Using A Notepad

Carry a notepad and writing utencil with you everywhere! I can't believe the number of creative ideas that occur to me in a day, and I also can't believe how incredibly fast they disappear from my memory. It's been shown that writing down all your ideas -- including the bad ones, because they may be useful elsewhere -- increases the number of ideas you have! Writing it forces you to think about it and consider it further. It also encourages your subconscious to produce more of creative ideas because you are paying attention to them and putting them to use. Almost everything has a snowball effect in life. The more creative you are the more creative it makes you, and the notepad is a key step to starting to be creative. You will begin looking for inspiration in everything, and then jot it down, think about it, and remember it later.

Creative Traits

Donald MacKinnon studied the characteristics of creative architects. There is a hidden assumption here that if you want to become a certain type of person, you can adopt their habits, traits, characteristics, and become that type of person. So here are the traits of presumably creative people:
(1) Aggression - They tend to express their dislike for what others are doing
(2) Autonomy - They are very self-governed. It doesn't matter what others or the administration want, they will do their own thing.
(3) Low on socialization - If you socialize, you don't have time to be creative and let ideas manifest themselves.
(4) High on expressed desire to control others.
(5) Belong to fewer social groups - see (3).
(6) Independence - see (2). They don't follow the norms or trends set by others.
(7) Value some artistic standard of excellence and have a sensitive appreciation of the fittingness of architectural solutions to that standard - from personal experience, this may cause the other ones. When you have a standard and are extremely sensitive to it, it will be hard not to express this in some way listed above. This may also be one that uncreative people have the hardest time understanding.
(8) Not preoccupied with the impression they make on others
(9) Guided by aesthetic values and ethical standards which they have set for themselves - It is very important that they set these standards themselves. There is a list of traits uncreative architects have, and it is very much the opposite of this one. The difference in this point (in the uncreative list) is that they follow preset standards.

Intrinsic motivation is what allows creativity to foster. Image being a writer, publishing these amazing books. Then suddenly, someone pays you thousands of dollars to continue writing brilliant books. They feel like they are doing you a favor by giving you subsistence, but the motivational orientation has shifted, and now there is pressure externally to create. It will be much harder to write as well.

Creativity

A while ago, I discussed some of the characteristics of someone high in need for achievement. Those 4 things were fairly straightforward to understand why.
(1) If the risk is too high, probably won't achieve anything; too low and you don't achieve enough.
(2) Feedback is extremely useful in learning (as we will eventually discuss!) and improving at what you are doing.
(3) Personal control and direct responsibility: people who need to achieve things (or at least feel they do) must be the ones achieving things! Maybe I'll get around to talking about need for power -- people high in need for power delegate to accomplish things rather than being directly in control. The responsibility part puts a fear of failure into the achiever which creates more motivation to do things.
(4) Research and experts gives the achiever a tremendous advantage in what they do. They want things done well and right and fast.

Today I want to talk about creativity. This is based off of Eliot Hutchinson's How To Think Creatively. There are four stages to attaining creative insight. Creative insight is that spark of genius that makes people go 'wow'. Given a problem with no known solution, creative insight is the thing that solves it. Let me explain:

(1) Stage of Preparation:
Superabundance of hypotheses -- you just have hundreds of ideas and false starts. Creative people tend to have the trouble of sorting through their ideas to find the best ones, rather than a lack of ideas.
Logical attack of the problem using every known method -- no matter what you try, nothing will work.
Resort to trial and error -- before creative insight, you usually end up doing useless repetition.

(2) Stage of Frustration
Melancholy, anxiety, possible breakdown of the personality, feelings of inferiority. Creative people are tormented by their problems until the problems get solved. There is regression, solace in fantasy, negativistic attitude, stubbornness, negligence in personal habits.
Hutchinson recommends that if you find yourself in this stage, consciously renounce the problem you are working on. Because eventually there is:

(3) Stage of Achievement
Often times this is brought on by an accidental stimulus. There are countless stories about how famous scientists came up with their big insight in a dream, or watching an opera, or something completely and utterly random. Theories speculate that our subconscious works on our problems when we are not focusing on it -- but this is still far from being proven (we know unconscious thought exists, but how intelligent is it?).

(4) Stage of Verification
This is the hardest part! It requires a shift in mental attitude. We are often unable to see the faults in our own reasoning and creations -- perhaps it isn't such a miraculous discovery after all. An example of this is the tires that caused SUVs to roll over a couple of years back (there was a massive recall). The new design was so revolutionary that the engineers could find no fault in it. Don't get lost in your own glory only to find that it kills people.

Soon, I will go into the characteristics of creative people. Then I will try to get back on track with the efficient learning habits.

A Common Problem

One thing I notice quite frequently in students is that they are unwilling to put significant individual effort into problems. When solution manuals are available, my suggestion is to not even get one. The act of checking answers and discussing discrepancies with another human leads to much greater insight and understanding of the subject matter than checking the answer in a book. If you must get a solution manual, seriously attempt problems before looking at the answer. I have a feeling that many people learn some things well enough to pass a test when they study or do homework with the solution manual open right in front of them, but they do not pick up any new skills or retain the information. The act of putting the mental strain on a certain type of problem helps it stick in your memory, plus if you do solve it on your own, you are learning crucial problem solving skills. What happens in the future when you must solve problems that do not have a predefined answer? You must rely on the problem solving skills you have trained yourself in. I do admit needing help on problems though. I know this is inevitable in everyone's college career and in life, but whatever trick or technique is necessary to solve your problem you will remember much better in the future after having struggled with it. Don't fall for the temptation to save some time now because it will inevitably cause much greater wasted time in the future.

Notice, I am not saying feedback is unimportant. In fact, it is quite important, and I will get into that at a later date. I'm only saying that there is a lot to learn in the struggle. To support this, I will cite Eliot Hutchinson in his book "How to Think Creatively." He states that once you reach that stage of frustration where you've tried everything you know, just stop. Do something else, take a break, do another problem, anything to get your mind off of it. When you return to the problem, your subconscious will have continued working, and this is when you achieve "creative insight." There are countless stories throughout history of Nobel Prize winners and such who claim this is precisely how they came up with their big idea that brought them fame. Looking at the solution manual during this stage of frustration would thus stifle this creative process and you are no longer learning how to do this. You are in fact teaching yourself how not to think creatively. And thinking creatively is necessary in even the most rigorous and strict disciplines.