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Creativity Triggers for College Students and Everyone Else

By Edward Glassman, PhD | Posted 11/14/11 | Updated 6/15/25

Creativity triggers help everyone — whether you are a mother, father, doctor, lawyer, mayor, accountant, teenager, intern, police-person, business owner, soldier, president, vice-president, teacher, advertising executive, civic group leader, manager, government worker or official, fireman, nurse, district attorney, CEO, librarian, professor, scout leader, realtor, student, or coach.

Change from a person that has to be reminded to 'think outside the box,' into a person who can 'eliminate the box' from your thinking, a person that spouts unexpected ideas generously, and solves problems creatively.

Savor Your Creativity

I enjoy my creativity. Ideas pop into my head in an erratic stream. It adds spice to my life. And it enabled me to write this book and contribute to the quality and excitement of my life.

Savor your creativity. It helps you enjoy your life. To reveal some dimensions of your own creativity, finish these statements:

"When I am creating, I feel …"

The biggest help to my creativity is …"

The biggest obstacle to my creativity is …"

I need the following to be more creative …"

"If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always gotten," maybe less...

Creativity triggers fuel your ability to generate an unexpected "new and useful" idea. The more unexpected the idea, the more creative we perceive it.

Today the process works even better. No longer do we have to wait for someone's brain to slowly churn out a new and useful idea. Now we have hundreds of creativity triggers to help spark ideas to achieve high-quality solutions to problems.

"Hold on," you say. "Didn't the old methods work for thousands of years to produce ideas? Didn't we construct our entire civilization using those old ways? Why a new way? If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

Of course, the old ways still work. And we did construct our civilization waiting for ideas to slowly appear.

Nonetheless, the new creativity triggers heat up the process, so we generate more new and useful ideas in a shorter time. And because we have more ideas to choose from, we turn out higher quality solutions, avoiding the quick fix.

Groups using brainstorming to generate ideas complain that they have trouble sorting and selecting so many ideas. How sweet to move beyond the old bottleneck of not having enough ideas to the problem of evaluating the myriad of ideas a simple brainstorming session produces.

And Alex Osborn invented brainstorming over 80 years ago, the era of the Model-A Ford and the DC-3 airplane. Not a modern procedure at all. Indeed, using only brainstorming today mimics driving around in a Model-A Ford or a DC-3 airplane, ignoring computers, antibiotics, TV, the Internet, the iPad, mobile phones, and the thousands of modern inventions from which we benefit. You need to use modern creativity triggers.

I know college students. I taught college students for 30 years, plus the years I was a college student myself, so I possess some insight into the college student's mind.

All college students are creative. Unfortunately almost all students attempt creative thinking without training, like a teen athlete operating without a coach, a mentor, or any formal lessons.

The result: an attempt at creative thinking without the quality outcomes that come from trained creatives.

Let's look at some ways to spur the enhancement of ideas in college students, helping them to become more creative by improving their thinking skills.

What triggers creativity?

Receiving new ideas in a supportive, non-evaluative manner.
Focusing on the daily enjoyment of creative effort, the internal reward.
Learning and using targeted creativity triggers, such as, brainstorming, brainwriting, forced combinations, fresh eye, How to's, metaphors and analogies, future fantasy, idea card, idea grid, etc.
Seeking to discover and use personal environmental creativity triggers.
Enjoying and welcoming bizarre ideas as triggers to better ideas.
Taking 100% responsibility to create a creative climate.
Using the 8 rung problem-solving ladder to attack problems creatively.

Creativity produces golden thoughts, new and useful ideas. Whether you are an undergraduate, a graduate student, or a student in a professional school, my book will help you change from a person that has to be reminded to 'think outside the box,' to a person who eliminates the box from your thinking, a person that spouts unexpected ideas generously, and solves problems creatively.

I enjoy my creativity. Ideas pop into my head in an erratic stream. It adds spice to my life. And it enabled me to write my books and columns, and contribute to the quality and excitement of my life. Savor your creativity. It will help you enjoy your life.

Reduce resistance to using creativity triggers

Today, many people find that creative thinking contributes to a winning edge. Students who work alone, or in groups, use creativity triggers to solve problems more effectively.

Many students underestimate the power that creativity triggers provide, because they believe creative thinking comes from an exceptional, inherited gift. You either have it or you don't.

Not so. Most of us have creative ability and use it everyday. We don't recognize it as creativity or even see it as special. We call it tinkering, ingenuity, intuition, trial-and-error, imagination, making suggestions, inventing — anything but creative thinking. We think creative thinking an exceptional gift inherited by other students.

Not true. Most students think creatively most of the time; it depends on what you spend your time creating that makes the difference. Best of all, creativity triggers helps solve problems more effectively in your life and your career.

We could not have survived as a species had we not been creative and adjusted to changing conditions.

Tips to start thinking creatively:

❂ Seek Many Alternatives: Consider this situation. You perceive a problem you want to solve. An idea flashes through your mind. You like it. It appears to work. You shout eureka, and the creative process ends. Actually, it hardly started, because this is the quick fix. To avoid this, generate at least five new alternatives. One hundred is better, but who's counting.

❂ Ignore Premature Criteria: Knowing the criteria for a quality solution too soon suppresses creative thinking. Criteria box you in, and you waste time worrying whether each idea and new perspective meets the criteria.

❂ Avoid Instant Evaluation: Evaluation depends on old ideas and old information. Creativity seeks new ideas and new information. Old and new conflict with each other. Instant evaluation versus the new idea. So, to escape old thinking patterns, do not evaluate new ideas too soon.

❂ Listen To Other People's Ideas: Other people's ideas will often trigger new ideas in you.

❂ Forced-Withdrawal: Change the setting of your perspective. Create and combine alternatives within a different context than the real problem you want to solve. For example, pretend that you attend a different school in a different country, or that you are a different person. In this way, you avoid getting bogged down in stifling old thoughts and habits.

❂ Trigger-Ideas: Ideas that do not contribute to a quality solution, when properly used, can trigger other ideas that do work. Trigger-ideas can play a key role in creative thinking. Indeed, even indifferent, exotic words can spark new ideas.

❂ Forced Combinations: You may create unexpected and useful ideas by combining ideas, objects, thoughts, and impressions with your problem. You may connect your problem with thoughts related or unrelated to the problem.

❂ Idea Improvement: Improve your idea relentlessly. This process itself will spark many more new ideas.

List what you like about the idea so you won't change that.
List what needs improvement. This process will give you a sense of the usefulness of your idea.

❂ Use Bizarre Ideas To Startle and Upset Your Viewpoint

What works counts most. Avoid philosophical distractions.
Avoid the internal gauntlet and other habits that distort the creative atmosphere in your mind.
Stay patient and relentless. ❈

Next: Forced Creativity Combinations for the Arts

Edward Glassman is a former Guggenheim Fellow at Stanford University and a Visiting Fellow at The Center For Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. …