Create: Day 6
August 6, 2011 
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Day 6
Ideas, purging, mistakes, breaks, brainstorming, and risks.
1871 Caricature of Darwin in The Hornet, a satirical magazine.
If you want to be a successful creative person, there are 6 practices you must cultivate, according to scientific research.
1. Throw out tons of ideas.
2. Evaluate and purge ideas ruthlessly.
3. Take risks and make mistakes.
4. Work hard and long, but take breaks.
5. Brainstorm with colleagues.
6. Don’t wait for inspiration…simply create.
Here’s an excerpt from a Time magazine interview with Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, author of the academic work Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation.
Are there generalizations you can make about creative people?
“They have tons of ideas, many of them bad. The trick is to evaluate them and mercilessly purge the bad ones. But even bad ideas can be useful. Darwin’s notebooks, for example, show us that he went down many dead ends…Sometimes you don’t know which sparks are important until later, but the more ideas you have, the better.
Take risks, and expect to make lots of mistakes, because creativity is a numbers game.
Work hard, and take frequent breaks (note from Habithacker…see Nest Day 5), but stay with it over time. Do what you love, because creative breakthroughs take years of hard work. Develop a network of colleagues, and schedule time for freewheeling, unstructured discussions. Most of all, forget those romantic myths that creativity is all about being artsy and gifted and not about hard work. They discourage us because we’re waiting for that one full-blown moment of inspiration. And while we’re waiting, we may never start working on what we might someday create.”
Now would be a very good time to open up your Create notebook (or the Create section of your BOP) and spend a few minutes throwing out a whole bunch of ideas for creative work. Don’t forget: you don’t have to be inspired to do this exercise. Just go ahead.
Create Month 1
What to do so far:
In case you missed a day, the reminders below are clickable.
Have fun.
Be violent and original in your creative life.
Make collages (dream boards, vision boards).
Leave perfectionism behind.
Take risks and throw out tons of ideas.
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