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.
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