Be Extraordinary: How To Tap Into Your Amazing Creative Power

December 13, 2007

How to be creative

Unlike what you may think, creative thinking is not solely for other people.

You can also be creative. The only requirement is that you make an effort to be creative.

First, let’s get the definition of creativity out of our way.

According to Dictionary.com, creativity means: the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.

This is spot on. Only I’d replace transcend with use.

People always think that others are creative and they are not. They think highly creative people possess extra-ordinary thinking qualities that transcend the normal way of thinking.

While I agree that creative people go beyond the traditional way of thinking, they do not have superhuman qualities to help them become creative.

Creative people train themselves to be creative.

Just like any other new way of thinking requires you to learn it first, thinking creatively also requires you to learn to think creatively.

Ditch the traditional way of thinking

Are you caught up in a mundane way of living? Do you follow a predetermined routine in your day-to-day activities? Have you ever thought you can change the way things happen to you?

If your answer to first two questions is yes, and a NO to the third one, you probably haven’t tried to be creative.

What do you do when you feel thirsty? You probably go and drink water. Problem is, drinking water is not a very creative idea. When you feel thirsty, your brain decides for you that you need water. It’s an automatic response that you instantly accept.

Now if you feel thirsty and think to yourself “Hmm.. I drink water whenever I feel thirsty, let’s try something new today“, you reject your brain’s ready-made suggestion and switch to a creative mode of thinking. You weigh your options and decide that you’ll get yourself a coke to quench your thirst.

There. You just ditched a conventional way of thinking and went through a creative process of thinking to get yourself an alternate thirst-quencher.

If you start taking coke every once in a while to satisfy your thirst, it too becomes an unoriginal idea. How about you try another brand of coke that tastes differently?

See, when you want to be creative, sky is the limit.

How to become a creative blogger

Once we accept that creativity and innovation, in most cases, is looking at traditional ideas from a different angle, or building upon unoriginal ideas to come up with original ones, it becomes a lot more easier to apply creative thinking to every aspect of life.

Blogging is writing, and writing is a creative process. If you keep churning out same kinds of posts everyday, your blog will become boring.

Before you write your next post, ask yourself how you can write it differently. Be innovative. Every other blogger is writing like you do, so why will your visitors subscribe to your feed?

Two examples of creative blogging has just come to my mind.

1. On 99% of blogs in the world, a blogger writes a post and readers comment, addressing the blogger directly. It doesn’t matter whether blogger responds back or not. The conversation is over as soon as commenter leaves the comment. There is no back and forth dialog. No exchange of thoughts.

Skellie, who is a creative blogger and likes to think outside the box, didn’t accept this typical way of holding conversations in the comments. So she put on her creative hat and came up with a solution. She now dedicates a whole post to her readers every week, where she asks her readers a thought-provoking question and encourages them not only to hold a dialog with her, but also engage in a conversation with one another.

To ensure that her new idea works, she selects a reader with the best comment and most active participation in the discussion and features him/her in her next post.

Result? Go see for yourself.

2. Maki, whose whole blog is one big collection of creative ideas, has recently started a new kind of post on weekends that he calls “Weekend Media”. It’s an innovative idea because weekend media post is not just another post with a bunch of advice. In every weekend media post, Maki features books, movies, documentaries, and other similar media, and finds a connection between the featured media and some aspect of internet marketing.

As a result, he has found a way to step outside his niche, while keeping his new posts relevant to his current topic of Dosh Dosh. So even though he is attracting more readers to his blog, he is making sure he does not scare away his current readership.

Do Skellie and Maki possess super-human qualities? Of course not. They are just like you. Only they are not satisfied with the conventional way of blogging, and are willing to try new things.

So go try something new. Here are a few ideas for you:

  • Writing long posts? Try shorter ones.
  • Writing posts in the same format? Change it. If you use headings to assert every points, use bullet points with bold openings.
  • Covering the same old topics? Cover new topics that are similar to your current set of topics.
  • Been targeting StumbleUpon traffic? Target Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot.
  • Been linking to the same bloggers over and over? Find new bloggers and link to them.

Keep building your own list.

Whenever you do something differently from the way it’s usually done, or how you have been doing it for ages, you take a creative step.

Trust me, you are always being creative to little degrees in your routine life. In all the decisions you make and problems you solve, you unknowingly stimulate your creative neurons.

The next step is to use your creative power consciously in whatever you do.

So what are you waiting for? Leave me a creative comment now!

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