Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking

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1. You are creative. The artist is not a special person, each one of us is a special kind of artist. Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker.

2. Creative thinking is work. You must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of creating new and different ideas.

3. You must go through the motions of being creative. When you are producing ideas, you are replenishing neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to what your brain is doing, which in turn is responding to challenges.

4. Your brain is not a computer. Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than computes them like a computer.

5. There is no one right answer. Reality is ambiguous. Aristotle said it is either A or not-A. It cannot be both. The sky is either blue or not blue. This is black and white thinking as the sky is a billion different shades of blue.

6. Never stop with your first good idea. Always strive to find a better one and continue until you have one that is still better.

7. Expect the experts to be negative. The more expert and specialized a person becomes,  the more their mindset becomes narrowed and the more fixated they become on confirming what they believe to be absolute.

8. Trust your instincts. Don’t allow yourself to get discouraged.

9. There is no such thing as failure. Whenever you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail.

10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are. Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral.

11. Always approach a problem on its own terms. Do not trust your first perspective of a problem as it will be too biased toward your usual way of thinking.

12. Learn to think unconventionally. Creative geniuses do not think analytically and logically.

And, finally, Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.

(via creativitypost)