I have heard many people say that they don’t think they are creative. Rubbish! You are creative. You have creativity inside of you for something. Most of us live our lives without ever using the creative ability that we have been given. Here’s a little test you can take to see what your creativity lies in.

Keeping an ideas book

Ideas are like gold to those that capture them. Consider this quote from eclectic film director David Lynch:

“The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you’re dead.” courtesy of: Think Exist.

What do you have ideas about? I didn’t realise that I had so many ideas about various things until I started writing them down. As I began to study the ideas, I noticed how I could use them in my work. Some of them helped me to understand issues I was having with other people and so on. You may really like gardening. There will be moments throughout the day when your ideas about gardening will come to you. Do yourself a favour and write down that idea. You will forget it if you don’t!

What to do with your ideas once you write them down

Make a commitment to follow them through. Even if you can’t do it right now make plans to do it soon. The ideas you follow through on you probably wouldn’t have if you hadn’t of written them down! I know, it sounds stupid but keeping an ideas book helped me to gain an edge in my life and I know if you do it in yours it will help you too.

Imagine you have just reached your dream. What would that feel like? Think for a moment what is it you really dream about? Say it was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. If that was your burning desire what on earth would stop you from doing it? Money? Time? What about if you had two legs amputated below the knee? Warren Macdonald suffered a horrible fate of losing both legs below the knee after being crushed by a rock on a trek in Hinchinbrook Island, Australia. Yet he managed to reach his goal and climb Mount Kilimanjaro. So what’s your impossible dream?

Dreams are meant to be impossible

The fact is when we were formed dreams were formed in us. I don’t care what your friends told you or what you think… you have some deep down burning desire in you that wants to form itself into an actual reality. As I have said before there are two kinds of reality that we need to be concerned with.  That which is active and that which is passive.  The passive kind are the dreams we have and the things we entertain in our heart.    These things are what I am talking about today.  What is it that you deeply dream about?   What are the things you have in your heart to do?  Write them down.

The main goal of having a dream

The major thing you need to do when you have a dream is to think about it.  Don’t shuffle it under the carpet and pretend like it’s not there.  Your dream is that thing that keeps you up at night, that niggle in the back of your mind.  It’s the thing you would do if you could do anything.  It’s meant to be impossible because it will take miracles, action and much faith to get the thing off the ground.  If it didn’t why would you dream about it?  If it was possible there would be no need to dream about it.  You would just do it.

So what can I do about my dream?

The thing I have maintained having reached a dream or two in my life (getting a post graduate degree and a PhD… almost there) I can say that there are several things you need to know.  The most important for this post is this: hold on to it.  Don’t let it go.   There are many things I want to achieve before I go home but that doesn’t mean I am a failure.  The only failures I have met are people who fail to try.  So what’s your dream?  The first and most important thing you need to do is work that out and hold on to it no matter what.   Never give up.

Imagine with me for a moment you are George Lucas. You are leaning back on your expensive black executive chair staring at a picture of yourself holding a light saber wondering, ‘How can I make something that good again.’ You notice a picture of a duck on your desk and it hits you. THAT’S IT! You need a duck that’s a superhero. And so the world was forced to endure Howard the Duck. Are your ideas like these? When I wrote recently on 4 ways to come up with cool ideas I thought how do we know if we have suckful ideas?

How to know your ideas suck

The main way you can tell is not because they don’t work… ignore that. Many good ideas don’t work. That’s another post for another day. There are two things I think that can give you a clue. The first thing is you have no critical voice. I love my wife because she is 100% pessimistic. You would never meet someone who is more negative that she is. Whenever I am about to do something I ask her: What’s wrong with this? She usually answers with something I didn’t think of because I am very optimistic (utopia nutters). I only see what’s good in most things I am doing. If you have no critic there is no way of telling how much your ideas suck. Find a critic. They are worth their weight in gold.

