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Being creative is like tending a garden. Ideas grow on their own, and all you can really do is prepare the environment to facilitate this growth. You do this

Being creative is like tending a garden. Ideas grow on their own, and all you can really do is prepare the environment to facilitate this growth. You do this by clearly defining the problem, fertilizing your mind with inspiration, and revisiting the problem periodically to keep it present. From there, you need to relax and let your brain do its thing. Actively thinking/concentrating actually inhibits brain activity in much of your brain to prevent interference, and the brain areas inhibited are usually the ones that make creative jumps. The rational networks of the brain should only be engaged to sanity check/refine creative ideas.

kamaal 10y ago
Not exactly: "Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu One way to have good ideas is to have a lot of them and then filter. Even in highly creative endeavors like say music and painting, volume of work largely matters. You have to spend a lot of time(years) doing a lot of work before you get anywhere close to good.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  You can work on a lot of different problems and still do the creative garden cultivation that the previous poster said. I do that. I've got about 10 prototypes for board and card games actively going at once at the moment, and I write down fresh ideas that pop into my head to come back to later. Even if months pass, I'll get spontaneous ideas to certain projects that improve them a ton. But I have to feed my brain with fuel for inspiration constantly, and actively try to apply any interesting idea to my existing projects and see if they inspire anything new for them. I can't find the quote now (It's written in a notebook I don't have on me at the moment), but this is apparently how Richard Feynman approached work, although by working on multiple problems at once, not projects (although all of my projects have problems :).
  - kamaal 10y ago
    "creative garden cultivation" might be a poetic way of putting it. In reality its just hard work and sweat at the end of the day. It requires you to go through many iterations of success/failure loops testing outcomes of your work. Of course you can do more than one of this at the same time. In fact that was precisely my point. The more of such you grab, the more come they come to you.
    - Senderman 10y ago
      "sweat" is poetry/metaphor in this context, too, so your description and the previous one are equally valid "in reality."
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  Hard work is what you do once you have a creative direction. Before you have creative direction, you need "work hard" fertilizing your mind with inspirational material, then relax and let your brain create connections on its own. This process might need to be repeated frequently, but it is how big ideas are grown. Think of your potential idea space like a box. When you relax the box moves around and reconfigures itself into different shapes. If you are actively thinking, this locks the box in the current location and shape. This can be useful when you want to explore the current box a bit more, but there is only so much exploring you can do within the current box before you are just retracing your steps. If you are always in explore mode without letting the box move and reconfigure you're just going to generate small variations on the same old ideas.

kamaal 10y ago

Not exactly: "Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu One way to have good ideas is to have a lot of them and then filter. Even in highly creative endeavors like say music and painting, volume of work largely matters. You have to spend a lot of time(years) doing a lot of work before you get anywhere close to good.

cableshaft 10y ago
You can work on a lot of different problems and still do the creative garden cultivation that the previous poster said. I do that. I've got about 10 prototypes for board and card games actively going at once at the moment, and I write down fresh ideas that pop into my head to come back to later. Even if months pass, I'll get spontaneous ideas to certain projects that improve them a ton. But I have to feed my brain with fuel for inspiration constantly, and actively try to apply any interesting idea to my existing projects and see if they inspire anything new for them. I can't find the quote now (It's written in a notebook I don't have on me at the moment), but this is apparently how Richard Feynman approached work, although by working on multiple problems at once, not projects (although all of my projects have problems :).
- kamaal 10y ago
  "creative garden cultivation" might be a poetic way of putting it. In reality its just hard work and sweat at the end of the day. It requires you to go through many iterations of success/failure loops testing outcomes of your work. Of course you can do more than one of this at the same time. In fact that was precisely my point. The more of such you grab, the more come they come to you.
  - Senderman 10y ago
    "sweat" is poetry/metaphor in this context, too, so your description and the previous one are equally valid "in reality."
CuriouslyC 10y ago
Hard work is what you do once you have a creative direction. Before you have creative direction, you need "work hard" fertilizing your mind with inspirational material, then relax and let your brain create connections on its own. This process might need to be repeated frequently, but it is how big ideas are grown. Think of your potential idea space like a box. When you relax the box moves around and reconfigures itself into different shapes. If you are actively thinking, this locks the box in the current location and shape. This can be useful when you want to explore the current box a bit more, but there is only so much exploring you can do within the current box before you are just retracing your steps. If you are always in explore mode without letting the box move and reconfigure you're just going to generate small variations on the same old ideas.