Here are 7 habits that I use to help my creativity:
1. Get into adventures. Instead of saying no, say yes. Whether it’s agreeing going to the South China Sea or to Sundance festival or the grocery store.
2. Devour popular culture. Examine the work of other artists, movies, books, magazines, the interwebs.
3. Take pictures of things. I photograph things I see in the world that inspire me and use them for reference.
4. Scribble ideas. On a notepad, ipad, or whatever.
5. Share your ideas with others. Better ideas often come from a conversation. Give and receive. It’s a dialectic.
6. Ask Questions. Lots of other people know more than you do.
7. Listen. Try to listen carefully. When other people talk, you should listen. Ideas are everywhere.
All that is well and good…attempting to live an interesting or interest-ed life–via travel, adventure, new experiences, consuming the arts and devouring popular culture or whatever–is certainly a proven method to produce the raw material, the putty that makes up creative ideas….BUT, here’s a left hook. It’s all for naught…nearly useless if you don’t take one extra step…Beyond a doubt, the most important thing for shaping your raw creative material is QUIET.
Reading the biographies of so many of the great artists, inventors, and idea-people in history confirms it…they locks themselves away to get the master idea… But this is not myth. Doesn’t your own experience confirm it as well?
On reflection, it’s certainly true for me. The aesthetic for the best campaigns I’ve shot have come to me in the wee hours of the morning. Seattle 100 came to me while relaxing in my hammock on the weekend. The Best Camera ecosystem hit me in the middle of the night while on vacation. creativeLIVE was cooked up with Craig over the holidays when the studio was closed. The vision for many of my best photographs and videos have come while on airplanes, out of reach of phone calls in wireless signals. And time at the family cabin consistently produces long lists of things I want to create or do. I’m banking the same is true for you.
We’ve gotta carve out some time and space from the day to day noise…the laundry, the groceries, the homework, the job, the spouse, the friends, the television to go away.
Live and learn? How about Isolate and create.
[if this idea resonates with you, there’s more on this over at Zen Habits.]
For me, I’m most creative when Im bored…
Travelling, commuting, on the way to a job, waiting for a friend to turn up… Thats when all my ideas come to me..
They go straight onto my phone in drafts and I later write them up and review..
I just need to get those ideas better organised..
But the key is implementing them..
Thanks for sharing Chase
Hello Chase,
I was reading your 7 habits and really appreciate the thought process behind it and it surely makes a lot of sense. However, since this is an open source platform, I was thinking as an Indigenous American, that honoring and reflecting on our ancestors could also be a big sources of inspiration. I understand popular culture, but in many ways popular culture has its roots in indigents cultures from around the world. In many ways our current culture is an amalgamation of many different art forms. So, I wanted to put that our there in terms of expanding on what you have already built and stated, that as move forward in technology and new media, we cannot lose our cultural ancestry efficacy through our arts medium. “Sankofa” teaches us that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward. That is, we should reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach us, so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone or been stripped of, can be reclaimed, revived, preserved and perpetuated.
great point, will.
“Isolate and create” I like that.
Whenever I get on an airplane, that seems to be a conduit for creativity for me. Whether it’s because I picked up an magazine at the airport that I normally wouldn’t or because I have time to think thru things, whatever it is, flights seem to do it for me. I’m getting to do some big travel soon – hopefully I’ll get inspired!
Interesting and inspiring
….but I can’t help myself
It’s not a “dialectic”, it’s a dialog – dialectics having to do with logic and logical arguments
It’s not “for not”, it’s “for naught”
…and my project stewing on the back burner is named for exactly how you’ve framed inspiration – unconscious thoughts – those ideas and concepts that are swirling around our heads and seem to gel when we’re not super-focused on anything in particular.
thanks!
I think therefore I am.
…that’s all I’ve got.
You got me. One so seldom sees a reference to Hegel!
It’s always easy to think we’re more productive if we’re “doing something”. Everything you said here has definitely been true for me as well. Although I really need to work on jotting my ideas down. I usually always forget to do that.