This may confuse you but you really know your ideas suck if nobody is willing to criticise them. I think most people don’t like hurting other people. If you have written a book and people look at it and say ‘that’s good’. Keep searching. Ask why is it good? Why is it bad? Why does it work so well? I have to call out blogs on this one. I don’t know how many times I have read a blog post and there are 75 comments of people saying ,’wow what a great post.’ Not one (if you’re lucky) voice that is looking for what’s wrong. You need that. I have had it on this blog and it always makes me think. Sure, I don’t like it at first but after I have taken out my frustration on the Wii I feel better.

What you can do to stop your ideas from sucking

There are many ideas you can use to stop sucking. The first that comes to mind is to create a mastermind group. They say iron sharpens iron. If you can find two others or more than I recommend using them as a bouncing board. I have three people in my life that I run things past before I do anything. I learned this from failing in business… I suggest you implement this as well. Another thing you can do is walk into the bathroom, look into the mirror and say, ‘you are smart as you are handsome but you don’t know everything.’ It will do you the world of good.

In closing this I want to say that stopping your ideas from sucking means that you get feedback, critique and other points of view involved. You can become so excited about something that you don’t even realise that you are getting emotional with it and thus clouding your judgment. Remember, if your ideas suck it’s because you don’t have enough perspective. Get some.

Ever been stuck in this? On a regular basis the motorway in Brisbane is a car park. As I am in process of building more content for this blog and in my travels I came across this video:

In this case De Bono has asked us to come up with some creative thinking to see how we can solve the traffic crisis. To show you the basics of perspective shifting, I am going to offer four ways to solve traffic problems. The four perspectives I am going to use are based on different assumptions. These are: Political, Economical, Social and Technical.

The Political perspective

The political view is one that says, ‘Traffic is the government’s problem’. To fix it we would require politicians to mandate to us an effective legislative solution. A political solution I think is a legislative one because we are creating a rule that stops traffic flow. This means, the government could tax us more to build new roads, more carparks and provide incentives for the use of public transport. These things (in Australia) are state supported and funded. This really means changing the law to restrict the flow of traffic in someway.

The Economic perspective

The economic view says, why not build bigger faster and better roads. In reality, you rephrase this view as ‘turn on the money hose’. I have been working in aid circles on and off for many years… I can assure you if more money was the answer we would be there by now. There are many circumstances where the economic view is substantial and correct but the majority of the time it’s wrong. To summarise this view the traffic crisis could be solved if we decided to build a bigger road system or spend more money on transport infrastructure.

The social view

Ex-leader of the Australian Labor Party Mark Latham once said that we need to go back to building grassroots movements for things to change. In short, in order for things to change we need to form together to become groups so that we can facilitate change in our social lives. This is community building and things like that. To change the traffic crisis from a human/social point of view you need to understand behaviour and ask what causes traffic jams to exist? Why do we all want to be on the road at the same time? This give rise to challenging solutions about the work weak, what jobs need to be done when and the ways in which we define work. A challenging task but not one that is entirely out of our reach. An example solution would be to create new work conditions that allow the burden on our roads to be shared more equally.

The technical view

The technical view always resolves things down to a scientific or engineering solution. So every problem has a simple/linear cause and effect view that will resolve the problem at hand. So for the traffic problem is viewed as a technical issue. The roads aren’t wide enough or there isn’t enough people taking public transport. Every problem is viewed as being a technical one and hence cannot be solved through any other method. A solution to the traffic crisis that’s technical involves making the roads better, or wider or some other technical view.

Combining different views in one setting

So what would a technical, social, political and economic solution look like? It might be a solution that saw the encouragement of staggering work hours (economic and social) or created wider roads that were toll based (social/economic/technical). Say for a moment we redefine the traffic problem as something else. It could be the problem is: too many people needing to go to different places at the same time. How could we stop that from happening?

