How to be creative and apply creativity as a science and not as “dumb luck”

Lots of people perceive I’m a creative person, some say I’m a smart person, honestly I feel very far from those “title” that people put on my forehead using their “virtual-yellow-post-it”, there are times I feel really dumm and there are lots of time when I’m lost in the middle of an activity or a conversation, and sometimes I just don’t have any ideas, but still despite all of that people still consider me as a creative person.

Being considered as a creative person can sometimes “drive up” your nerves, all that constant questions towards you, those silly challenges as if I was a big walking encyclopedia that has all the answer or this walking-talking problem solving computer, although I have to admit there are moments when I enjoy myself being ask silly questions and I felt so “pleased” when I manage to give an alternate solution but still.. c’moonn.

So enough me: spilling over my un-important- narcissistic -self-pity-emotion, I want to share how I get those ideas –  some people call it creativity- to solve those problems:

1.    Look for Patterns
I always look for patterns in an event, something that keep recurring or that is always there when things went wrong, or some action or thing that other company keep using, or what are the similarity of those successful person/company.
Whatever the problem is, I always look for patterns, what have we done in the past, how is it done now, when and where it went wrong.

2.    Look for benchmark (cheat answer by imitating n modifying what other people has done)
I’m no genius I don’t even consider myself creative or smart, so to answer those questions, to solve problems, I go to my trusted “GOOGLE” you just Google it, and patiently click through the URLs, read through articles, and again look for patterns in those articles, find the best practices that is applied elsewhere, note that best practice, try to imitate it, if you can imitate it, modify it and applied, it works all the times.

3.    Create a big elaborate stories and all the component must linked up to each other
When you have the patterns and have best practices from various sources, it’s time to do some association in your head, make up a stories that you can re-tell to other person without reading or cheating, make sure you have all the stories correct and connected, so when people ask you questions and challenges your ideas, you have a story to tell, and people always relate better to stories than just plain facts.

4.    Stay curious
Never ever hold yourself back from being curious, when you have a questions pop-up in your mind, write it down and when you have time look for the answer, it triggers your curiosity it help you learn more and it will build your confident.
At one moment I have a question that people say I’m silly to ask, but no one can answer it, the question is:

How digital projectors can shows black font? digital projector use very bright light to project the object, but how can they project black font, black is the condition without light ? Have you ever thought of that? It took me 5 minutes to come up with an answer, which I won’t reveal it here, how long does it take you to answer that question?

5.    Keep adding that stories
My head filled with stories and with each experience I had from my life, from answering questions, solving problem I added another chapter on that small stories I have in my head, I have many small-short stories that tie up to 1 big story, that is how I can recollect my memories in a short period of time.

6.    Do step 1 over again
Like a vicious cycle of virtue, so does creativity, to apply creativity as a science you have to duplicate the process and re-do them over and over again, being creative is not a “dumb-luck” it’s an exact flow process, even you don’t have that “AHA” moment if you follow the process you’ll have a “spark of genius” – money back guarantee-

The end to my narcissistic blog