How to Avoid Being Creative

1. Follow a routine every day, all the time, with everything you do.
2. Stick to what you already know.
3. Assume that your way of thinking is always right.
4. Only pretend to listen to other people’s ideas.
5. Believe that creativity cannot be learned.
6. Play it safe, avoid risks.
7. Ensure that you are never wrong.
8. Always think logically.
9. Critique while creating, not after.
10. Constantly copy other people’s ideas.
11. Believe that creativity is work, not fun.
12. Spend an irrational amount of time thinking about an idea before acting on it.
13. Never write down your ideas.
14. Do what has been proven to work, always.
15. Listen to the same genre of music and read the same types of books.
16. Pretend not to care about anything.
17. Remind yourself daily that you are not creative.
18. Never seek out creative inspiration.
19. Forget about observing the world around you.
20. Simply don’t think.

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Find your creative muse.

If you ever walk by a man sketching something in his notebook, chances are he will be drawing – or his sketchbook will include many drawings of – a woman.

Nothing surprising there. For thousands and thousands of years the male gender has found inspiration in the natural beauty of women. Just look at ancient greek statues, the majority of which are shaped like women.

Try to think of a single great artist – Picasso, Van Gogh, or even Dalí – and you are sure to find a woman (or women) behind a great number of their artworks.

In order to truly be creative you need to find motivation and a source of inspiration, or a muse. While your muse doesn’t have to be a woman, or even a person at all, having something that you can continuously look to for inspiration can be a powerful creativity tool.

Finding a muse isn’t hard if you don’t have one already. Simply walking down a crowded street or sitting in a cafe or visiting a museum is enough. When you become overwhelm with any type of emotion while observing an individual or object, you know you have found your muse.

Who, or what, is your creative muse?

Don't Believe Your Eyes.

Beau Lotto understands the difference between what we really see and what’s an illusion. But do you?

According to Lotto, the visual world we see around is isn’t entirely reality. In–fact: you are only able to make sense of the world you see, these words you’re reading right now, because your mind has been trained to recognize the shapes and colors and hues in a convenient way.

What you’re looking at right now may not entirely be reality, but for functionality – and your sanity – your mind has accepted the reality you see.

Let me try to be a bit more clear with an example. Read the following statement out loud:

Wh  t   a  e   you   rea  ing?

If you read that last line as –What are you reading?– then congratulations: you are normal. But more than that: why did you assume that the statement was what you thought it was? It’s because your mind has been trained, for convenience, to place the letter “d” between the a and i of the last word. Nothing said there had to be a letter there, however.

When we look at the world around us we are overwhelmed by empty sentences, shapes that can be seen from literally millions of different perspectives, colors that can be misleading (based on their surroundings and anything between us and the colors.

As a creative thinker you must accept the fact that what you see is not certain.

As a challenge for this week: try to find one thing you regularly look at, be it a stop light or computer screen or familiar face, and try to see it from a different perspective. Ask yourself: “Is what I see what is really there?”