We are not only born to be creative, we find greater fulfilment when we are creative.
Next in the curated creativity series, let's get into the flow.
Many of us would have come across the term or concept of 'flow', formulated by the researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His research looked at answering the question ‘what makes us happy in everyday life?’. His early focus was on artists and scientists to understand why they undertook and found happiness in their work. He concluded they found meaning in their activities, through continued practice, to achieve a higher level of mastery that allowed them to enter a special state of mind. He called the complete immersion in an activity ‘flow’ and believed when people are completely involved in the process of creating, losing themselves in that activity, they’re truly happy. So the following are posts that center of how we might achieve a flow state.
The Organised Creative and How to Maximise Your Flow State
What do Neil Young, Stevie Wonder and Sting all have in common? Yes they’re great musicians and they’re all highly creative. According to Dr Daniel Levitin, neuroscientist, author and musician, they also have maximised their flow states to enable highly insightful creative outcomes.
When you’re engaged in any kind of creative pursuit, one of the goals is to organise your time to maximise your creativity. So how can we arrange our lives to maximise the possibility that flow periods will occur, as well as to enable us to stay in this flow state?
How the Goldilocks Principle Can Help Us Be Better Creatives and Reach a State of Flow
The many forms of creativity have at their foundation two distinct ways of problem solving. Consider what happens when you’re confronted with a problem. Do you sit down and analytically work through it, or do you just wait for a sudden insight where a solution pops into your head out of mid-air?
More often you probably have experienced both when tackling problems or bringing creative ideas, products and services to life. These are the so called ‘analysis verses insight’ creative modes. Let's find out how understanding this can assist to reach a flow state.
Are People More Creative Alone or Together?
It appears the brain doesn’t care if you’re an introvert or an extrovert. It needs solo- and group-time to be creative–in that order.
The way to maximize creative potential is to flow between being alone and being in a group, and back again. While collaboration clearly assists in generating ideas, both research and history show the importance of solitude and being alone with one’s thoughts in order to generate real breakthroughs. But they also need time with one another. When you join a group, you’re igniting a shower of sparks that might light it up.
Picasso Verses Cezanne... Which Are You?
David Galenson, an economist, has an interesting theory about innovation and creativity and points to creators as being either ‘Conceptual Innovators’ or ‘Experimental Innovation’.
When looking at modern art, he believes there are two different trajectories that great artists take. Conceptual Innovators are those that do their best work early in their life, someone like Picasso, who bursts on to the art scene, epitomizes the conceptual innovator. While Experimental Innovators are those who never have a clear easily articulated idea, and work by trial and error. Cezanne coming back to the same subject with no clear linear plan, would fit this description. So read on and see which are you?
I’ve been immersed in creativity, problem solving and critical thinking for a long time and this has involved taking on many varied and different roles. The more I thought about the different roles the more I saw that these often aligned with a stage in the problem solving process.
This became so much clearer when I came across the work of Dr Gerard Puccio, from the US International School of Creativity. He with fellow researchers developed an amazing set of tools, methods and self-awareness of our own thinking style that could assist no matter where we were in the problem solving cycle. This post explains the FourSight Thinking Profile assessment.
Book Review
This book by Peter Simms provides a step-wise process that encourages people who have big ideas to start small. It’s based on the proposition that little bets are made up of concrete actions that enable us to progress by exploring and discovery.
The chapter headings tell it all.. from growth mindset, to failing fast to learn, incorporating play into idea development, learning to ask the ‘right’ questions, to acknowledging small wins… This could be the manifesto for anyone wanting to go from where there are now to an entrepreneur. A key message – while you have big dreams, start small and keep on learning to develop your project. Long live the ‘BETA’ experimental testing approach to project development.