Whack – How You Can be More Creative!
Mar 18, 2013 | 9:58 PM
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Contributed by Stephanie Staples at Your Life Unlimited
A perennial best seller recently found its way to my desk, A Whack on the Side of the Head – How you can be more creative. By Roger von Oech. And though some of the ideas seem a little – well, whacked, there are some great nuggets to be pulled out to increase your spirit of creativity both and home and at work.
Here are some ideas that stood out to me:
- Look at the same thing as everyone else does, but think something different. Just as the first person to look at a ships sail and thought ‘windmill.’
- Play metaphor games. Life is like a …
- Ask and answer the ‘what if’ question – answer with a contrary-to-fact condition, idea or situation. What if, people carried their homes on their backs like turtles, what if the price of oil was the same as the price of water, what if, when you looked in the mirror there became two of you?
- Imagine how others would solve the problem. Wonder Woman, Ghandi, Beethoven, King Kong.
- Create an imaginary meeting between two totally different professionals – a choreographer and a bookie, a priest and a fisherman, a comedian and a bus driver – what thread could you pull from one area into another that would be ‘normal’ in one area but innovative in another.
- When you judge an idea, focus first with their positive, interesting and potentially useful features.
