Creativity is one of the evolutionary forces. Without it, humanity wouldn’t be able to solve problems or come up with new ideas.
Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of least resistance, says, “much of what you learned growing up was what not to do and what to avoid”. That is, people are trained to react to what happens instead of pursuing what they want. As a result, we let circumstances control our lives, and growing creativity becomes more difficult.
Ask the right questions
How often have we been told to be realistic? To consider what can be done and what can’t be done, according to external factors. Our thinking about these factors is influenced by our experiences, values, and assumptions. In other words, it’s biased. Therefore, we can be wrong about what is realistic.
There is another way to approach change. We can remove reality from the beginning of our thinking process by asking this simple question: What do I really want?
By finding what you really want, you can define the gap between what you have and your desired future. This gap creates a creative tension that allows new ideas to emerge.
Creativity is not a product of our circumstances, but of our desires. When we feel constrained by the environment, it is more difficult for us to access our creative resources.
Creative resources
As Pablo Picasso said, “The greatest enemy of creativity is common sense”. In a sense, to access our creative resources, we should let go of what we think we know and be curious. Ideas often arise by chance in the most unlikely places or from observations outside a specific field.
It is said that Henry Ford redesigned his car factory and conceived the first assembly line after seeing how some butchers in Chicago worked. The pieces of meat were hung on hooks that moved on a monorail. Each worker had his place and when he finished his task, he pushed the piece to the next station so that the operators did not have to move.
Henry Ford changed the paradigm of auto manufacturing by applying something he saw in a different industry. In fact, he didn’t just change the auto industry. He created a revolutionary manufacturing process that changed so many businesses.
He wanted to build cheaper cars in less time, which was impossible at the time. His goal of bridging the gap between reality and desire, combined with his curiosity and open-mindedness, made it possible.
The lesson behind this story is that we all have enough creative resources to make things happen, but first we need to free ourselves from biases and constraints. How we perceive reality is one of them.
Image by Juan Marin at Unsplash