• he artist is not a special person, each one of us is a special kind of artist. Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker. The only difference between people who are creative and people who are not is a simple belief. Creative people believe they are creative.
• Creative thinking is work. You must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of creating new and different ideas. Then you must have patience to persevere against all adversity. All creative geniuses work passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which are bad.
• Thomas Edison created 3000 different ideas for lighting systems before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music, including forty-one symphonies and some forty-odd operas and masses, during his short creative life.
• You must go through the motions of being creative. When you are producing ideas, you are replenishing neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to what your brain is doing, which in turn is responding to challenges. When you go through the motions of trying to come up with new ideas, you are energizing your brain by increasing the number of contacts between neurons. The more times you try to get ideas, the more active your brain becomes and the more creative you become.
• Your brain is not a computer. Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than computes them like a computer. It thrives on the creative energy of feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination.
• There is no one right answer. Reality is ambiguous. Aristotle said it is either A or not-A. It cannot be both. The sky is either blue or not blue.
• Nothing kills creativity faster than self-censorship of ideas while generating them. Think of all your ideas as possibilities and generate as many as you can before you decide which ones to select. The world is not black or white. It is grey.
• Never stop with your first good idea. Always strive to find a better one and continue until you have one that is still better.
• Expect the experts to be negative. The more expert and specialized a person becomes,  the more their mindset becomes narrowed and the more fixated they become on confirming what they believe to be absolute. Consequently, when confronted with new and different ideas,  their focus will be on conformity
• Trust your instincts. Don't allow yourself to get discouraged. Albert Einstein was expelled from school because his attitude had a negative effect on serious students; he failed his university entrance exam and had to attend a trade school for one year before finally being admitted; and was the only one in his graduating class who did not get a teaching position because no professor would recommend him. One professor said Einstein was "the laziest dog" the university ever had. Beethoven's parents were told he was too stupid to be a music composer. Charles Darwin's colleagues called him a fool and what he was doing "fool's experiments" when he worked on his theory of biological evolution. Walt Disney was fired from his first job on a newspaper because "he lacked imagination."
• There is no such thing as failure. Whenever you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail. You have learned something that does not work. Always ask "What have I learned about what doesn't work?"
• You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are. Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral. They have no meaning. You give them meaning by the way you choose to interpret them.
• Always approach a problem on its own terms. Do not trust your first perspective of a problem as it will be too biased toward your usual way of thinking. Always look at your problem from multiple perspectives. Always remember that genius is finding a perspective no one else has taken.
• Learn to think unconventionally. Creative geniuses do not think analytically and logically. Conventional, logical, analytical thinkers are exclusive thinkers which means they exclude all information that is not related to the problem. They look for ways to eliminate possibilities. Creative geniuses are inclusive thinkers which mean they look for ways to include everything, including things that are dissimilar and totally unrelated. Generating associations and connections between unrelated or dissimilar subjects is how they provoke different thinking patterns in their brain.
• Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.

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• Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing.
• Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being
• Creativity requires whole-brain thinking; right-brain imagination, artistry and intuition, plus left-brain logic and planning.
• Corporate Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions.

• According to the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, which surveyed 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, CEOs believe that,

   

  More than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision – successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity.”
• Daniel Pink in his book,  A Whole New Mind (2005) defines Economic Development
• 4. Conceptual Age (creators and empathizers)
• Without creativity, you are doomed to compete in commodity hell!
• A study by George Land reveals that we are naturally creative and as we grow up we learn to be uncreative.
• You learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination and synthesing information.
• It requires practice to develop the right muscles, and a supportive environment in which to flourish.

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• But I Can't Draw (or Write or Dance or Sing)!

   

      

    Try doing some things you're sure you "can't.

• On one page, for instance, she lists some sources of inspiration (a postcard from an art museum, a sketch by an architect, a wall of graffiti, a comic strip), and suggests you "glue a variety of things that you find interesting" on the following blank page.

  Drawing is a practice, she says in her introduction, like yoga. By practicing regularly, you will become more open and aware.

• Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

• My podcast partner Tom Webster and I explore this interesting idea on the latest episode of The Marketing Companion. I really think you’ll like this edition, as we explore:

   
   
  • The romance of catastrophic business failure
   
  • Why Seth Godin’s “Just Ship It” mentality leads to problems
   
  • The true source of business innovation and progress
   
  • The untold side of the Apple story and survivor bias
   
  • The strategy paradox –why we don’t learn from failures
   
  • Why you can’t be Zappos
   
  • Is technology an enabler or a leveler of business innovation?
   
   

  Do you need to be ”all in” to be successful in business today?

• We envision four key challenges:

   
   
  • Engagement challenge:   reinventing the mass message model.
   
  • CGM challenge: helping   consumers tell stories.
   
  • Social media challenge:   playing in a new landscape.
   
  • Training challenge:   growing talent with creative vision
• The Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant  chain and its agency 22squared used the storytelling concept to move  beyond advertising the chain's attributes (i.e., food and sports on  televisions) and instead create an image of a clubhouse where camaraderie  is easy to find. The agency believes that sports, jokes, and competition  represent the "social currency" of the target, so it makes these  three things part of every brand story. All messages have a strong attitude  that clearly resonates with the target audience; the agency uses the  voice of these messages as the key means to differentiate Buffalo Wild  Wings from other restaurants. Television ads set up the story, and then  the story moves online to the social media space where patrons can organize  their social lives, using the clubhouse as the physical meeting place.
• The result of using such brand  stories, according to Jenkins (2006, p. 3), is that "every important  story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted  across multiple media platforms." Confluence, then, occurs when media  industries are less task bound and merge together to allow content to  flow freely among them, empowering technologies and practices that are  both adaptive and associative in nature.
• To succeed in the confluence  culture, agencies must rethink content, moving away from what Deuze  (2007) terms "show and tell" advertising and toward proving content  for consumers to create their own stories. Agencies must find more ways  than ever before to bring consumers into the advertising process. Deuze  (2007) also imagines a flattening hierarchical relationship between  the agency and the consumer as agencies adapt to this new engagement  model; he uses the term "bricolage" to describe the remixing, reconstructing,  reusing, and repurposes of audio, visual, and textual content. It simultaneously  consists of repurposing and refashioning the old while using and making  the new.

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• Research on the ELM has examined the effects of several marketing communication variables, including: source attractiveness (Petty et al., 1983), grammatical forms (Munch &Swasy, 1988; Swasy &Munch, 1985), implied versus stated conclusions (Kardes, 1988; Sawyer &Howard, 1991), multiple versus single advertising executions (Schumann, Petty, &Clemons, 1990), visual advertising elements (Miniard, Bhatla, Lord, Dickson, &Unnava, 1991), number of copy points (Alba &Marmorstein, 1987), message repetition (Batra &Ray, 1986), and comparative versus noncomparative claims (Droge, 1989
• But perhaps the most intriguing variable examined within the ELM frameworkis the quality of the verbal arguments contained in the copy of advertisements. Argument quality has largely been de.ned empirically within the ELM. Several arguments are pretested in pilot experiments; those that elicit consistently favorable cognitive responses are labeled strong arguments and those that evoke consistently unfavorable cognitive responses become weakarguments (Petty &Cacioppo, 1986a; Petty &Wegener, 1991). Empirical tests of the ELM have established that argument quality in.uences persuasion via the central route, when message recipients are high in ability and motivation to process relevant information (Petty, Unnava, &Strathman, 1991).