This may seem like a silly tip, but I swear it works.

Give yourself a secret nickname. This is going to be like your super-hero identity for creativity. For instance, perhaps you could call yourself “Genius Pants.” Now, when you need an idea fast or you start to get stuck, just say to yourself, “What now, Genius Pants?”

Once you do this, it activates a whole other part of yourself. The part of you that is energetic and eager to please. The part that is brimming with ideas! Great ideas!

Then, after you’re finished, just say, “Thanks Genius Pants, you are awesome.”

The first step is to choose your nickname. I recommend having more than one word in your nickname. The first word can either be a positive adjective, like “genius” or “amazing,” or a title of some kind, like “princess” or “mister.” Then, the second word can be any noun or another positive adjective.

It can also be fun to add a “Mc” to the front of the second word.

Here are a few samples:

Princess McSparkles
Magic Racecar
Sergeant Playmobilecastle
Kid Genius
Awesome Sequins
Colonel Jellybean
Rebellious McCupcake

Pick a stupid name, but a name you like. Don’t tell anyone. Sharing it will make it work less. It’s a nickname for you to use for yourself.

If you come up with one that you aren’t going to use, just leave it in a comment. You might be helping someone else.

The Twin City Daily Planet posted an article by Michael Fallon, one of their critics, called How creativity is killing the culture. In it, he suggests that encouraging everyone to be creative has resulted in “a nation of navel-gazing dreamy-eyed so-called creatives who no longer
consider it worthwhile to roll up their sleeves and get down to hard
work to get a job done, or, even worse, who no longer deem it worth
their time to bother checking out any of the stuff that anyone else has
made.”

Obviously part of the point of the article is to start discussion (flamebait) more than I think he’s really serious. In truth, it seems like he’s burned out with his job and is tired of going to gallery shows by bad artists.

The meat of his argument is that people shouldn’t show bad art to an audience. Two hundred years ago, most of the creativity you would come in contact with was probably pretty bad. The art you would see and the music you heard was produced by local artists. Only the great art survived, so it seems as if they were better than now. Then, when performances could be recorded and art more easily distributed, there was a time when a very select group of editors and writers decided what was good and what should be seen. Now, the role of the critic is being diminished in value and that probably hurts if you’re a critic.

Today, you have access to music and movies that would never have made it to mass distribution even twenty years ago. Is there a lot of bad stuff? Of course. I haven’t seen an increase in the number of bad gallery shows here in Seattle, but the competition has increased.

I agree with him that I see a trend amongst creative types to not pay attention to what is being created by others. Great writers read, great chefs eat at other restaurants, great musicians listen to music, if you aren’t an avid consumer of something, why would assume that you would be able to create it?

But, I say if you get pleasure from creating, by all means create – just don’t assume you’re producing something of interest to others. If you do want to share it, be prepared to be ignored. Even if you produce something great, be prepared to be ignored or dismissed. So has it been, so shall it be.

The rush to creativity has increased the amount of art produced, but I don’t think the percentages of good to bad art has changed. There is more good art, there is more bad art.  That means critics have a numerically larger number of artists trying to get reviewed and a larger number of bad artists.

I’m going to include one more paragraph that to me seems to describe the way the world has always been. There was no magical time of fantastic art in the past.  It has always been extremely easy to create something and extremely difficult to create something great.

From my vantage point, the zero-sum creativity spiral has some
strangely counterintuitive and dreadfully harmful results. Most
worrisome among these is the fact that the constant lip service to
creativity leads to the creation of more and more stuff—art and music
and writing and the like—that is actually not very creative,
uninteresting, of poor quality, and off-putting to any potential
audience. This may seem an impossible thing to stem from such a
feel-good sentiment—more creativity must mean a better world,
right?—but the problem is that more emphasis on creativity means less
emphasis on what it is precisely that makes art good. It’s not the
simple act of making—of creating something, anything—that makes art.
It’s the application of craft, dedicated practice, careful thought,
hard work, and artfulness that makes art. Real creative art is a rare
and precious thing and this will likely always be so.

I guess, to him, it would be better to discourage creativity. That way, he would have far fewer artists to deal with.

Read the article here

It’s easy to get caught up in the search for the next big idea, but don’t disregard finding an improvement for an existing idea.

A simple 1% improvement to an existing project might not seem like a lot, but if you continue to find small improvements, it eventually becomes something completely different. In fact, using this attitude everywhere in your life can help you develop a constant creative outlook.

Most people only focus their energies on things that are broken, but why not focus on improving things that are working? Don’t wait for a problem, make it your attitude to always be improving.

For writers, editing and rewrites are built into the project. A hundred tiny changes can turn something mediocre into something great.

It’s just like compound interest for a bank account. These tiny improvements don’t just add to an idea, but add to the principal and earn more interest with each new improvement.

Businesses use the Japanese philosophy Kaizen as a model for improving themselves. Some people find this kind of structured gradual improvement to also be helpful in developing their personal skills.

Creativity is change. It’s the fresh and new. It’s connecting things that have never been connected before.

Every single original creative act that you undertake is a strike at the status quo of the world.

Ever wonder why being creative is sometimes such a struggle?

Most people set up their whole lives to maintain the status quo and here you come to change things.

Remember that you are a rebel. If you’re trying to sell a really fresh idea, you either have to face this opposition or go underground and release your ideas gradually or pad them in some acceptable way. Find other rebels and join with them.

Anything you do from inventing a new kind of cupcake to decorating your house with 100 preserved owls is going to challenge people. They are going to call you stupid, wasteful and a dreamer.

No matter how small, truly creative acts are rebellious. Stand strong, you are not alone.

People who see connections between events that other people don’t see are considered conspiracy theorists. This conjures up images of unkempt men in dark rooms with filing cabinets full of “evidence” that they post on their websites to prove that their view of reality is the TRUTH! Obviously the Earth is controlled by reptilian aliens that live in tunnels underground and the moon landings were faked.

Really, the human brain is a machine that looks for evidence to prove what it already believes. You take in new information and store it in relation to old information.  Creativity is making connection between unlikely bits of information where none existed before. When you are creative, you are relating previously unrelated ideas to one another.

Creative people are conspiracy theorists that are less concerned with the past and more concerned with the future.  What ideas can we, as creative people, come up with now that will cause the future we want to live in?

This can be as simple as a reality where you have a lot of money or as complex as some kind of Utopian society where everyone immortal.

What conspiracy can you put in motion now that will make the future amazing? What new connections can you make that will expand what it means to be human? What decision can you make today that someone 100 years from now will point to as a turning point in human history?

Don’t use your brilliant mind to look for evidence of alien interference in history or Nazi moon bases.

Instead, create new conspiracies, the kind that make things better.

If you are a reptilian alien and reading this, ignore the plea to create a new reality, you guys have already done enough.