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Personal growth and the creative process – the challenges February 26, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Growth Books, The Creative Process, Uncategorized.
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If developing and increasing your creative capability is part of your personal growth program, disciplined work may be a better route to success than trying to cultivate “inspiration”.

In discussing the process of innovation,  Brewster Ghiselin, in his book, The Creative Process, says:

“A great deal of the work necessary to equip and activate the mind for the spontaneous part of invention must be done consciously and with an effort of will. Mastering accumulated knowledge, gathering new facts, observing, exploring, experimenting, developing technique and skill, sensibility, and discrimination, are all more or less conscious and voluntary activities. The sheer labor of preparing technically for creative work, consciously acquiring the requisite knowledge of a medium and skill in its use, is extensive and arduous enough to repel many from achievement.”

He notes that it does not matter how smart or innately creative a person may be – they still need to do the requisite work to master the fundamentals of the creative field they are interested in:

“Even the most energetic and original mind, in order to reorganize or extend human insight in any valuable way, must have attained more than ordinary mastery of the field in which it is to act, a strong sense of what needs to be done, and skill in the appropriate means of expression.”

If, then,  we are interested in being involved in a particular creative activity as part of furthering our personal  development potential ,we need to be prepared to put in the hard work to thoroughly learn the elements of that creative field.

Knowing this truth would help decrease the frustration many of us can feel when we embark on a “creative” pursuit but find at the start that we do not have any creative insights on the subject matter involved.

Simply put, we need to pay our dues (work) before we can reap any creative rewards.

Effectiveness in the Creative Process Results More from Consistent Work Than From “Inspiration” February 28, 2007

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in The Creative Process.
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The ability to generate creative ideas and solutions depends more on consistent application to a field of activity than it does on isolated flashes of intuitive insight.

In the personal development journey, creativity can play a strong component in a variety of areas: achieving goals, implementing the Law of Attraction, forming intentions, manifesting, using visual, spoken, or written affirmations, getting organized, improving our work and our relationships, and much more.

The key to creativity, however, and this is a personal view, does not rest on an innate talent of “being creative.” Resourcefulness, which is a form of creativity, might seem to be inborn in certain individuals, and perhaps it sometimes is.

But the rest of us can become more resourceful, by using tools such as utilizing the thought process in new ways, as explained, for example, by Edward de Bono, who has written excellent books on thinking more creatively through the lateral thinking process.

Creativity can be learned. It might help to have a gigantic IQ, and be a literal storehouse of information, but as Einstein has pointed out, imagination is more important than knowledge. Also, it is a mistake to think of creativity as being dependent upon “inspiration” which, loosely defined, is some kind of wave of emotional intensity coupled with thought, that pushes us into a creative ‘mode’ in whatever sphere we are trying innovate within.

Creativity rather, comes more often from continuously working on something, or as Edison has said, in words to the effect, that most of his inventions came from perspiration rather than inspiration. An artist, such as a painter, for example, cannot be truly creative unless they have paid their dues in learning and applying the various techniques that have arisen through the ages in painting. Nor are they likely to create a new movement or force in painting unless they are thoroughly familiar with all that has gone before.

Most important, however, is that a painter will find that creativity comes mainly from doing a lot of painting. The same applies to writing. If you love poetry and want to write it, you’ll find that the more you write, the more creative ideas, or new ways of expressing yourself,  you will come up with.

Again however, it is important for the aspiring poet to understand the underlying forms of poetry and what has preceded them in the writing of poetry. In other words, those who want to be poets need to have read a lot of poetry and to have written a lot of it before they are likely to have truly innovative or creative concepts in their work.

This makes creativity sound a lot like work. And I think that’s true. The best way to create, such as in the area of personal development, is to work at it. The current fascination with the Law of Attraction for example, is with some people, leading to a misconception that it is as simple as making declarations to the universe and then waiting for virtual miracles to unfold. This expectation shows a lack of understanding of the Law of Attraction and the creative possibilities available by working at it.

Creativity comes to the surface in any endeavor when we put in the work. Waiting for “inspiration” in order to create can be an enjoyable state of mind, but it is not a substitute for work in the creative process. The more we do of anything, the more we are likely to come up with novel or innovative ways of accomplishing things, including our personal development goals.