What Makes A Person Creative?

A very successful advertising executive once said, “The creative person wants to be a know-it-all”.  He wants to know about all kinds of things” ancient history, 19th century mathematics, current-manufacturing techniques, flower arrangement and hog futures.  That’s because he will never know when this information might come together to form a new idea.  It may happen ten minutes later or ten years down the road.  But he has faith that it will happen”.

Knowledge is indeed the wellspring of new ideas.  However, knowledge won’t make a person creative.  We’ve all known people who knew lots of facts and information and nothing creative ever comes out of them.  Their knowledge just sat in their heads because they didn’t think about what they knew in any new ways.  The real key to being creative lies in what you do with what lies in your brain, all the facts, information and knowledge which you’ve garnered through the years.

Creative thinking is a way of thought, an attitude that you adopt to search for ideas and work with your knowledge and experience. How they all come together,  be mixed around and manipulated like fresh clay to be molded into ideas.  With this perspective, you try various approaches, first one, then another, often not getting anywhere.  You persist, you use crazy, outlandish and impractical ideas as stepping-stones to practical new ideas.  You constantly break the rules and explore for ideas in unusual outside places.  By adopting a creative outlook you open yourself up both to new possibilities and to change. 

Are you a creative person? Why not take a test to see if you have what it takes to solve a problem, with some imagination.  Think of all kinds of crazy ideas to solve the following problem;

An eccentric old king wants to give his crown to one of his two sons.  He decides to hold a race and the one who owns the slower horse will become the king.  The sons, each fearing that the other will cheat by having his horse run less fast than it is capable, ask the court jester for his advice.  With only two words, the jester tells them how to make sure that he race will be fair.  What are these two words?

The answer is at the end of this article.

There is a man by the name of Johann Gutenberg.   Gutenberg combined two previously unconnected ideas, the wine press and the coin punch.  The coin punch was used to leave an image on a small metallic surface such as a silver or gold coin.  The wine press was used to apply force over a large area to squeeze the juice such as grapes.  One day, Gutenberg hit upon the idea and asked himself, “What if I took some coin punches and put them under the force of the wine press .  Would they leave an image on paper?”  He did just that and lo and behold, he had invented the printing press and the movable type.

Grace Hopper, a Navy Admiral also had such an Eureka moment.  Tasked with explaining the concept of a “nanosecond” to some non-technical computer users. (A nanosecond is a billionth of a second, and it’s the basic time interval of a super-computer’s internal clock).  She had to find a way to explain a nano-second  and decided that she could explain it as a space problem rather than a time problem.  She pulled out a piece of string 30 centimeters long (11.8 inches) and told everyone one that it was the time taken for light to travel from one end of the string to the other.

The examples above illustrates a creative mind’s power to transform one thing into another.  By changing the way we look at things and playing around with our knowledge or what we do know.  We can make  ordinary knowledge and make it an extraordinary idea, and the unusual, commonplace.  In this way, wine presses squeeze out information and a string is transformed into a nanosecond.

Just as it takes a wild imagination to come up with new ideas,  people who participate in memory competitions have been known to use unconventional associations to remember long chains of numbers or list of things.  Such memory training techniques can also be used by students to enhance their study skills and improve their grades, sometimes dramatically.  Memory training is also known to not only improve memory, but also to accelerate learning

Discovery is all about looking at the same thing, or what others view as the same, and thinking of something very different.  So if you are ever stuck with a problem,  try to see it in a different light.  You might just come up with something that no one has ever thought of.

Answer To Creative Test Above

Switch horses.