Harness Creative Thinking
“The joy is in creating, not maintaining.”
—V
INCE
L
OMBARDI
, NFL H
ALL OF
F
AME
C
OACH
Creativity
is pure gold, no matter what you do for a living. Annette Moser-
Wellman, author of
The Five Faces of Genius
, asserts, “
The most valuable
resource you bring to your work and to your firm is your creativity.
More than
what you get done, more than the role you play, more than your title, more than
your ‘output’—it’s your ideas that matter.”
3
Despite the importance of a person’s
ability to think with creativity, few people
seem to possess the skill in
abundance.
If you’re not as creative as you would like to be, you can change your way of
thinking. Creative thinking isn’t necessarily original thinking. In fact, I think
people mythologize original thought. Most often,
creative thinking is a
composite of other thoughts discovered along the way. Even the great artists,
whom we consider highly original,
learned from their masters, modeled their
work on that of others, and brought together a host of ideas and styles to create
their own work. Study art, and you will see threads that run through the work of
all artists and artistic movements, connecting them
to other artists who went
before them.