Boost Your Creativity For Good With This Long-Term Strategy
A million authors have written a million articles about amping up your creativity for a minute or two at a time. This article is different, because I intend to help you develop a full strategy for boosting your creativity whenever you need it and as much as you need.
The first thing to get a grasp of is exactly what creativity is. Creativity is novelty. When someone does something unexpected, we refer to that as a creative choice.
The only way to make unexpected decisions is to see some of the unexpected options which are open to you. This is what people tend to find the most difficult, because there is ultimately no way to really expect the unexpected. You have to find a way to open your eyes to something that has been in front of you all along. And that is creativity. Creativity is perspective.
So here’s how to open your eyes:
1. Clear your mind.
Often this is actually all that is needed. We get so wrapped up in looking at a problem from a particular perspective that all we need is a little bit of distance in order to perceive the solution.
You should, of course, try to clear your mind using a method that is congruent with the problem at hand. If you’re a mathematician who has been quietly contemplating a problem for three years, a bath could do the trick. If you’re an ad-man in need of a manic flight of last-minute ideas, on the other hand, a moment of contemplation may not be for you this time around—try going out for a run. If you’re somewhere in between, a good walk can work wonders; walking has a hypnotic rhythm that can focus your mind and allow unconscious processes to exert a greater influence.
2. Exercise and get plenty of sleep.
Yes, I know. Blah blah blah. But, there is growing evidence that regular exercise and sleep are both powerfully related to your mental health and cognitive functioning. Specifically, exercise prevents depression and improves mental focus, and sleep seems to be your brain’s primary way of consolidating your memories and perceptions. Since all of these will directly affect the depth of perspective that you have to work with, they will both enhance your creativity.
3. Undo burnout.
If you work all the time like I do, it’s easy to get burned out. Give yourself some contrast. Schedule a day when you will not leave the bed. Read, watch movies, order out, drink champagne. Ideally, you’ll have company for this one.
4. Commune with nature.
If you’re spending all of your time inside, surrounded by the same stale old decorations and furniture, the same straight lines and white walls, then it’s no wonder you’re in a slump.
The things we see outside of us, especially the things we see over and over again, are literally recreated inside our brains. Not just our minds, but our actual physical brains. The moral of the story? You need to expose yourself to nature. The outside world has trees and birds and all manner of unpredictable things. You need some more dirt and bugs in your life. Make a mud pie and seriously consider eating it.
5. Record your dreams.
Your dreams are your very own natural wellspring of creativity—Freud called them the royal road to the unconscious.
Whether or not you are able to remember, you actually dream every single night, and you do so throughout the night. Periods of dream sleep tend to cycle in about every 90 minutes, and get longer as the night goes on. So an extra hour of sleep in the morning can yield a substantial increase in total dream activity.
Keep a journal by your bedside and resolve to wake up and immediately start writing down your experiences while they’re fresh in your mind. It may be a little difficult at first, but short, vague entries will soon become long, detailed ones. Then go back and re-read your dreams and try to understand what they might be trying to tell you—try to adopt the dream’s perspective. Doing this will definitely get you more in touch with your creativity. For help learning how to interpret dreams, why not submit a dream here?
6. Try out a new medium.
What are you actually trying to do creatively? Write? Market? Design? Draw? It’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of doing the same things the same way. Break out of that old pattern by switching to a medium you’re less familiar with.
Try watercolors or clay, poetry or bongo drums. Really struggle with it; have fun; go crazy. If you can’t seem to let yourself go, make yourself a promise that you can throw away the results in one week. Don’t worry about skill, just let it flow. Then think about whether the way you’ve approached this new problem might be able to tell you anything about the way you approach the old problem.
7. Brainstorm drunkenly.
If you actually have to get drunk to do this then so be it, but you can probably do without.
If you’re in a creative rut, you’re probably just a little gunked up. You need to squirt out whatever you’ve got at random in order to get through all the crap, so don’t worry about whether you’re getting results. Just sit down and write down absolutely everything that comes to mind, no matter how irrelevant it might seem. Later you can go back and separate the wheat from the chaff, and if you look carefully you may even find some hidden gems. It may even be that your idea of what is “good” is more rigid than you’d like to believe, so recruit some trusted help in sifting through your ramblings.
8. Activate your imagination.
Creativity is really just the ability to adopt a novel perspective, so you need to stretch your eyeballs out a little bit. Allow yourself some time to daydream, and really get into it. Make a special costume or uniform that you can wear when you know you need to go really off-the-wall. Build a fort out of sheets and chairs. 
In order to stay reliably creative, you’re going to have to be reliably flexible, and that means actively breaking your own routines. Try to see how many different routes home you can find, or how many different ways you can think of to greet your co-workers in the morning. Try like hell to avoid ever living the same moment more than twice.
Also, and I hate to tell you this, but if you want to be a creative genius, you’re going to have to end up behaving a little strangely sometimes. Embrace the strange.
9. Really stretch.
Try to embrace an entire worldview that is completely opposed to your own. If you’re an atheist, go to church and allow yourself to really believe every word—let yourself feel in awe of the profound implications. If you’re a die-hard conservative, go to a rally and genuinely try to save something. If you’re an intellectual, go to the most brain-dead movie you can find and hoot and holler at the screen. Act as if you were someone else from an entirely different background, and perspective will come.
To recap, creativity is the ability to adopt a novel perspective. This means that all you have to do to be consistently creative is to allow yourself to consistently see things you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. So mix it up a little. Go places you wouldn’t go, think things you wouldn’t think, and behave in ways you wouldn’t behave. Develop a healthy scientific curiosity about it all—I wonder what would happen if I did this? What if I started from a different set of assumptions?
Keep your body healthy, your mind sharp, and cultivate this sense of wonder, and you will always be the most creative kid on your block!
David Godot
[...] Godot presents Boost Your Creativity For Good With This Long-Term Strategy saying, “This article describes a long-term strategy for boosting creativity and developing a [...]
Thanks for a number of excellent perspectives. Many artists have tried to “adopt a novel perspective” or “stretch their eyeballs out a little bit” through using substances like drugs and alcohol. But a number of people with exceptional creative abilities have used those substances as self-medication to ease the pain of their high sensitivity, as well as a way to enhance thinking and creativity. Sometimes they risk addiction. Beethoven reportedly drank wine about as often as he wrote music, and was an alcoholic or at least a problem-drinker. Actor Johnny Depp admits getting drunk to deal with his sensitivity, and having to go to functions like press appearances. More in my article Gifted, Talented, Addicted.