You Can Be a Creative Thinker…

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Written by Jimmie Burroughs Email this article to a friend

Creative thinking is actually not an art, but an ability to think of ideas and solutions, but like an art it requires development. I remember when I was growing up there were advertisements in magazines for muscle building that were quite amusing: It was centered in a beach scene where a skinny, sort of a weakling of a boy was with his girl friend stretched out on the sand when this muscled up bully character comes along and kicks sand in his face and of course the weakling could do nothing. So he decides to build muscles until he is as muscled as the bully and when the guy comes by again, he challenges him and the bully backs down.

Each of us has the potential for creative thinking but many are weaklings because that ability lies dormant waiting to be developed; like body muscles, it needs to be used to grow and become strong. “Every child is born a genus. But the reason why most people do not function at genus levels is because they are not aware of how creative and smart they really are”, Albert Einstein.

The creative mind is like a muscle that grows the more it is used. Unlike muscle building that requires much time and very hard work, increasing your thinking ability just takes a few exercises done with some consistency.

The design of creativity is to help you improve in some way whether it is personal development, doing a certain task, being successful or whatever it is that you desire to do. So a simple way to look at it is that creative thinking is improving upon something through the process of thinking.

Sam Walton thought of a way to sell a number of things that people need under one roof, making shopping much easier; therefore Wal-Mart was born and became the largest corporation in the United States. It was actually a simple idea but no one else had done it before.

Most of us have ideas that could make us millionaires but we don’t act upon those ideas. It has a lot to do with thinking that what we think of certainly is not good enough to work. It is like Einstein said: we don’t realize how smart we are. “Creativity anyway is 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration”, Thomas Edison. It is just taking a simple thought and developing it into something different that hasn’t been done before. Someone said if you can improve on something only 10% it will make you a millionaire.

It is generally accepted that there are four things involved in the creative process:

• Preparation
• Cerebration
• Realization
• Application

Preparation:

Preparation is doing the work. This is the research; drawing up the plans; determining the amount of investment and getting the funding. It is not necessarily like you will need a million dollars or anything near that. With Sam Walton it was a matter of finding a way to finance the first store front; his father-in-law loaned him some of it. It was not the multi-million Super Wal-Mart of today; it was a simple start that led to that.

Cerebration:

This is the part where you rely on your subconscious mind as you move forward to create step by step the ideas you need to make your work proceed along; from steps one throughout the entire process. That is how this website that you are now on became a reality. I started with a plan to build a website for a blog. I first did a lot of research and then one day I got my domain name and hosting account and set up a WordPress blog platform. There was hardly anything at first.

As I moved along I continued to think on it and continue my research and as ideas came to mind, I would initiate them into the blog. I thought of each thing I did one thing at a time and then incorporated it into the blog. I began to think on the topics I wanted to write on and began to write them one at a time until now there are 97 articles on this site. I didn’t have all the ideas the first day; they came gradually as I moved forward.

Realization:

Realization is being receptive to each idea that comes along, weighing them and determining if it is what you want. Remember this: It is not the quality of ideas that is the most important but the quantity of ideas because it is form the quantity that you will choose the quality.

Application:

The application is selecting from the quantity of ideas that come to you and applying them as you move forward. This is an unending process. I started this blog in January of 2011 and this is now November of 2011 and I’m still receiving ideas and implementing them as they come to me…not every idea but those I think will make the blog better.

Not every idea that you have will be a winner but if you keep them coming, some will be prize winners. You have to keep asking yourself questions as you go along like: What am I doing here that is not working? What do I need to change to make it work better? If you are failing in the way you are doing something, start thinking on what you can do different that might work and if that doesn’t work, keep the thoughts coming until you do come upon the right solution. The solution is somewhere there in your subconscious mind waiting for you to discover it.

A story is told about when President John F Kennedy gave the order to make the plans to send a man to the moon. Scientists were stumped on one particular problem for what seemed like forever. They could not come up with a solution concerning the fuel it would require to land a man on the moon and then return to earth. The amount of fuel required would be far too heavy to ever leave the earth’s surface. The answer was so simple but it was over looked for the longest time. It was only when they began to think in terms other than landing and taking off from the moon, since they knew that could not be done, the answer finally came. They would orbit the moon and send a small module to the lunar surface.

Solving the issue was a matter of asking questions outside of known knowledge until the right solution surfaced. Sometimes we must realize that what we are presently doing will not work and then turn our thinking to a different approach. Begin by asking questions as to why the present approach won’t work and what will possibly work. The knowledge is already available, it just needs to be found and applied. When someone succeeds at something it is because they have acted on a set of plans that produce the desired results. The key to success it to keep trying until you find the right set of plans to produce the desired results.

Another way to build up mental muscles is by an intense motivation to accomplish a certain thing. If you don’t know where you want to go and why you want to go there, how do you think it is ever possible to get there? The stronger your want to, the more likely you are going to have the ideas on how to get there. Strong emotional desires stimulate our creative thinking. I think it is fair to say that most people have no real goals in life that they are relentlessly going after.

Ask yourself what it is that is stopping you from being successful. What are the problems that you are up against that are stopping you in your tracks and what are the answers to those problems. Write them down and brainstorm the answers.

Maybe it is I don’t have the money to pay $500 for the starting pack for that online business. I use that example because that was the problem a friend of mine was dealing with who wanted to join my business. They asked me to borrow the money, but what they needed was to put forth more creative effort than just to get me to loan the money to them. I did tell them that I would give them, not loan them, $125 to help them get started and within hours they had come up with the rest of the money.

It is easy to worry about problems we face that are holding us back but the way to deal with them is to put serious thought into what you can do to begin to alleviate them and then start the process. The process is a matter of examining each problem and exactly the nature of it and why it exists to start with. Next is coming up with possible solutions that would solve the obstacle before you. Superior thinking is the ability to single out a problem and beat upon it until you have an answer.

Another way of approach is to avoid closing your mind off to certain possibilities. Lay every possibility on the table and eliminate the ones that obviously won’t work like the scientist did on planning the moon trip. They had to drop the idea of landing the rocket ship on the moon because it required an impossible amount of fuel and that is when the solution came.

Another element to consider is called the limiting element. What is limiting you from obtaining the success you desire? There could be several possibilities to any given situation. For example, for many trying to build a business, it is leads that they need so the primary question to answer is how to get more leads.  Is it that you have a limited knowledge in a certain area; or is it an obstacle that is standing in your way that you don’t know how to move? Is there a skill that is lacking or an individual or a difficulty or anything else that you might discover that is limiting your success? Once you know exactly what it is then you can begin to think on what you will have to do to get past it. You have the mental powers to do it so “Do the thing and you will have the power”, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

When it is a person that is the obstacle, there is always invariably something that needs to be resolved with them in order to move forward. The first thing is to identify the problem then to take the necessary steps to resolve it.

At first using the creative muscle of the mind might seem cumbersome and hard to maneuver but as time goes by and as the strength builds up you will be amazed at just how creatively smart you are. In time you will find yourself becoming more and more able to come up with solutions. It will become a second nature.

Before you start thinking I can never do that, remember what Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right”? Why not just think you can?

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“With patience and ease, in an unselfish and purposeful way, over a time period undetermined, and for a good that includes others, I intend for $1,000,000 to come to me and to others who join me in holding to this objective.” Jimmie Burroughs




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Jimmie Burroughs is the author of JimmieBurroughs.com ; get more tips on personal development: www.JimmieBurroughs.com

JimmieBurroughs.com is founded and maintained by Jimmie Burroughs Nashville, Tennessee. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2011 Jimmie Burroughs. All rights reserved