3 Ways To Train Yourself To Be More

Creative
Creativity isn’t a talent you either have or you don’t,
it’s a skill that you can build with these practices.

[PHOTO: FLICKR USER KHAIRUL NIZAM ]

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BY   ART MARKMAN 4 MINUTE READ

What makes someone good at their job? Talent or skill?

According to research by Stanford professor Carol

Dweck and her colleagues many people believe that
people’s performance reflects either their innate talent
for that activity or the amount of work they have done
to acquire a skill.

In reality, of course, any performance reflects a

combination of talent and skill. You can improve on just
about any task with a lot of practice, though if your goal
is to be the absolute best in the world at something it is
also helpful to have some talent for it.

In order to put in the hard work to acquire a skill, you

need to believe that the activity really is a skill you can
learn. When you believe the activity is a talent then you
don’t bother to work hard at it, because you attribute any
limitations in your performance to your lack of talent.

RETHINKING CREATIVITY AS A SKILL

This way of thinking about talents and skills is

particularly important when it comes to thinking about
creativity. For skills that involve actions in the world,
such as shooting a free throw or playing a musical
instrument, people have a pretty good idea of what they
need to do to improve. But for mental skills like
creativity, few people know enough about the way their
minds work to be able to treat it like a skill.

As a result, most people tend to look at those people

who develop creative ideas consistently with a kind of
reverence. And people who do seem blessed with a
talent for creativity live in fear that talent will run out
some day and they will be just like everybody else.

In order to enhance your creativity, here are three things

you can do to practice.

1 . B E C O M E AN E X PL A I N E R

The most creative people in any field are people who

have a tremendous amount of knowledge. Creative
people like Einstein, Edison, Coltrane, and O’Keefe were
also experts in their own field. In this age of Google,
there is a tendency to assume that information is
available when you need it and so you don’t need to
internalize it. But, if you have to interrupt your flow of
work whenever you need to look something up, you can’t
follow ideas to new places.

In order to maximize the quality of your knowledge, you

have to develop the habit to explain things back to
yourself. Think about what happens when you sit down
to watch a TED talk. A great speaker gives an
inspirational 15-minute presentation. While you are
listening, you feel that you have understanding of what
the speaker is saying. Afterward, if you try to repeat
what you learned to someone else you may realize that
your feeling of understanding was a reflection that the
speaker understood the topic very well. Unless you
explain talks like that back to yourself afterwards,
though, you have no idea whether you understand it, too.
2. PRACTICE OPENNESS

One of the five core personality dimensions is openness.

It reflects how much you are motivated to consider new
ideas, concepts, and experiences. The most creative
people are typically very open people. If you are
someone who resists new ideas and experiences, that
does not mean you cannot be creative. It just means that
you need to develop a new set of habits to try new ideas
on for size rather than rejecting them just because they
are new.

If you have to interrupt your flow of work whenever you

need to look something up, you can’t follow ideas to new
places.

If you find yourself unwilling to consider new ideas or

dismiss things that are “not the way we do things here,”
try this exercise:

When you encounter a new idea, listen to it or read it

through, but don’t engage with it much right away.
Instead, put it aside for a day and come back to it later.
When you read it again, it will feel more familiar based
on the mere exposure effect. Mere exposure is the
observation that we like things better after we have seen
them once before. Let that familiarity help you open
yourself up to new prospects.

3. KEEP ASKING NEW QUESTIONS

A third critical aspect of creativity is to remember that

any idea you have is something that you pulled out of
your memory. That means that when you have a brilliant
idea, you retrieved a helpful piece of information from
memory and used it.

How do you get information from memory? All you do is

ask your memory a question, and it pulls out information
related to that question. If I ask you to think about an ice
cream you ate, you do that. Even if you did not expect
me to start talking about ice cream. Memory serves up
experiences related to the questions you ask it.

That means that whenever you want to think about a

problem or situation differently, you have to ask your
memory a different question. The most creative people
don’t settle on a single way to think about a problem.
Instead, they keep finding new descriptions of that
problem and allowing their memory to find more
information that might help to solve it. The more
different questions they ask, the more creative ideas
they have.

As an easy exercise to practice asking questions, think

about a problem you are trying to solve right now. Now,
ask yourself how a variety of your friends would
approach that same problem. Imagine a person from
another country encountering your problem. Would they
take a different perspective? Use the lenses of different
people as a way of training yourself to describe a
problem in different ways.

Allow each of these perspectives to bring new

information to mind that might help you solve the
problem you face.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Art Markman , PhD is a professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of
Texas at Austin and Founding Director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of
Organizations. Art is the author of Smart Thinking  and Habits of Leadership , Smart
Change , and most recently, Brain Briefs , co-authored with his "Two Guys on Your
Head"  co-host Bob Duke, which focuses on how you can use the science of
motivation to change your behavior at work and at home.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3044865/3-ways-to-train-yourself-to-be-more-creative