It’s hard to pinpoint the exact meaning of what it is to be creative. We may understand how to accomplish basic tasks like brushing our teeth, washing our laundry and filling up our cars when they need petrol – but finding a routine for creativity isn’t as obvious.
There’s no universally accepted method for increasing your creativity. But if you want to learn how to be creative, your best bet is to follow the advice and practices of the world’s most creative people.
Depending on who you ask about being innovative, the answers can vary widely. But despite the variation, there are clear commonalities when it comes to the habits of the creative elite.
These are the common habits that help elite innovators think outside the box and continuously improve the world’s processes and technology, one idea at a time:
Challenge assumptions
Creativity isn’t something you do, it’s a mindset. In order for innovation to occur, an open mind must meet a presumably “solved” problem. There are so many everyday rituals and occurrences that happen all around us that we don’t even question.
But the innovative mind is always questioning.
By forming the simple habit of asking questions, you can expand your understanding of the everyday systems and rituals we’re exposed to.
Ask yourself how you know what you presumably know. Ask yourself why you do things a certain way, and be curious as to the history and reasoning behind it. What would the pros and cons be of changing things up? What were the pros and cons of prior methods? What problems needed solutions before, and what problems need solutions now?
Identify patterns
Developing your curiosity is a great start, but it’s not enough to make you a true innovator on its own. You need to get good at pattern recognition as well – identifying consistencies between otherwise unrelated industries and having the skills to apply innovations from one field to another.
If you’re good at identifying patterns, you can learn from the disruption and breakthroughs that industries totally unrelated to yours experience. You’ll be able to understand why a solution worked, which will help you apply similar conceptual thinking to your own field.
An obvious example of this in action comes courtesy of Uber. Uber disrupted the transportation industry, providing a smarter way to get around. Shortly after, UberEATS was developed, providing a smarter way to order takeout.
Experiment
Finally, the last thing innovators always do is experiment.
It’s great to think about ways to improve known processes and technologies, but experimentation is what makes curiosity valuable. True learning happens through action, not theory. And if you’re never testing your crazy ideas, you can’t learn enough to produce breakthrough innovation.
Even if you have an idea you’re only 20% sure about, give it an honest test run. It might not work the first time around, but your learnings might lead you to a promising second iteration.
Thomas Edison said it best with regard to the light bulb. When asked about failure and the value of experimentation, his response was, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ideas that won’t work.”
