Creative confidence by Tom and David Kelley. Introduction

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Develop the courage to explore your creativity – it’s a great first step toward discovering your new self.
Have you ever been in a situation where you had to face your fears, perhaps by touching a boa constrictor in spite of a phobia? When you confront your fear of being creative, it’s just the same.

Luckily, there are strategies you can use to help make the process easier.

Many people want to be creative, but they don’t really know how to do it. The most basic thing you can do is to give up the notion that you cannot be creative. You must remember that everyone – even you – has a creative muscle.

You must truly believe that you can grow, experience and create more than you ever previously thought was possible.

By adopting this growth mind-set you will automatically change your perception of yourself and the world around you, and be empowered to flex your creative muscles and come up with innovative solutions.

One way to develop this mind-set is to create a roadmap to guide you through creative processes. This roadmap has all the different techniques you need to train your creative muscles, providing you with an easy, straightforward path to follow.

One technique that the authors often use with so-called “non-creatives” is design thinking. Basically, design thinking helps us to identify human needs and create new solutions by thinking like design practitioners.

For example, in order to redesign a series of kitchen tools, the authors went out and talked directly with users who were experiencing problems, such as the elderly, in order to find out what bothered them about the existing designs.

Afterward, they used the knowledge they gained to experiment with different solutions, and eventually put the best ones into production.

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Allow yourself to fail in order to succeed.

Sometimes, when we’re on our way to achieving our goals, our steps falter, causing us to lose confidence and give up. But this is exactly where the difference between success and failure lies.

Don’t give up! Get up and try again!

Even the greatest creative geniuses fail. However, when they do, they use their failure to their advantage.

Do you think that Mozart wrote his first masterpiece without writing garbage first? Or that Thomas Edison simply flipped the switch on the first lightbulb without sweating through many different models and test runs?

Everyone fails. In fact, Professor Simonton of the University of California found that these iconic creative geniuses didn’t fail less, but actually more than others.

However, rather than quit, they learned to keep going. Creative geniuses learn from their mistakes and modify their next attempts so that they are closer to the mark.

If we want to be successful in our creativity, then we need to think like Edison: a failure is only a failure if nothing has been learned from it.

In fact, there’s a paradox: success at your first attempt might actually hurt your results in the long run.

This is because failures that happen early in the innovative process reveal the weaknesses in your product or line of thinking.

Consider, for example, the story of the Wright brothers, who launched the first successful airplane in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. If they hadn’t failed hundreds of times in unmanned trials and had the opportunity to improve their design, the Wright brothers might have been just another splat to clean up on the road to flying machines.