Redefining the traffic problem

The first thing to do is ask the question: why do people need to be at different places at the same time? The most obvious answer is work. Secondly, school times are structured around work times. Thirdly, people tend to group activities around the same things at the same time. So they drop the kids off at school and go to work in one action and then conduct other activities. Stuff like playing bills, going to the shops. So say school starts at 8:30, work at 9:00 which finishes at 5:00 (when the kids are picked up from day care or after school care or not depending on your personal situation) and oh by the way honey can you get a carton of milk on the way home?

Now lets add more to it. Fourthly, the roads are too thin to handle everybody going everywhere at once. So when Jenny drops little Xavier off at school … everybody is using the road at the same time because they have to go to work or the shops or wherever at the same time. Fifthly, we have no control over which roads to use or when to use them. In Adelaide for example they have roads that are only available at peak times and are bi-directional. Not so in Brisbane. We have a bunch of one-way streets and narrow bridges! That said Brisbane is the greatest city in the world! Alas, I digress.

So we have work times (social and economical), school times (political), the grouping of activities around similar times (social), thin roads (technical/political), ability to access to roads that are only crowded part of the day (political/technical) and so on I go. See how just by combining different views I am able to uncover more perspectives of the problem. I even redefined it. Now, I am not that smart (handsome surely but smart?) anybody can do this. Yet, we fall hook line and sinker for simple answers from a singular point of reference. And, I have only picked four perspectives. Imagine if I had ten?

Some off the top of the head ideas for solving the traffic crisis

So what we really need is a solution that stops the constant flow of traffic being caused. We could use a variety of at hand ideas to do this. We could implement flexible work schedules for working parents and school parents. An example of this worked well on the Sunshine Coast. A staggered set of hours were offered for school times for older children. This meant they could walk to school later and traffic around the school reduced.

Remember the problem is why do we need to have everyone on the road at the same time? If we change that we change our problem. Technically we could build bigger roads that are only open in peak hour. That didn’t work well here in Brisbane… it actually made things worse some would argue. We could redesign work so that people could work from established targets (bi annual) and didn’t have to come the office as often. We could also offer incentives for people to work at night. Politically we could have a road toll that was twice as much as the bus and offer financial incentives to car poolers. For the biggest employers we could have incentive based payment systems for people willing to work flexible hours. So now we are starting to touch on the centralised work system that is really at the heart of the traffic crisis. I could go on and on … so could you.

This is just a handful of quick ideas that might work. All I did was begin to look at the problem from a different set of values. As you learn to perspective shift you begin to see more of the problem. At times I have found this process so useful it has gotten me out of some sticky situations. I have also found that sometimes I have also noticed that I can’t see beyond the problem. Like Australia’s housing affordability crisis. Hmm… maybe I will make that my next problem solving post?

I was reading about the death of philosopher Richard Rorty recently when I noticed the following quote after his was asked to write a poem:

“I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts?—?just as I would have if I had made more close friends.”

Professor Rorty died shortly after saying that.  It got me thinking about something I had heard a while ago about dieing with the music in you.  So, as you can see here someone as imminent as this professor was still unsatisfied that he hadn’t spent more time creatively expressing himself.  Don’t wait to do it I say… get it out.

As the great former leader singer of House of Pain once uttered, ‘I am fed up.’ The latest in mind numbing lack of creativity from the publishing monolith is yet another technological solution to a social problem. Presenting Kindle. I am using this to demonstrate with I think is a discernable lack in creativity of an industry that is increasing going up it’s own pipes. So why is this so uncreative?

This is not the problem it’s part of the problem

A few years ago the great Stephen King attempted to sell his Plant novella (still unfinished I might add) online through what many thought was a clever system at the time. The problem? The honor system. Apparently it wasn’t worthwhile to write something for online audiences. In plain English, you can’t take what people expect to be free and sell it to them. The problem: the publishing and writing world is notoriously unfair. It’s dog eat dog eat publisher eat author eat audience. We needed a different way of doing things.

