10 Ways To Be More Creative

What Does It Mean to be “Creative” Anyway?

Creativity and crazy. They go together like ginger and beer, aged cheese and fine wine, impressionist painters and lead poisoning. One can hardly think of one without the other. Almost by definition, creativity is the opposite of boring. If something is creative, it’s because it triggers some degree of surprise or excitement within us—it reconfigures existence in ways we could not have previously imagined.

Creativity is a delicate dance between novelty and value. For something to feel creative, it must feel both new and useful in some way. Although we think of creativity as creating something unique, most of it isn’t. In fact, most of what we experience as being “new” is simply taking old stuff and remixing it in fresh or unexpected ways.

Researchers call this “divergent thinking,” and it’s one of the best predictors of measurable creativity as well as one of the best skills to learn if you want to be more creative. Instead of asking yourself, “How do I create something new?” ask yourself, “How can I change something old to make it feel new?”

Even my own creativity has followed this path. One of the most common criticisms of my books is that I didn’t “come up” with most of the advice I give. Well… of course I didn’t! You really think I’m going to compete with Aristotle and the Buddha? This advice has been around for thousands of years. I simply repackaged it in interesting and novel ways, changed the emphasis on a few points, and added a couple of my own ideas to spice things up. Instead of focusing on happiness and positivity, I focus on pain. Instead of selling desperate people a vision of success, I help people question their definition of success. Instead of trying to sound like an authoritative expert, I use phrases like “authoritative expert.”

And this has worked. The millions of people out there who aren’t into mushy, woo-woo, feel-good self-help crap really appreciate the novelty of the way I write.

Which brings us to the second part of creative work: adding value. Creative work isn’t creative just because it’s “new”—it’s also creative because it adds some sort of value to the world.

For stuff that adds value but isn’t new, we generally consider it to be a rip-off of something or someone else. On the other hand, stuff that’s novel but doesn’t add value, we see as crude, tasteless, and immature.

Nailing the combination of novelty and value is difficult. It requires a lot of trial and error. It requires getting feedback from people. It requires understanding your audience and their values. It requires honing and perfecting your craft over many years of practice. And this is where the hard work of creativity comes in. For every genius symphony or mind-melting tech gadget, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of failed ideas. For every hit song, that band probably has half a dozen albums that no one has heard of. For every scientific breakthrough, there have been hundreds of theories that have been proven to be wrong.

Creativity is, in reality, hard work. And like all hard work, optimal creativity requires some degree of routine and repeatability. And that is why creativity is secretly kinda boring.

It turns out that creativity is a skill. And like any skill, you can practice and get better at it. In fact, just learning about creativity and how it works can help. So here are some of the not-so-exciting-but-also-really-important things you can do to be more creative in your own life.