Creative confidence by Tom and David Kelley. Introduction

Creative confidence by Tom and David Kelley.
Introduction
What’s in it for me? Learn how to flex your creative muscle.

Do you remember when teachers would chastise you for drawing pictures or singing songs in class, telling you to buckle down and do some “proper” work instead? Of course, math and history is important, but while these teachers might mean well, this insistence that learning facts is more important than flexing our creative muscle has a dampening effect on our ingenuity.

This lack of appreciation for creativity is outdated: today’s companies actively seek out creative minds, and what’s more, creativity is a key factor in designing your life to match your values and aspirations.

Luckily you can never lose your creativity entirely. It’s always there; you just need to nurture it.

Creative Confidence helps you rediscover your creativity, showing you how to exercise your innovative muscle by drawing on the authors’ experiences working at the design and innovation firm IDEO, as well as the lessons they learned and imparted to others at the d.school at Stanford University.

You’ll learn how everyone – not just those in “creative” professions – can benefit from exercising their imagination.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• 
  which member of The Beatles almost lost his chance at fame and fortune by going into the manufacturing business;
  
• 
  why it’s far better to fail than succeed on the first try; and
  
• 
  how the “do something” mind-set helped keep an elderly woman from standing in freezing rain.
  

Blink 1
Creativity is about all kinds of imaginative innovation, not just genius masterpieces.
What is creativity? Is it daubing breathtaking paintings, sculpting Greek icons out of marble slabs or writing sonorous music?

Great creativity sometimes finds its expression in the fine arts, but it actually has a much broader application. Creativity means simply using your imagination to create something new.

This broader definition embraces many different aspects of creative work that otherwise go unseen. Not only does it include the work of artists, but also the work of more analytical types, like CEOs or computer programmers.

Indeed, these analytical types express their creativity whenever they make something new: for example, when the computer programer creates a novel web interface, or the CEO develops a new business strategy.

When we employ this broader definition of creativity, we discover that we are all born to be creative.

As young children, we finger-painted and danced around the room. We built tree houses with our own hands and found interesting solutions to the problems we faced.

Unfortunately, as we grow older, many of us stop acting out our creativity. However, we never actually lose the ability altogether.

In fact, you can think of your creativity as a muscle that you can train and use to find innovative solutions to problems.

Even if you haven’t flexed this muscle for a while, it only takes a bit of training and hard work before you can make it strong again.

Just look at the magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) technician Doug Mietz – very much the analytic type. He struggled to find ways to make children feel safe when they were being scanned in one of these intimidating machines, but with the help of the authors, he was able to train his creative muscle in order to find a solution.

His imaginative solution involved completely changing the look and designs of these clinical machines to something adventurous, like a pirate ship or a UFO. The kids then saw the experience of getting scanned as an exciting adventure rather than something dreadful.