What are the Best Ways to Think Creatively?

After having spent more than a quarter of a century exploring creativity, I have in fact come to accept the notion that creativity is an innate skill. That’s to say, we are all born with it.

Just look back when we were kids.

To me, creativity has a lot to do with “seeing, but thinking differently”.

Let me share this personal experiment of mine for more than two decades with adult professionals and school kids.

Using a chisel tip black marker, I often drew a dot on the whiteboard or flip chart and asked them what did they see.

Adults generally came up with one or two ideas, like a full stop, or a black dot, and then they ceased.

Interestingly, most kids saw differently, with seemingly pretty weird ideas:

beetle in sleep mode; cockroach’s shit; black hole; cannonball; UFO; bullet coming your way; ozone; aching tooth, mummy’s nipple; Phua Chu Kang (Singapore’s favourite TV comedian)’s mole, etc.

Why? My answer: Adults didn’t want to look stupid and/or feared ridicule from peers.

Actually, at a deeper level, it’s the fact that we adults had invariably picked up a lot of mental blocks, cognitive biases and perceptual blind spots while growing up.