This link has been bookmarked by 26 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 May 2008, by Chris Lott.
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13 Jul 08
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There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression.
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The first and most important competency is “capturing
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The second competency is called “challenging”
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The third area is “broadening.”
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And the last competency is “surrounding,”
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I’ve mentioned the morning pages, which sounds like your capturing, and the second technique I teach everybody—the artist “date” or “outing,” I call it—is to take an adventure once a week, which probably involves both broadening and challenging. The third tool is to walk out the door for 20 minutes or so and see what happens to your thinking. When people walk, they often begin to integrate the insights and intuitions that they have had through morning pages and outings.
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Creative people are productive. They may have lots of ideas that don’t work, but the point is that they have lots of ideas.
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There’s also a stereotype that creativity is just involved in the generation of ideas. But after the ideas are generated, you then have to evaluate them, sift through them, embellish them, repair them, revise them and get them tested, which all means that the creative process is actually quite complex.
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Never say, give me three ideas for this; always say, give me at least three. When tasks are open-ended, a lot more ideas are generated. I also like to use what I call “ultimate” problems with kids. Those are problems that have no real solutions. Children have great fun with problems like those. Ask them questions like “How could you get a dog to fly?” or “How could you make the sky a different color?” You can also supply your kids with idea boxes and folders—special places for putting drawings and poems and scraps of anything new. That encourages capturing on an ongoing basis and tells children that their new ideas have value.
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27 Jun 08
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20 Jun 08
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05 Jun 08
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31 May 08
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30 May 08
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In a discussion with Scientific American Mind executive editor Mariette DiChristina, three noted experts on creativity, each with a very different perspective and background, reveal powerful ways to unleash your creat�ive self.
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29 May 08
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There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. Your morning pages, Julia, are a perfect example of a capturing technique. There are many ways to capture new ideas. Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize for work based on an idea about cell biology that he almost failed to capture. He had the idea in his sleep, woke up and scribbled the idea on a pad but found the next morning that he couldn’t read his notes or remember the idea. When the idea turned up in his dreams the following night, he used a better capturing technique: he put on his pants and went straight to his lab!
The second competency is called “challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.
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But you’ve got to capture now and evaluate later. A big mistake people make is to start visualizing the criticism or the feedback while they’re still generating. That can shut you right down.
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