How To Boost Your Creative Output (Part 1)

Working productively can be broken down into several key skills: time management, organization and controlling your attention and energy. One of the often neglected but most important factors is your creative output. Successful people tend to have an unusually high creative output and I'd like to offer some tips for how you can boost yours.

What is Creativity?

Creativity is often compared with originality. When you see someone who can come up with unique ideas, you say they are "creative". Picasso was creative because of his unique painting style. J.R.R. Tolkien was creative for writing "The Lord of the Rings" while Linus Torvalds is considered creative for starting Linux.There is another way of viewing creativity. The root word of creativity is create. Creativity can be seen not just on how original your ideas are, but on how many of them you can produce. Creative output is a measure of your ability to churn out creations.Thomas Edison held over a thousand patents in his name. Leonardo da Vinci was an astronomer, painter, engineer, inventor, poet and writer. Although both had unique ideas, their creative output dwarfed most of their colleagues.

Why Does Creative Output Matter?

Isn't quality supposed to be more important than quantity? The problem is that with creative output, quality and quantity are completely independent. A few people have gotten the wrong idea about creative output, the myth that having a higher output will somehow reduce the quality of the ideas you create. Having a high quantity of ideas doesn't reduce the quality of ideas; quantity enhances quality. I write for several sites as well as my own. A couple of fellow bloggers disagreed with this strategy. Won't you be giving away your best ideas so other websites will profit from them, they asked? This assumes that each idea I create reduces the total ideas available to write about. But that's ridiculous.Ideas are not zero-sum. Having one idea doesn't reduce the amount of ideas you are able to produce. Boosting your creative output requires changing how you channel attention. It has nothing to do with depleting an imaginary idea-bank inside your brain.