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The power of visualization is the secret that artists, entrepreneurs, sports figures, and all creative freethinkers have used for centuries.

As just one example, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys fully visualized the sound of each instrument used on Pet Sounds, his breakthrough album. He first heard in his mind the sounds of a wide range of instruments, many of them had never even been thought to be used before in rock songs. This included such unlikely ones as sleigh bells, a trombone, accordion, ukulele, and even Coca-Cola bottles. With his vision resoundingly clear in his mind, he then went into the studio where he was able to direct musicians to play precisely what he had already heard, like a craftsman following a blueprint.1

As an artist, you use your imagination and skill to create work that will communicate effectively what you saw and even felt to your audience. This is inherent in the definition of art by Oxford Dictionary:

The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination…producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

From this you can see that art applies to any creative skill using imagination. It is much broader than simply thinking of art as painting, drawing, sculpture, music, etc. Let’s view art in this wide sense and apply it to any part of life.

A common misconception is that one simply goes forth and works on their craft in the hope of somehow creating art that will be beautiful and have emotional impact. But this would be like a builder with no plans, simply grabbing wood and building materials and putting them in place in the hopes that they will come out fitting well and looking great.

The first and most important step of improving your creativity is learning the skill of “visualization.” It’s another way of saying, “using your ability to imagine or get a mental view of something.”

This term dates back to 1883 and according to the Oxford Dictionary means “the action or fact of visualizing; the power or process of forming a mental picture or vision of something not actually present to the sight; a picture thus formed.” It comes from a Latin word meaning “sight” and an earlier word meaning “to see.”

Keep in mind visualization doesn’t just apply to visual art, as in the case of Wilson’s ability to visualize sounds. A dancer does the same with her movements. A gardener with their design, a parent with an outing for their kids, etcetera.

Take a moment—can you remember a time when you visualized something you created before you set out to make it? It could be a birthday party for a friend, or redecorating a room, a presentation at work—any area of creativity. This is creating with definite purpose or intention, rather just letting it happen and hoping you’ll get what you want.

The Key to Creativity

With all of the steps of the creative cycle, why is visualization the central and most important part in the whole series? Because it guides every single step of the process, without which, as we’ve seen, it would be like trying to travel without a map or plans, or make a movie with no script, or sail a boat without charts. In all of these activities, you will end up wandering around and never achieving your goals, which would be wasteful and very frustrating.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough that the fastest way to elevate your creativity is to visualize the final result before you work your craft.

See with Your Mind’s Eye

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was known as the “father of modern photography” and was one of the most respected photographers of his day. He emphasized that his process was to see in his “mind’s eye” the photograph that he intended to create, in order to convey what he “saw and felt” at that moment. He said, “I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.”

Equivalent here means “something that is considered to be equal to or have the same effect, value, or meaning as something else,” according to Encarta College Dictionary. It comes from a Latin word meaning “be strong.” Thus, when you convey the equivalent of what you saw and felt, it can be very strong for the viewer.

Having a “vision of life,” of what you see and feel when you view a particular scene, is what sparks the whole creative process. You are conveying a message including emotions to your audience that they can connect with. This same process applies to writing, music, decorating, or any art form.

Electric Visualization

My first major visualization of a photograph had a rather strange beginning in the eighth grade: Peninsula School, the grade school that I attended from age two to twelve, valued creativity, adventure, and freethinking above all else, which is why I had such a strong beginning in these areas early on. So, by the eighth grade I already considered myself a photographer and brought my camera along on our class trip in May shortly before graduating. As was traditional, the upper classes would take weeklong trips in the fall and spring, often with a specific purpose. This was our spring trip with the goal of finding the extremely rare California Condors, which were nearly extinct by that point.

Our class only had about twenty students which caravanned down the central coast of California in a green VW bus, my teacher’s bright red Land Rover, and a tan Ford station wagon. Leaving from the San Francisco Peninsula, we wound our way south on Highway One through the artistic town of Carmel, then past the jagged cliffs on the coastal ribbon of a highway to the bohemian Big Sur, and then continuing south to the small sleepy fishing village of Morro Bay.

