10 brain workouts to help you think more creatively
Creativity isn’t a talent, it is a skill you can nurture – here are 10 exercises to get you enjoying to think more, courtesy of a professor at Stanford, no less.
We’ve all been there. Your colleagues or fellow students are bursting with ideas while you’ve been sitting there, clueless, staring at a blank sheet of paper for an hour. This is where Tina Selling comes in. She’s a 64-year-old author and Professor of the Practice in the Department of Engineering at Stanford University in California who insists that creativity isn’t a talent, it’s a skill you can learn and hone just like math or playing a musical instrument.
Seelig says creativity is something we can all learn and improve upon. She’s taught many a Silicon Valley genius the art of creativity and helped them achieve flashes of inspiration. Her TED talk has been viewed over three million times and now she’s here to tell us how we can come up with original ideas.
Tina Seelig is an author und principal at Stanford University.
© Katherine Emery
01
Dancing and eating
“Our bodies and minds are never apart. If, say, our heart beats faster, our brain notices. We get stressed and our creativity is blocked, so I have breakfast in class with my students and we always have snacks. It’s hard to concentrate and have creative ideas if you are hungry. I once invited a dance instructor to do a couple of dance moves with my students before class. Physical exertion loosens up the body and, therefore, the mind. We are much more creative once we have moved a little first.”
02
Chindõgu!
“Another exercise I like to do to get my students warmed up. This is a Japanese game where you think up a totally unnecessary invention which might, in some way, perhaps even make a little sense, but which is basically pretty silly, like shoes with little umbrellas so your feet don’t get wet in the rain. The inventions always have something funny and surprising about them. The aim of the exercise is to give your imagination a bit of a stretch and warm-up at the start of the class.”
03
Putting up posters
“Remove all chairs from the room before you start a brainstorming session. Participants are more dynamic and involved if they move around. The perfect number of participants is six to eight and it’s important not just to invite the colleagues you get on well with. Participants should have the broadest possible range of opinions on the matter at hand. People usually use a flip chart to note down ideas. But beware: the ideas usually dry up as soon as you run out of writing space, so the best thing to do is plaster all the walls with blank paper.”
04
Collecting silly ideas
“One rule of brainstorming is: no suggestion will be judged. There’s no such thing as a bad idea; this method positively encourages them. When you collect good ideas, the result is often predictable. If, say, you think about where you want to spend your holidays, you end up with options like Hawaii, Disneyland or a cruise. But if you collect crazy ideas, you end up with some totally unusual, fairly absurd suggestions. What would the worst possible problem-solving approach be? There’s still usually an interesting seed in the thought anyway. Then when you look at it through the magnifying glass and concentrate, you suddenly come up with pretty original ideas. Another advantage: participants have more fun and are more involved.”
05
Swapping words
“This method is about moving the goalposts on a problem to gain new perspective. All you have to do is change one word in a problem to release a completely new set of ideas. An example. Say the task is: ‘I have to make Christmas dinner for my guests.’ How about, instead of that, we say, ‘I have to make a Christmas buffet for my guests or a Christmas picnic.’ Other ideas immediately spring to mind. Or what if all the guests were five years old? Or 90?"
06
The dictionary oracle
There was a time when I use to cut the covers off The New Yorker magazine and make them into collages. It was actually an art project. But bringing together things that seem to have little to do with each other is, in fact, also a really good way of generating new ideas. Every great business idea is pretty much based on this method. An example: we have hotels and we have apartments. What happens if we combine them? We end up with Airbnb. You can also use a dictionary instead of making collages. It works just the same. I used to do the following exercise with my students: choose a problem in your life, then pick a random word from the dictionary and think how that word can help you solve the problem. The word is like a door that will lead you towards new solutions.”
07
Too much of a good thing
“I once did this exercise with students as part of a workshop. They had to think up 100 solutions to a problem, like a partner snoring in bed. Every solution had to have something to do with music. Some students thought I’d made a mistake and actually meant ten ideas. But I hadn’t. Innovation is hard work; it takes stamina to develop original ideas. The students eventually understood that they only had their most interesting and original ideas once they thought they had exhausted all their options. For example, after battling its way through all the obvious solutions, one team finally came up with the idea of a face mask which turns the loud snoring of the person wearing it into gentle music.”
08
What if ...
“This is one of my favourite exercises that I regularly do with students. I once asked them to note down everything that came to mind when they thought of the circus: big top, animals, artists, popcorn, etc. Then I asked them to turn all that on its head and imagine the opposite was the case. What if there were no animals at the circus? What if the big top was small? They then had to decide which features of the traditional circus they would hang on to. By the time we had finished, we had a completely new circus concept, à la Cirque du Soleil. By challenging our assumptions about a problem at the root, we gain totally new insight."
09
Brain-jogging
“We’re distracted by lots of things while sitting at our desks. This is why many people have their best ideas in the shower. Nothing distracts your attention while you are there. I often go for a walk to think. It’s important to shake off everything that’s distracting you and to free the mind so that it can flourish. It also helps to break the day down into slots for each task and to limit your social media activity, say, to a specific part of the day. Concentrating for a longer period on a single thing and not always doing multiple things at once considerably increases your creativity.”
10
The password-boost
“Creativity is a problem-solving tool, and the engine that drives creativity is motivation. No motivation means no creativity, so it’s important to consider what motivates you to want to solve a problem. Otherwise, there won’t be the drive needed to do the creativity exercises to get you all the way through to having that idea. When your boss gives you a job to do, think about what motivates you. That could be a pay rise, a vacation, an apartment you want to buy or a skill working on the project is improving. Some people use it as a password so that they see their goal every day.”
Some clever apps to get you thinking
- Brainsparker Creativity Cards: Stuck in your search for new ideas? These virtual cue cards take your thinking in new directions with surprising questions and catchphrases. Give it a go!
- SimpleMind Pro - mind-mapping: Mind maps are wonderful for organising your thoughts and linking ideas. And thanks to this app, you won’t need a whiteboard.
- Sketchbook: If you suddenly have an idea while out and about, the best thing is to record it straightaway. In this design app, for example, which provides the user with hundreds of sketch tools.
