Last Thursday, the Jeremy of the Daily Post, wrote a post entitled Hacking Creativity: Simple Steps to Become More Creative. This immediately caught my eye, since the main goal of my blog is to explore my creative side. He notes that he struggled with pottery class and that he lacked ‘the creativity gene.’ I thought, “Wow, that’s me.” He goes on to say that “For longest time, we’ve assumed creativity is some kind of character trait bestowed at birth. In fact, it can actually be learned.” This crushed my hopes a bit, because I still believe that some people are innately more creative than others because for some people it just comes naturally.
Think back to when you were younger and your art project sucked and everyone else’s is awesome…but then again, that may be because I’m just grouping ‘creativity’ and ‘artistic’. My mother makes clay flower arrangements, and when I go help her at art and craft shows, people always ask if I do them. One, I don’t have the patience. Two, she likes things done a certain way, and I don’t really meet her standards. Three, I’m not good with art. (Crafts are definitely different. I can scrapbook, sew, cook, graphic design… and I help her in many other ways, selling, paperwork, taxes – things that have more of a ‘definitive’ result, so don’t think I don’t help!)Back to Jeremy – He listed four tips to help with creativity.
- Curate your surroundings – your ideas will come if you are surrounded by other people who have ideas (they don’t have to be good ideas either!).
- Attend a WordPress meetup – I’m not going to lie, I don’t like meeting people. I’m sort of anti-social because I’m just not very good at small talk and describing myself. I attribute that to me not having any interests, but now that I’ve taken up different things, maybe that will build up my confidence and be more willing to go and meet people
- Join an online Blogging University course – I’ve completed Blogging 101 and want to start Photography 101 when WordPress hosts it again
- Keep inspiration nearby
- Experiment with your environment
- Expand your bubble – this one is kind of hard for me because when I’m not interested in something, I don’t bother with it. For example, politics. I don’t really mess with them and so I kind of ignore it.
- Read books and blogs on different topics
- Practice free writing
- Take a writing vacation
- Force it – Maybe I’ll force myself to expand my bubble by reading a post from different topics. We’ll see how that goes.
- Back yourself into a corner
The bottom line of this jumbled post? Right now, the best creativity ideas for me comes from using others’ inspiration. It works the best for me, right now. Probably not in the future. But hey, we all have to start somewhere.
A More Creative Me 