Ideas

Great ideas come when you aren’t trying to think of them.

Creativity isn’t a talent. It is a skill that can be learnt, practiced and developed. Firstly, it is good to know where good ideas come from. Watch this VIDEO from Steven Johnson that explains where ideas come from. He talks about how ideas need to ‘incubate’. “Most important ideas take a long time to evolve and they spend a long time dormant in the background”. They don’t come overnight as they need time to develop and grow. You can’t sit at a desk with a blank piece of paper, turn off all distractions and just wait for an idea to come – they come when you least expect and aren’t trying to think of them. 

Although you can’t make a great idea happen, you can set yourself up in an environment that can spark inspiration. As Pablo Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working”. Carry a notebook around with you, start being spontaneous, break out of your normal routine and try something new, listen actively to conversations – people can be very interesting, read a new book or take a walk.

The internet and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can act as distractions from creativity but they can also allow us to connect with people from all over the world where we can share and collaborate ideas. Collaboration is important when it comes to ideas. Sometimes people will have half an idea and need to join with others to exchange and combine their ideas to create something great.

“A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons – thousands of them -fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain and an idea pops into your consciousness.” – Steven Johnson.

Ideas come when you least expect them to, so don’t sit around waiting for one to come to you – change your environment, try new things, be spontaneous and I’m sure somewhere you will find some inspiration for a great idea.

 

 

Never Stop Questioning

“Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking.”

Critical thinking is not something you are born with, it is something that you learn. There are four parts to critical thinking; analysis, inference, interpretation and deductive reasoning. You must find evidence, question the evidence, understand and clarify it, then draw a logical conclusion.

Critical thinking is “the art of analysing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it.” – Dr Richard Paul.

In our creative and critical thinking class the other day, we were discussing this topic and why it is so important to question everything. We live in such a technology-based world where the answer to anything can easily pop up on a screen if we just type it into Google – but are these answers even real? We don’t know. Yet most of us, including myself willingly accept that it’s the truth.

Our teacher got us to watch this video in class about misconceptions that most of us believe to be true and after watching it I realised that I too had been believing almost every “fact” in that video – and they were all myths. It made me stop and think about when I had actually questioned whether what I was being told or had seen was the truth – and I can’t actually remember a time when I had. I saw a photo scrolling through my Facebook news feed a few years ago saying that we only use 10% of our brains and until the day I saw this video I actually believed it. I hadn’t been told this by a neurologist or had any evidence to prove it yet I didn’t even stop to check if it was true or not – I just accepted it.

We should question everything because that is the only way we will be able to analyse and examine things closely enough for us to determine whether they are real or not. Even just by asking who, what, where, when, why and how. It will allow us to become more open minded. Only by searching and questioning the truth are we able to learn, develop and grow.