Practical means to become creative

Being creative is as simple as thinking/doing anything outside the usual. If you are flaky or a wit-loving person, you are already well packed and bundled with creativity. Life is so much fun with a pinch of ingenuity in our daily routine.

How can we improve creativity? Simple! Just by practicing to be creative in our thoughts & deeds. Here are a few techniques proved to be effective by several psychologists and scientists. These are grouped by the subject of focus.

(Some points are borrowed from Brian Hunt, filtered for practicality, and grouped)

HEALTH!
1. Exercise regularly. This will improve the blood flow to your brain.

2. Make sure that you get enough rest. Every hour of sleep lost leads to a drop of one IQ point.

CHANGE!
3. Get rid of the rules you don't need in your life or at work. Start learning to break non-essential rules.

4. Change your ambiance; Try to find ideas in a different environment. Go for a stroll, enjoy nature, change places, etc.

5. Change your routines. Creativity comes from seeing things that others overlook and from questioning what we are seeing and why. For example, take a different route to work once in a week.

THINK!
6. Make time for reflection and daydreaming - give your ideas time to form.

7. Brainstorm first! Go for quantity of ideas first, and then look for the good ones. Each idea will spark another one.

8. Look for ways to make a problem even worse - then turning these ideas around can lead you to the solution. For every good idea there’s an opposite one.

9. Write metaphors, similes, poetry and jokes to use your imaging right brain. This can help you see an object in a different viewpoint.

10. Practice creative thinking each day. Exercise your mind with daily puzzles.

11. Enumerate unexpected uses of familiar products.

12. Consider yourself to be a dialog writer for a movie, and construct imaginary dialogs. This technique was first introduced in the best-selling book by Napoleon Hill, "Think and Grow Rich".

COLLABORATE!
13. Get a different perspective by discussing your ideas with someone else. Organizing your thoughts to describe them to others can help you find gaps and things you've overlooked. Creativity arises from the differences of opinions and perspectives between people.

JUST DO IT!
14. Take up creative writing. Write a blog or a diary, and empty your thoughts in it.

Making it easy for you! Check out Saywit, a web2.0 app that lets you practice techniques 6 - 13 in an organized collaborative manner. It aims to bring up your creative abilities naturally, and makes it fun all the way!

To read an analysis on creativity, check out the article 'Introduction to Creative thinking' by Robert Harris.