I was recently interviewed for a podcast by Will Sherlin for his Innovation Engine Podcast, which I wanted to share with you in the embedded file above.

Episode Highlights

Why do we need to strengthen our creative capabilities?

  • Professor George Land commissioned a longitudinal study following the same group of people over time to see what happened as they got older. He did a creativity test with a group of five year olds, and 98 percent of them scored a genius level for creativity. Then he interviewed the same children five years later, when they were 10 years old, and that had dropped significantly. By the time those people were adults, those creativity levels have dropped from 98 percent in childhood down to about 2 percent overall. Learn more: “Evidence that children become less creative over time (and how to fix it)”
  • It’s not just happening at an individual level. In another study, Professor Kyung Hee Kim looked at what’s happening on a population-wide level over the last couple of decades. She found that, since the 1990s, there’s been a steady decline in people’s creative ability and creative output following a change in the school system where people were told to focus more on getting the right results, rather than expressing themselves and trying to think of new solutions to problems. Learn more: “The Creativity Crisis: It’s Getting Worse”

5 activities you should do every day, month, or week to maintain and increase your creative capacity:

  • Every day, you should be getting 15 minutes of unfocused time. If you can devote 15 minutes every day to not looking at a screen, not having a conversation with someone, not reading a book, and not listening to any human speech, that allows the brain to essentially start wondering a little more and start forming new random connections within itself.
  • Every day, you should be listing out what challenge you’re actively working on, whether it’s at business or at home, and what ideas you’ve previously tried to address that challenge. This is meant to help you stay creatively productive; to prevent yourself from just spending all of your time being unproductive, or doing activity rather than actions.
  • Every day, if you really want to become better at being creative, you need to force your brain to be creative. The best way that Nick has found to do this is through Deep Creativity Training, so he developed a set of several hundred daily creativity exercises. These are open-ended creativity challenges that don’t have a right answer, and it’s all about forcing your brain to get out of its comfort zone and to think of as many solutions to these random questions as possible, within a set time limit. “This trains your brain to become much more comfortable with the ambiguity that exists around creativity – the desire to give the perfect answer is one thing that really holds us back.”
  • Every week, intentionally add variety and new experiences into your life. New ideas are formed by random new connections between old ideas; Neural pathways will try different routes inside your brain to come up to a solution, and occasionally one of these new pathways comes up with a combination of previous ideas that is essentially a solution to whatever challenge you are working on. So if you can feed it more seeds of information, more new experiences, and more knowledge, more new ideas can grow. Plus, “when you get sort of a jolt out of your routine, that’s been shown to increase your short term creativity by about 14 percent.”
  • Every month, Nick recommends you do something creative for yourself, and finish it. This is all about executing, rather than execution, and it helps you get over the procrastination, the fear of perfection, and the fear of judgment.

Did you know that scientific evidence shows your creativity decreases over time

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Nick Skillicorn

Chief Editor, Founder & CEO at Improvides Innovation Consulting
Creativity & Innovation expert: I help individuals and companies build their creativity and innovation capabilities, so you can develop the next breakthrough idea which customers love. Chief Editor of Ideatovalue.com and Founder / CEO of Improvides Innovation Consulting. Coach / Speaker / Author / TEDx Speaker / Voted as one of the most influential innovation bloggers.