic. And we have the ability to take someone else’s ideas and improve on them.

Each of us has more or less the same ability to create, because we are all born with the same natural ability. We might need a bit of a mental workout, but the creative muscles are still there. We have ideas every single day. We can’t help it – we are human. The remarkable gift of human creativity is responsible for the very best advances made in human society.

Most importantly, you have the capability to improve your creative output every day for the rest of your life. You can choose to change your focus away from routine and habit, and instead experiment with newness and difference. If you make this your focus, this will have a life-changing impact on you.

In short, you have all the raw material to be truly brilliant in having ideas – in fact, you were built for it!