Introduction

What Exactly is Creativity?

Can creativity exist in a vacuum? What is creativity anyway? The characteristics of bringing into existence that which did not exist? It is the ultimate trait of a god. It is the thing that all humans desire to have.

The creative lifestyle is for anyone who wants it. Think you’re not creative because you’re in sales, are a desk-dweller, an engineer...a fill-in-the-blank? False. You can cultivate creativity which is the source of all positive motion in the universe. The source of progress. The new currency. If you are creative and you apply your creative solutions to the world around you, you will become successful.

We often think of ‘creatives’ as limited to the group of people who take charge of literal pen and paper to make art. Or perhaps those that make cute graphic designs, logos, etc. They are creatives, certainly. But so are real estate investors, businessmen and entrepreneurs. I know because I am the first two, but I am also the latter 3. The commonality that ties these sometimes-disparate groups together though is the ability to write fiction. Okay, I’m being deliberately obtuse. Fiction writers write fiction. The people who make art are artists and the businessmen build businesses. When I say fiction, What I mean is more along the lines of myth. Creative people create mythologies.

If this doesn’t yet resonate, it’s okay. It wasn’t until very recently that I started to connect the dots myself. What makes me think of a person as a ‘creative’ person is their ability to operate in the non-existent realm. They look at what exists and what could exist. They subtract the two. What remains is their body of creative work.

I think of creativity as an algorithm that takes place in the background in my head. I see myself doing comparative operations that number in the thousands all simultaneously- I am taking existing ideas that I am familiar with and cross examining them with other with other existing ideas, often from completely different fields or subject matter. A solution to one problem may work to solve my new problem, if only we can solve these two new emerging problems. It’s a seemingly mechanical, lifeless approach, but I guarantee that you do it too, only you may not realize it.

What we think of as creativity is simply the multiplication of our acquired knowledge, intertwining the common threads to serve as new solutions.

What can you do to supercharge your own creativity? Think about the creative algorithm. If creativity is proportional to the number of known solutions to a problem, then the more known solutions that you are familiar with, the more creative you can be. The internet has become the tool that unlocks near infinite amounts of possible solutions for your consideration (if you know how to properly leverage it). So one thing you can do is go to internaut training. That is to say, you can learn the tools of the trade. But more importantly, and universally, you can adopt the creative lifestyle. The tenets outlined in this pamphlet are those that allow me to live a creative, inspired life, and maximize my creative efforts.

A person cultivates creativity in 3 broad strokes: Attitude (perceiving the world around them), Acquiring Vision, and Implementation (Altering the world around them). That’s all there is to it. You must see what the world is like, decide how it should be different, and then put that difference into action in order to influence the world.

This is what artists do. It’s also what entrepreneurs do. It’s what engineers do. And house flippers, and writers, and problem solvers at large.

This is what makes the world go around.

This is the lifeblood of innovation in every field.

Economics may drive the car, but creativity is the engine that moves the world forward.

Read on to find out how you can cultivate it in your own life.

Creative Synthesis

When we are talking about cultivating creativity, when we are looking deep into the inner workings of our mind and dissecting creativity itself, we are inspecting very minute, very fast-acting phenomena that we are barely aware of in our waking life. I believe that creativity happens as much subconsciously as it does consciously. Perhaps more. You certainly need times where you force yourself into an active creative session where the purpose is to end up with a solution to a specific problem. This is a brainstorm. But I think that if our subconscious didn’t get primed first, you may not be accessing you best work. As a design engineer, I use to take walks every day out in the paths in nature – outside of the office. I cannot tell you how many times I found great solutions – without hardly trying- as I walked the paths, letting my conscious mind wander along with my feet and letting my sub-mind get to work running its comparison-algorithm.

Creative synthesis has 3 parts to it – combinations of previous solutions, discernment, and execution. Think of creative synthesis just like you would a literal synthesizer instrument. Do you know how Synths work? They combine and layer raw signals to produce the desired sounds, sometimes music. You can filter out a frequency there, tweak the original sinewave to get just the timbre you want. It is the same with creativity. It is the same ideas at play when you are doing any creative work. All signals that a synth utilizes existed previously. Square, sine, triangle. They are not new to the world. Similarly, the foundations of your new ideas are things that exist previously. They are based on things that you have seen or experienced. tasted. Smelled. Done. Felt. You take these signals; these new ideas and you combine them. You stack them like Lego blocks, you layer them in various ways some whimsical, you train your subconscious mind to try everything first. No fear, you have told you sub-mind. So that it freely and unscrupulously presents your conscious self with things that you never would have thought of in broad daylight. This is the spark that you feel when you think of a new idea. The creative spark. You need to train your sub-mind to do this. Save any criticism for the discernment phase. Let the sub-mind gather as many unique combinations of raw signals as it can.