Authors are no different

I recently read about the Sobol prize being cancelled for a lack of interest. Even more evidence of a lack of creativity. Sure, there are probably other reasons for the prize being canned. But for a lack of interest? Where are the next generation of writers? Blogging, reading their ‘e-novel’ on their ‘Kindles’… I doubt it. Whatever happened to writing a few good short stories and having them accepted and moving on from their. Hardly none of the publishing industry have done anything about the way it operates (including the authors who are a part of the system) for over 100 years. I haven’t seen one single non-technical innovation from the publishing industry. So now we have Kindle… great we can read the latest novels on an e-reader that feels like a book. Wow. How’s that going to sustain a failing industry? How’s it going to feed forward to the next generation of creative writers? It’s not.

What we can do about it

I have no idea. I am guessing that the majority of the 1/10 of 1% of authors that write books make money and don’t want things to change. The creative thinker says: ‘what can we do differently that we haven’t done before that would attract new talent to take the torch forward.’ How can we address the imbalance so that people who are considered to be unpublishable, at least have a shot at making it. The same goes for the film, art and other creative industries as well.

The non-creative plague

Think of the countless movies, television shows, books and the like that are the same old same old. Whatever happened to making new things that were interesting or being innovative. See, this is what happens when you put the dollar ahead of the art. You wind up with an imbalance that gives precedence to formula and spits on creative endeavour.

What to do about it?

I am not sure anything can be done. Have we gone too far in the wrong direction? I can shoulder the blame at the university level and say… yes we should be teaching the next generation of creative people instead of feeding them into the meat grinder. I am still amazed at the amount of movies that are released last year that you can predict point by point. I think I am well and truly alone on this. Never mind… that’s why I took up blogging!

Start being creative today.  Burn your CUBE!  Get out there and create.  If your boss stops you… do it anyway.  You must do something.  The world is in a very non-creative state of affairs.  For the love of God… do it!

I am proud to announce the lukehoughton.com [tag]creative project of the week[/tag]. Rather than suffering for my art (which I think is an appalling concept) I have decided to post a [tag]creative[/tag] project each week to my blog. I would say day but I just don’t have that much creative energy. Those of us who have creative ability yet no means to support it that other than side business and work have this on-going internal conflict where we know we should do something but usually sit on our bums (or asses) and do nothing. I think we could easily overthrow the publishing industry for example, if we really wanted to do but we think the world should come to us.

Well I can’t wait any longer. I have ideas and almost nobody to share them with so I have to let it out. I am therefore proud to announce my ‘[tag]commitment to creativity[/tag]‘ project. In order to fester that inner creativity I have I am going to post something I do each week that is deliberately creative. I am also working on making a website for daily submissions for people who are creative minded as well. The problem is getting the funding and finding the time. What a bugger! There is also the other problem of offering the project to people and having them commit their intellectual property with no foreseeable way of financial return. I am working on it as I have said so hang on to your hats for that one. It will be a cracker.

For now I am trialling my own stuff to see what I can achieve. There is no bigger fool than a hypocrite I heard somewhere. That and we must practice what we preach if we are to be considered credible. If I am telling anybody who reads this to be creative then I must first lead by example. If I don’t then all I am doing is making it up and that is a crock! So in order to be a real person I have decided to unleash my own creativity on my small readership one week, day or minute at a time. I have put the time limit of ‘one week on it’ but it will be sooner but NO LATER than that. Why? Well I keep saying I will do this or I will do that and never got around it. So I have just decided to do it.

In order to begin the festivities I have included in my [tag]fiction[/tag] tab The Woman in the River. This is short story I wrote for a woman’s magazine that the bastards didn’t publish! So, my commitment to being creative begins. I am now without excuse. I am not being paid so it’s not for money it’s for the pure exercise of being me and being creative. Enjoy. If you like it give it as many people you can so we can get a community going around this thing. We could start a revolution of creativity and destroy the world! Okay, so maybe that’s a bit excessive. I hope you enjoy it anyway.