How To Build Your Creativity Muscles

In 1974 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published an infamous article called Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.  The essential concept underlying the article is that our brains make many value based judgements by using mental-shortcuts.  For example, we assess the probability of something in our minds without actually going through the process of assessing the actual probability (what is the likelihood of us getting hit by a bus if we J-Walk?). 

While there are several benefits to applying heuristics, Kahneman and Tversky spent a lot of their time highlighting how applying heuristics can actually hurt us. For example, anchoring can impact our decisions.  Anchoring is defined as;

a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions.

In other words if I offer to sell you a product and I tell you that my original price was $100 but I will sell it to you for $30 compared to me telling you that it used to cost $25 but I had to increase the price to $30, you would have a very different reaction. 

Why do we take shortcuts?

Several reasons and this article goes into some details, but essentially we do it because our brains need to make sense of things, even when they actually don't make sense.  To not do so would take too much of our energy.  As it stands our brains can use up to 20% of the energy we expend. 

What does this have to do with creativity?

Well, a simple Google search will highlight several articles and blogs highlighting the benefits of being creative and the academic community is pretty much in universal agreement that creativity can help everything from general well-being to helping people with autism.

The problem is that most of us do not employ our creativity skills on a daily basis because of the reasons highlighted above.  Our brains are trying to conserve energy and prefer to use heuristics instead. However, being creative works much the same way as any muscle in our body.  If you don't use it you lose it.

Your 5th challenge is to start practising your creativity skills.  Choose at least one of the suggestions below (or come up with a suggestion yourself) and apply your creativity to these suggestions.  Write a Tryary of your experience:

1. Come up with at least 5 different uses for a coke can

2. Make up a story based on the following intro:  Once upon a time there was a donkey named Frank...

3. Come up with a contest idea to get people excited about a boring product (such as toothpaste or batteries)

4. Create a new Disney character to hang out with Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofie.

5. Come up with a crazy and new concept for a restaurant

6. Create your own recipe

If you need help with becoming more creative, this book, is an easy read that will fill your mind with amazing suggestions to become more creative.