Arriving at the campground stiff and pent-up from the drive, to our pre-teen way of thinking, it seemed like the very best thing we could do was to get into a water fight, which many of us engaged in with fervor, resulting in soaked clothes, but now back in form for adventure. The wet clothes left me chilled and feeling oddly apprehensive.

My friend Bob and I took off to search the nearby area of our campground and came across two tall pines that were begging to be climbed. But we also had the wild notion of peeing off the tops when we reached them, each from our own tree: two boys intent on marking their territory like a couple of wolf cubs.

The tree I had chosen had its top cut off, but from my perspective I couldn’t see why. I soon discovered as I made haste up the tree: The limbs were lopped off because there were power lines cutting right over the top. But feeling no sense of danger, I secured my spot, shouted over to my friend, “Hey there’s power lines over here,” and unzipped and let the pee flow forth, arching widely and cascading down like a miniature waterfall. With the lines less than six inches away, I remember thinking as I climbed the rest of the way up, I’d better be careful when I turn around at the top to climb down.

Then there was a deafening buzz in my head and a zap of painful electric shock to my left arm as I unwittingly brushed my wet jacket against one of the lines. I was literally blown backwards out of the tree. In slow motion, my limp body bounced down one branch after another, on its descent from the tree. After the horrible shock, my mind and body shut off like a circuit breaker tripping with an overload. I seemed to watch my body acting like a rag doll dropped from the top, flailing on its way down. From the blankness of mind came only one repeated line, what I was trying to say to my friend, like cartoon thought balloons coming out of my head, “I’m dead…I’m dead…I’m dead!”

Finally, as time stretched like salt-water taffy, having hit eight or ten branches, I collided with the ground, thankfully cushioned by decades of pine needle debris. A pause, and I started to breathe, after what felt like an hour, but was less than twenty seconds. Very stunned, I stood up, oddly first taking notice that my fly was still unzipped. Breathing in I smelled the dreadful stench of burnt flesh. I kept saying, “I’m dead, I’m dead.”

Bob must have made haste down his tree and came over to see what had happened. He looked at me and said, “Hey Marc, you’re not dead!”

As life came back to my limbs and my mind awakened, my death-thought suddenly inverted like a high diver doing a flip, and I said “Holy hell! I’m alive, I’m alive!”

I stood up, taking stock of my situation, moving my arms and legs to see if anything was broken. Amazingly everything moved, nothing broken, hardly even a scratch. My limp body acted like rubber and simply bounced down the tree limbs like a sack filled with tennis balls.

I felt oddly different, having my first brush with death. Something had changed. I understood the apprehension I had felt earlier, it was looming like a thunderstorm that was now dissipating, the dark clouds breaking up. The horror of this experience was being replaced by the warm glow of realizing I was indeed alive. I am alive! I thought.

Going back to our campsite, we both told our teacher what had happened in an overlapping, excited staccato fashion, as though spitting it out quickly would bring him on board faster, which seemed very important—to have an adult learn what had just happened.

Looking very concerned, he asked me to take my jacket off, with its row of neat burn holes up the arm to the shoulder. With my jacket removed, those same holes could be seen on my skin—burned through the flesh. He cleaned the burns and applied ointment and small Band-Aids to the burns, but as there was nothing else wrong with me, that was the extent of the first aid. I asked him if he thought there was damage to my brain? With a steady look and a kind smile, he reassured me that I looked fine.

Now with that incident over, it was time to move on to the next adventure: as sunset was nearing, our teacher said to load up the cars to head over to the sand dunes nearby. So off we were again in our caravan of Land Rover, VW, and Ford, to the designated dunes.

Arriving, we all jumped out and ran to the top of the sand dunes. Still shaky from the whole very recent experience, I still had the presence of mind to bring my camera. My friends were busy scrambling around hooting and kicking up sand. Then a group found the top and jumped off. I captured a few frames from the side with my beloved Minolta A5 film camera, but that wasn’t particularly interesting. The sun was setting behind them, so I went down about twenty-five feet below them on the sand dune. With a flash (a good one this time) I had a vision to capture them in the air from the bottom as they jumped off—with the sun behind, they would be perfectly silhouetted.

