Exercise Your Creativity

“Like the pugilist, the songwriter must always keep in training.”
- George Gershwin

I experienced another delightful found-in-translation moment at the end of an international course recently (you’ll remember my unforgettable first experience of found-in-translation). At the end of an arduous, immersive journey through the methods of design, we asked the cohort of professional students what they’d been telling their families they had been doing all week. One chimed in, “I’ve been doing a bootcamp for my brain!”

I loved that! It made me wonder whether folks who want to be capable of breakthrough thinking have the same conviction as Gershwin, namely, that it’s a matter of training? And not just having been through a training exercise, but rather, having a training mindset?

An athlete at the grocery store sees a gallon of milk for what it really is: an impromptu dumbbell! That’s because they have an athletic mindset: everything is an opportunity to flex that muscle.

Do we see that just like the athlete, just like the artist, our creative muscle needs to be exercised? As David Kelley once told me, “I think people fail to realize that the first-order goal is to be getting in practice. The first step is training your mind to think differently.”

You may not think of yourself as “creative,” but I firmly believe we are all in the ideas business. And that means all of us should approach creative thinking as a craft, or skill which can be improved with practice.

As Jerry Seinfeld says, you’ve got to “get your work in.”

Want to implement a practice mindset? Try this: Flip One Problem.

Related: Be Irresponsible
Related: We Are All In The Ideas Business
Related: Endure the Risk of A Bad Idea
Related: Daily Rituals
Related: The Daily Discipline

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