Creativity is a practice, not a gift
A working method for ideation, drawn from the book recognised by Ivanki University.
The myth of the lightning bolt
We tell creativity as a story of lightning: the apple falls, the bathtub overflows, genius strikes. It is a satisfying story and a damaging one, because it teaches people to wait. If ideas arrive by lightning, your job is to stand in a field and hope.
Forty years of building things — devices, books, broadcast systems, songs — have convinced me of the opposite. Creativity behaves like a craft. It responds to method, to schedule, to deliberate practice. The lightning is real, but it strikes the prepared far more often than the lucky.
Ideas are made of inputs
No mind produces output without input. Every “new” idea is a recombination: two known things joined in an unknown way. The Phoenix system was broadcast television joined to internet protocols. The Hunter device was X-ray diffraction joined to a policing problem.
This has a practical consequence: the person with wider inputs has more raw material. Read outside your field. Talk to people whose work you don’t understand. The strangeness you collect today is the originality you will be credited with next year.
A four-step working method
The method I teach, and use, has four separated phases:
- Collect — define the problem precisely, then gather everything adjacent to it without judging relevance.
- Combine — generate combinations in volume. Quantity first; a hundred bad pairings buy you three good ones. No evaluation allowed in this phase.
- Rest — step away deliberately. Incubation is not laziness; the background mind keeps recombining after the desk is closed.
- Judge — return cold, and filter without sentiment. Kill your favorites if they fail the problem definition from step one.
Generate like an optimist. Judge like an auditor. Never do both in the same hour.
Finishing is part of creating
An idea that stays an idea is a rumor. The final discipline — the one that separates inventors from daydreamers — is carrying the idea through the boring middle: the prototype that fails, the chapter that will not cooperate, the mix that refuses to sit right.
This is why I insist that creativity is a practice. Practices have schedules, and schedules finish things. The full framework, with exercises, is in my book Lessons in Creativity and Ideation, recognized by Ivanki University.
Frequently asked questions
Can creativity really be taught?+
What is the biggest killer of good ideas?+
How is this connected to your inventions?+
Ph.D. in Management, Engineering & Media · author of 8 books · lecturer, inventor and recording artist.