Quickly assuming my role, like a director on a movie set, I called out directions:

“Guys, back up over the crest of the sand dune and when I yell ‘run!’, run as fast as you can together and jump in the air when I yell ‘jump!’ ”

Sensing my purpose, I had their attention instantly, which is no small feat if you’ve ever tried to focus the attention of a group of twelve-year-olds busy playing. With the group at the ready, I moved into position, focused my camera at the right spot, I set the shutter to 1/125th of a second, aperture f/8.

Following my orders perfectly, they backed up and on my command to run, came charging toward me, like calling “action!” as a director. Then, as they hit the top of the dune I yelled “jump!” and they took off in the air. I anticipated their motion exactly and was able to capture them in a perfect arc. My visualization was complete and that moment captured forever in this one image, their joy of being alive and free, resonating with my recent feeling of being near death—then suddenly being alive and creating this split second that has lasted a lifetime.

I pressed the shutter at the exact “decisive moment” to capture their graceful motion, a split second later it all fell apart into random motion.

Many years later, Caroline, on the far left with her hands in the air, wrote to me about her experience:

“I was twelve years old, just coming into my adult consciousness, and experiencing one of the happiest years I’d ever known, in the wonderful community that was our class and our school. It was a glorious feeling to jump off the edge of the dune, all together, and that was captured exquisitely by Marc. A month or so later, the photo appeared on the cover of our student-made yearbook, enshrining that moment as an emblem for our class. It became for me a symbol of one of the happiest times of my life.

“As I look at the photo now, those feelings come back vividly, although with some perspective. Part of the thrill of jumping was that we were together, on our own, and the moment was caught by one of us—creating an expression of our new selves by ourselves, with no adults involved. The ensuing years have been rewarding in many ways, but rarely as carefree and joyful as that moment. In the right atmosphere, surrounded by the right people, a spirit can soar.”

It was strange to move so rapidly from dark to light, but as I found many times later, not totally unusual to find a near-death experience springing into a fully alive and fully aware state.

Life Lessons from This Experience

1.Look up before you climb a tree that’s cut off at the top. Translated: pay close attention to your environment dude!

2.No matter how you get there, being fully alive opens the doors to creativity.

3.Visualize your art.

4.But then act to make it happen.

5.As a subtext of this—be willing to direct people to bring about your vision: Don’t leave it to chance.

6.Then be fully prepared with your tools so you don’t miss the opportunity.

7.Capture your art at the decisive moment.

How Do You Strengthen Your Visualization “Muscles”?

I didn’t write “learn how to visualize,” because you already know how to do it. As it turns out, the ability to visualize is “standard equipment” from our earliest age. In fact, when we are kids it might be its strongest (the previous story as an example), and alas, as we grow older we often hear excuses for not being able to imagine and create as we once did. But the visualization ability of the mind is powerful. It just may need some regular exercise to get back in shape.

Can you remember the wonder you had as a child and the flexibility your imagination had? It’s that ability we want to focus on at this stage of creativity. I am so grateful that I made creativity a major part of my life, it has kept me young by causing me to continue to imagine.

Feed Your Creativity: Go to Museums

Here’s some Damn Good Advice from the book of the same title by George Lois, a source of inspiration for me. He is one of the most creative people I know; in fact, he has said, “Creativity can solve almost any problem—the creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” Among his many accomplishments, he has designed ninety-two covers for Esquire magazine, so listen closely to his advice about feeding your creativity:

“You must continuously feed the inner beast that sparks and inspires. I contend that the DNA of talent is stored within the great museums of the world. Mysteriously, the history of the art of mankind can inspire breakthrough conceptual thinking in any field.”

Take George’s advice and spend plenty of time looking at art (he does it weekly on Sundays). But when you look, don’t just glance and say, “That’s great. That’s strange,” etc. Really look deeply.

Here’s the process I suggest: bring your notebook with you to take notes or sketch as you look. If you can’t go to a museum, you can do this with books, but don’t do it on your computer—you should get as close to the original art as possible.

First, you can select a genre of art that is similar to what you want to create. But you needn’t be too selective, it seems any form of creation could be the trigger you need and sometimes the most disparate will be the one that does that.