I am not creative. I am better suited to a life as a mousepad.
Each book on creativity that I have read features a test to measure how you fare. For instance, a picture of an empty matchbox and a candle which you must rearrange into a five course dinner in three moves.
I always go hungry. Even if I cheat. These tests are not designed for lesser mortals like you or me. They are designed for college students who already know everything.
Our vision of an idea is of a lightbulb suddenly lighting up the inside our heads. Nonsense. That’s how cartoonists showed Felix the Cat having an idea in cartoons before movies had sound.
We approach “ideas” wrong. In amongst the 366,000,00 different definitions of the words are these ones that I kinda understand.
- “Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality.”
- An idea is “Something, such as a thought or conception, that is the product of mental activity.”
- A problem, in the context above is “something that is difficult to deal with” and unrelated to either creativity or ideas.
I discussed this with 100 ninjas last night, all struggling to dream up some idea that might pay some bills.
I asked them to identify five ideas in two minutes. 25% beat the clock.
Then I asked them to list five problems they’d experienced this past week. 75% beat the clock this time. We recognise problems more easily than ideas.
We think that an “idea” pops into our heads like the sight of falling fruit led Isaac Newton to discover gravity. Nonsense. He’d wrestled for ages on the problem of why we can’t fall upwards.
An idea is just one answer to a problem we experience.
The problem leads the way. The commercial success of an idea results from how many people face the problem it solves.
Once you’ve been blessed with a problem it’s easy to find different ways of solving it. At least if you aren’t too busy bewailing your fate.
Almost everything we touch today exists because somebody solved a problem that they faced in their personal life.
The starter motor, for instance.
Owners of a 1910 Cadillac started the engine by cranking it with a handle. When the engine burst into life the crank handle reverse or fly off. This always surprised the cranker. Often fatally.
Nobody much cared. The founder of Cadillac took an interest when a friend of his died cranking. He tasked somebody to solve the problem. The problem prompted the idea of an electric starter motor to crank the engine. The 1912 Cadillac featured it.
That’s why you now start your car with a key, and I’m jolly grateful for that. Especially in the rain.
The challenges you face today are seeds of opportunity knocking at your door. You don’t know how lucky you are.
The more nightsoil in your life the more fertiliser to nurture your entrepreneurial seeds.
How wonderful is that?