Perceiving Reality

Developing Your Unique Vision

Influencing Reality

Just like a synth musician sets out to find the shimmery tone of his dreams, you start out with those bits of sound and you experiment with little regard for right and wrong, for good and bad. But as you stack and as you layer the raw bits of noise, you gradually assert your inner creative quality engineer, discerning and making stylistic or otherwise informed choices. Those choices are informed by every moment in your memory of what you understand as good music. You do though, have significant control. Maybe the musician is building his synth tone for a specific horror sequence and so his frame of reference is set not for good, but for a specific outcome. Your sub-mind has untold influence on the hand on the knob, while your active mind has the ability to direct those instincts towards an overarching set of objectives that your sub-mind may not (should not) care about. “filter out everything below x frequency.” your sub-mind tells you, as you a suggestion, based on its depth and reach into worlds inaccessible to you. You try it. It doesn’t get your tone closer to your external objective, so you try the next idea. The point is, the sub-mind and the mind must collaborate in order to achieve creative results, maximized for outcome. If the sub-mind takes over with little regard for the rules that are set on the creative project – yours or other’s rules- then the result will likely be unfocused and scattered, if not unique. If the sub-mind is throttled, the result may be rigid, stiff, lifeless and boring. It may follow the rules too much for its own benefit.

Finally, the musician will have reached his ultimate tone, perfect in nearly every way. Now he must do something with it. How does he use his work to influence the world? There are varying degrees to this. By doing the process at all and hearing this final tone himself, surely, he has already changed his own world? Is that enough? It certainly may be. And it is for the creative mind to decide the extent to which the world may be changed by his tone. To a large degree, I would encourage the musician to not be satisfied by the toying around and synthesizing alone – while satisfying it is restricting and capping your ultimate reach. This is perhaps a disservice to yourself, a traitorous act to your career’s longevity, and likely a result of insecurities, at the deepest level. The work is most powerful when it breaks the barrier of self-examination and bleeds out into the realm of others.

This is difficult but challenges the work and builds up the skill of the creative worker immensely compared to the isolated approach. I myself have written many songs and have realized after the fact hat my period of isolated ‘artistic’ creation suffered immeasurably from a lack of external commentary. You need feedback. It is impossible to get good, unbiased feedback from yourself. I love the music that I made, but me loving it didn’t make it good music. Being in a band helped certainly. It broadened the commentary and greatly increased the number of ideas at each of our disposal. But as a group we suffered from this as well. We kept ourselves isolated and shard our progress with very few people. I am still proud of what we accomplished – we recorded, produced, and released a very ambitious album one of the greatest steppingstones and learning experiences of my creative career. I think that the entire process, if I could do it again, would have been served much better by actively seeking out external critique along the way. It was a largely self-indulgent creative act.

It is hard to expose yourself, your deepest self, you sub mind and all its lofty concepts, to others. As creative people, we often take refuge in our loneliness and isolation because it is safe, but also because it is easy. Easy doesn’t do anything for your creative work. It needs challenged. It needs tested. It probably is missing thirty things that you didn’t see that will make it brilliant. To publish you work is to test it. To challenge it. The goal should be to receive with open arms and much discernment, criticisms. Take this feedback and build it into your intuition. Testing in an external way should become an integral part of your creative process. Now this whole thing assumes that ‘other people’ are the ultimate purpose of your creative work. That can’t be right… can’t I have creative work that satisfies me as the artist and that is enough? To this I say that the ultimate purpose of creativity is to alter or influence the world. If it is your own little world inside your head that you are altering, you will flatter yourself and your career will stay small. You must choose which degree of the world you will alter.

The musician then decides to execute on his idea, the master tone. He records it. He manipulates the recording to have maximum impact and then he publishes his work to the world.

That is creative synthesis.