Five Basic Steps to Benefit from Your Creativity

By Nicholas Kabarow

The ability to exercise your creativity is even more important for you than you probably think. Why? First, your creativity tremendously contributes to your self-actualization, which is essential for you to feel satisfied with your life and be happy. Second, it is exceedingly important for being successful in building relationships and earning money.

Taking creative approach contributes to your emotional state the similar way as the spice contributes to the taste of a course stimulating the appetite. If you generate ideas and fulfill them, your life becomes more and more interesting and exciting. This does not mean that you must generate a waste amount of ideas to feel excited and call yourself “creative”; quite the contrary, you should rather be able to generate from time to time really good ideas. If you generate too much ideas and are unable to prioritize, select and fulfill them properly, you will finally feel exhausted and discontented. There are some important factors that should be taken into account to avoid this danger. Please read the five practical guidelines below and ask yourself: ”How often do I follow them in my life?”.

1. Liberate yourself from the overstrain. A stress is not only the bitterest enemy of your creativity, it is also a violent destroyer of your nervous system. There are simple efficient ways to reduce stress or even entirely get rid of it. First, plan your time regularly. You should avoid emergency jobs to the maximum extent under your control. Schedule your jobs for at least 2-3 days and make reminders in order not to forget to do things in a timely fashion.
   
   Second, you should store all your important information in a convenient form, always accessible for retrieval. The inability to quickly find a required info cause stress. If you need a phone number, address, date of a meeting, or the latest result of a negotiation, you must be able to quickly find it. You should better make from time to time a few efforts to accurately write down your information, than to make later on incredibly huge efforts to search for the lost information. Remember, there is much more free space for brilliant ideas in a calm mind than in overstrained one.
   
   
2. Seize opportunities. Do simple jobs immediately as they arrive. Do you have to make a note for tomorrow? Write it down right now, or you will inevitably miss the deadline and will have to do an emergency job under time pressure. Is an idea flashing in your mind? Write it down right now, or you will forget it at once and forever being distracted by so many things you have to do. Do not lose the golden opportunity to generate a brilliant idea.
   
   
3. Concentrate your attention. Do not think about several things at a time, focus yourself exactly on the work being done. Try to reduce the number of distractions, or their impact on you at least. In order to do so, it is very essential to be able to quickly write down any incoming information securing it to be easily found later. If you can do that in an unobtrusive way, you will not get distracted and you will keep your mind focused in most cases. A good concentration is important for you to feel comfortable at work and it forms the solid background for ideas creation.
   
   
4. Spare your resources. Do not make too much efforts to immediately turn a newly arrived idea into a ready to implement solution. When an idea is flashing in your mind, simply write it down. When you have time, read and think about it; then forget it for a while to revert back later. Repeat that process over and over again until you could finally decide whether the idea is good or bad. Do not worry about the fact that you are not deliberating on your idea; at this stage of the idea development this does your subconscious. By forgetting an idea for a while you get a good chance to see it several times with a fresh look and evaluate it objectively. Moreover, and that is extremely important, by doing so you avoid wasting your personal resources on implementation of premature ideas and stop working on fuzzy goals.
   
   
5. Use your computer. There is a tremendous information processing power located inside the case of your computer. Make all those Gigabytes and Gigahertz work for you to solve simple yet very important issues: scheduling, quick setup of reminders, taking notes and ideas, archiving them into history and searching them. Take your time to find a software that really fits your needs, it will spare your time and efforts daily in the future. A good software for the everyday use must be convenient for you, smooth to operate, unobtrusive and it must in no way turn itself into another problem when you apply it to solve the original one.

In this article you have been presented five practical guidelines to build a solid background for discovering and efficiently using your creativity. Regardless of how much creative you are, you need to perform appropriate actions in appropriate circumstances to get real results. If you are not doing actions, doing inappropriate actions or doing right actions in wrong circumstances, you will only waste your potential and lose opportunities. The guidelines above ensure that you are acting properly. This article deals both with your personal organization and creativity, because they contribute tremendously to each other. That is why you should exercise them both to get practical results. This is the only solid bridge you can build from your creativity to your success. Good luck to you! •

© 2005 Nicholas Kabarow

About the Author
Nicholas Kabarow is a senior designer and software architect at CuteReminder Labs. His innovative ideas were implemented in the personal information management software called Cute Reminder. Nicholas’ main concept of a software aimed for personal use is the quick and unobtrusive user interface able to spare your efforts daily. Comments can be sent via the contact form at CuteReminder.com.

02/17/05