Five ways to think creatively

What’s the best way to think creatively? If new ideas are formed as a result of discovery, what’s the best way to get into a mindset that will allow you to truly explore? Here are five things you can do to spur creative thinking today.

Relax
Being too focused or weighed down by pursuing results makes it easy to miss everything just outside your scope. When you’re stressed or tightly wound up about pursuing creativity, you’re going to miss things you otherwise could have easily spotted in your discovery process.

Be unafraid
You’re going to fail once in a while, but failure isn’t the end. In-fact, failing is one of the quickest ways to discover ideas that succeed. To quote one of my favorite authors and brilliant probability experts, Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “A thousand days cannot prove you right, but one day can prove you to be wrong.”

Have a direction
It’s one thing to explore for fun (which is valuable on its own), but it’s a whole other thing to have a goal or objective when pursuing ideas specifically. How are you going to know whether you’re ideas are any good if you don’t have a destination in mind? Set a course and see what happens as a result.

Utilize your environmentThe environment you try to think it greatly influences the ideas you are able to come up with. Sitting in a quiet park is going to spur different types of thinking then sitting in the middle of a crowded, loud movie theater. If you find yourself unable to think creatively in your current environment, look around and see if it’s worth changing where you think.

Act
Do something. Write, draw, paint, sing, get up and dance, talk to a stranger, anything. What separates someone who’s creative and the average thinker is their ability to innovate, to follow through on their ideas, as least in part.