7 Ways To Stimulate Your Capacity For Creativity
I pulled this list from an article on Fast Company online. It was written by Don Peppers, the author of Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage
In it Don writes:
"If you want to generate more innovative ideas, then you should purposely expose your mind to radically different facts and unusual, often conflicting concepts."
This is great advice for musicians stuck in a creative rut. Try some of the Don's ideas on the list and let me know if they worked for you by commenting below.
- Move to a different apartment, or a different office location, or a different job. Change your environment, for no reason other than to make the change.
- Drive a different route to work or school, or to church, or to the club. Take a long cut, on purpose.
- Spend 30 minutes a day for two or three weeks with a language course from Pimsleur
or Rosetta Stone
- Brainstorm different ways to use a common tool (like a hammer, or a Phillips screwdriver).
- Go on a physical-fitness campaign. Work out until you break a sweat at least one time every day. Seriously. Every single day.
- Memorize something useless but ambitious, like pi to 100 digits, or the names of all the major chess openings, or all the U.S. vice presidents and the presidents they served.
- Meet one new person a day for a whole month. Talk to them, converse with them, get to know them. Talk with each of them frequently in subsequent days. You can easily do this online.
You can read the entire article over at Fast Company magazine.
Wow, that office space looks fantastic, creativity is born out of marrying the two things that don’t usually mix and it looks as if Google have done that here. I wonder if I could hire meeting rooms out from them? Ha.
That would be cool, Jonny. Although it looks like you would always have to wear a jacket. ;)