Travis Bradberry* believes creativity is within the reach of all of us — and suggests strategies for those who have difficulty releasing it.
I expend a huge amount of my time and energy writing books and articles and working to keep my company innovative.
I investigate some of history’s most creative minds in the hope I might learn some tricks to expand my own creative productivity.
Some of the things I’ve learned are more useful than others, and some are simply too weird to try.
Steve Jobs, for example, routinely sat on toilets, dangling his bare feet in the water while he came up with new ideas.
Yoshiro Nakamatsu (inventor of the floppy disc) would dive deep under water until his brain was deprived of oxygen, then write his ideas on an underwater sticky pad.
Weird ideas aside, I’ve developed a pretty good understanding of the habits of some of history’s most creative minds.
There’s enough commonality between different people that I’ve distilled their habits into strategies that anyone can follow.
Six of these strategies stand out because they have the power to change the way you think about creativity.
Wake up early
Not all creative minds are morning people. Franz Kafka, for instance, routinely stayed up all night writing.
However, early risers make up the clear majority of creative thinkers. The list ranges from Benjamin Franklin to Howard Schultz to Ernest Hemmingway, though they didn’t all wake up early for the same reasons.
Franklin woke up early to plan out his day, while Schultz uses the time to send motivational emails to his employees.
Hemingway woke up at 5am every day to begin writing.
He said: “There is no one to disturb you and it is cool and cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.”
The trick to making getting up early stick is to do it every day and avoid naps — no matter how tired you feel.
Eventually, you will start going to bed earlier to make up for the lost sleep.
This can make for a couple of groggy days at first, but you’ll adjust quickly, and before you know it, you’ll join the ranks of creative early risers.
Exercise frequently
There’s plenty of evidence pointing to the benefits of exercise for creativity.
Feeling good physically gets you in the right mood to focus and be productive.
Exercise also forces you to have disconnected time (it’s tough to text or email while working out) and this allows you to reflect on whatever it is you’re working on.
It’s no surprise that so many creative and successful people built exercise into their daily routines.
Kurt Vonnegut took walks into the nearby town, swam laps, and did push-ups and sit-ups; Richard Branson runs every morning.
Stick to a strict schedule
It’s a common misconception that in order to be creative, one must live life on a whim with no structure.
The habits of highly successful and creative people suggest otherwise. Most creative minds schedule their days rigorously.
Psychologist, William James said that only by having a schedule can we “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action”.
Keep your day job
Creativity flourishes when you’re creating for yourself and no one else.
Creativity becomes more difficult when your livelihood depends upon what you create.
Perhaps this is why so many successful and creative people held on to their day jobs.
Many of them, like author, Stephen King, who was a schoolteacher, produced what many people believe their very best work while they still held a 9-to-5 job.
Day jobs provide more than the much-needed financial security to create freely. They also add structure to your day that can make your creative time a wonderful release.
Learn to work anywhere, anytime
A lot of people work in only one place, believing it’s practically impossible for them to get anything done anywhere else.
Staying in one place is actually a crutch; studies show that changing environments is beneficial to productivity and creativity.
E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web, said it well: “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”
When you have a creative idea, don’t wait — put it into action as soon as you can.
Learn that creative blocks are just procrastination
As long as your heart is still beating, you have the ability to come up with new ideas and execute them.
They may not always be great ones, but the greatest enemy of creativity is inactivity.
Author, Jodi Picoult summarised creative blocks perfectly.
“I don’t believe in writer’s block.
“Think about it — when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn’t it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due?
“Writer’s block is having too much time on your hands. If you have a limited amount of time to write, you just sit down and do it. You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
In my experience, you must get intentional about your creativity if you want it to flourish. Give these strategies a try to see what they can do for you.
*Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the co-founder of TalentSmart. He can be contacted at talentsmart.com.
This article first appeared at talentsmart.com.
