What is creativity? We are all creative at one level or another but sometimes we don't engage the creative gears. One of my favorite books is A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech. He comes up with creative and imaginative ways to get you to think creatively, differently and sometime jarringly. I believe that creativity is simply combining two completely different items, ideas or thoughts to come up with a completely different item, idea or thought. Take two things that are totally unrelated and discover a creative idea.
Here's an exercise: Make a metaphor out of these two unrelated items:
1. A movie car chase
Is like a:
2. dead fish on the beach
In the following ways:
Here's what I come up with as I think about it. A movie car chase is like a dead fish on the beach in that: most of the time they both stink; neither can see too far ahead; both are destined for the trash heap; both involve the mafia; you get a movie made just for the halibut. Okay, so not very creative or amusing but you get the idea.
In 1948 George had just finished taking his dog for a walk when he noticed all the burrs that stuck, stubbornly to his dog and his pants. He looked at them under a microscope and found the burrs had tiny hooks on them that caught the loops of his pants. Then his creativity kicked into gear and he combined those annoying burrs with closures for clothing like zippers and buttons and came up with Velcro. Some brothers combined a bike and a bird and came up with an airplane. A bunch of guys combined a typewriter with some magnetic tape used to record music and later some silicon sand to come up with the computer I'm writing on now.
Think about, the ability to take two completely unrelated items and combine them in a new way is creativity. Look at things upside down for a while and get a new perspective. Occasionally we all need a metaphorical whack on the side of the head.