27 Ways to Stay Creative

by Ingrid Pan, Graphics Designer

Celebrate your unbirthday. Eat something healthy. You need to stay alive to be creative.

Nevermind, you have no willpower. Go back to cookies. Creativity is cookies.

Einstein wouldn’t have liked my definition. He’d have told me to see what’s been seen but think what’s never been thought; he also flourished in solitude. Take a spontaneous day trip alone by train and explore. Maybe work by an unmoving body of water. Ask a six-year-old the big questions of life. Play Scrabble. Erich Fromm believed creativity was courage - the courage to let uncertainties run away. Einstein would have told him it is also the courage to let certainties go. Watch a movie that makes you reconsider your existence and everything you hold to be true. I recommend something Inception or Interstellar-esque.

Take breaks proportional to the time you work, or if it’s late - which it probably is - go to sleep

two hours earlier and get up two hours earlier to create.

Steve Jobs felt guilty for not really doing anything; creativity, he said, is only seeing the obvious. So eavesdrop conversations. The best places I’ve found are fiction or fantasy sections of a bookstore, restaurants, and playgrounds. Read the stories of the captions of photos from Humans of New York or Paris or India. Type phrases like “What if…” or “Why is the…” into the search bar and let Google Autofill inspire the next few words of your poem. Keep a notebook of doodles, quotes, and phrases with you at all times.

You’re hopeless. Marathon a TV series to pass the time.

David Lynch found the above statement appalling because negativity is apparently the enemy of creativity. That’s unfortunate. I was going to tell you to cry over twelve-year-old CEOs and to write about your inadequacy. But don’t you dare because Ayn Rand claimed that real creative people are not driven by competition but by a desire to achieve. Watch other creators do their thing; you could see something you can interpret differently. Make a map of your future, pinpointing the places you will go, the great food you will eat, and the brilliant new things you will be creating. Find a role model in the mirage of faces, and keep them in the back of your mind.

Redecorate.

Ray Bradbury would have hated that you’re thinking of creativity and not just doing things. Order a new drink and stay at the cafe until you drink every last drop of it. If it’s good, congratulations on breaking routine. If it’s the last thing you want to take another sip of, you’ll be stuck there for a while, so you might as well write something in the meantime. Sing. In the shower, in the car, in the middle of the park - just not in the middle of the library. Mark Davis’s future started when he woke up every morning, so every day he did something creative. Force yourself to write a three-line poem every day the moment you wake up.

Don’t force an idea that doesn’t work. Keep it on a post-it note to come back to later.

Yo-Yo Ma decided creativity comes from taking risks for your passions. Listen. Take recommendations, and listen to a variety of music. For at least a week, say “Why not?” to every proposition or opportunity. Learn your favorite word in three foreign languages. Martin Luther King Jr. would have gotten along with him well. He said the creative minority is the people making the world better. At least once in a while, direct your creative juices to the service of someone else.

Make a list of ways to stay creative.

#ingridpan #misc