Or watch the video on Creativity and Successful Living
Creativity has always been with us. Unfortunately, many people fail to recognize it in themselves, and therefore fail to utilize it as a powerful mental tool for successful living.
Each day of our lives we are faced with challenges. Whether it’s while working for a boss, or working for ourselves. Daily challenges and striving to develop our lives into a successive chain of events which make us realize that we are being successful each and every day of our lives, is our goal.
The misconception for many people is that success is a single event. The idea that we can strive towards success while we are in a state of failure, then somehow a sudden change of events creates a single successful event that defines us and our lives. This is not success, this is when a person receives a windfall of a large amount of money, or the opportunity to stop working and start doing whatever they want due to an unusual event in life – such as winning the jackpot on the Lottery.
Success is an ongoing series of happenings that we must always work at in order for it to continue into a successive series of smaller events.
It doesn’t matter what you personally choose as your goal. It could be a purely creative pursuit in art, or it could be business and the success of firstly building a business, then enjoying the benefits of a better income. Whatever your goals are, be sure that they are serious, and that you know that you chose them because they fit your character and your needs.
Creative thinking is used to solve problems. Ego based thinking is dreaming, and then dreaming some more – that’s as far as ego goes.
Dreaming about success and equating it with stopping work, and not having responsibilities, and being able to get up in the morning and make spontaneous choices about what to do with your day, is not a dream of success. It’s a nightmare scenario that most human beings couldn’t live in for more than a couple of weeks. The boredom would drive you into depression, the choices you would have to make about the trivial things in your daily life, would drive you nuts. Who wants that. I think, once again, Hollywood has given many people a very immature version of what success really means.
The problem with ego based thinking is that it runs away with itself. We end up exploring ideas that are not viable in reality, but they sound great when they are only inside our heads. Creativity in thinking allows us to dream big, but stay realistic.
In other words, creativity will connect itself with the outside world all of the time. It’s in its nature to take two objects, and try to find a connection between those two ideas. The ideas that it presents to us often create new questions. The opportunity to ask a better formed question about how to achieve something we have set out to do presents us with a step by step challenge to not only develop our ideas, but to test them with more powerful questions. That leads to the higher motivation to put the ideas into action at each step of the way.
Each step of the way is about making solid connections with your own ideas, and showing yourself how they fit together. Then taking the result and deepening it into a more viable and solid idea that can become a creative work, or a business idea.
Along the way you will always be faced with something important – yourself. You will see your own weaknesses and your own fears constantly showing up and demanding that you be more sensible. Doubt breeds fear, so learn to recognize it as it tries its best to make convince you to put down paper and pen, and forget the whole project.
Successful people, whether it’s their wealth or their lifestyle that defines it on the outside, are always working on their own success.
Successful people began to create successful ideas at their kitchen table, then tested them by taking them outside. If you have a product or a service to offer, one which you have developed, then it needs to be tested. Through feedback, you will get great ideas about how to improve what you are doing.
At first, you will spend a lot of time working on how to connect ideas. Those creative connections are the thing which create the whole. It’s a matter of subtraction and addition. Testing, removing and replacing ideas, moulding the whole idea like a clay statue until you finally see it in the form that you envisioned in the first place.
It was a process of creative thinking based on staying grounded in reality, and using the ability to fantasize and dream that got you to your first goal of having a product or creation.
One foot is in dreamland, the other is always firmly placed in reality.
The whole process is propelled forards by your character. You must prove persistence in your activities. Overcoming doubt, and never allowing fear to determine your decisions is imperitave to you realising the end result.
Determination is about decision making, and sticking to the decision. Resilience is about being able to bounce back from knock-downs and small failures. A determined person has a plan which they implement and stick to. You determine the course of action through conscious activities and don’t allow other emotions to interfere with the progress.
Resilience will support determination and create a sense of “battle”. You will feel how enjoyable it is to go into the fray of life and do your best to win, each day. Just that alone is successful living.
Creative thinking in business and everyday life takes practice. If you have experience, or live a life as a creative person, then you are ahead of the game. Creative people can be found in all walks of life. Artists and entrepreneurs can be as creative as each other, there is no difference in what they do. The end results and its use, are what is different.
Reading about creative people helps you to identify with the process – and how, sometimes, it can appear to be a process of chaos to outsiders. So many people in creative pursuits, in business, and in everyday lifestyles have been hounded, criticized and blamed for living nutty, crazy lives by lazy thinkers. They then went on to prove that all their thinking and planning was rock solid and totally in line with reality as they finally revealed the projects in the flesh.
The only real rule of creativity is to get on with it, to stretch your imagination so that you know that each answer will lead to a new point of thought. That new point of thought about youzr project may require that you create a new perspective on your project. How?
Questions are more important than answers – the answers will come, so long as the question is well formulated and you are careful about the perspective you have on the project.
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