Where Did Your Creative Mojo Go?

by Yaro Starak, creator of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Last article I said we would look at the way the final four play personalities engage their creativity but we’re going exploring and excavating instead. We will come back to those final four later. The big question right now is, where did our creative mojo go? If we’re born creative, and we’re highly creative as children, then what happened to this ability?

This article is going to look at a vital ingredient of creativity and innovation, as well as why this is lacking in many of us today. As for how to get your creative mojo back, we’ll cover that at the end.

I’ve mentioned previously how prolifically creative young children are, usually up until they go to school, and then unfortunately, creativity tends to get squashed. This sentence holds the answer to both of the above statements.

What Makes Steve Jobs So Creative?

One of the key ingredients to creativity is curiosity, or inquisitiveness. This same trait is also one of the strongest traits of the Explorer play personality. It’s been well documented that some of our most outstanding business leaders of today have retained this aspect of their character into adult hood and attribute a big part of their success to this. It’s the curiosity of the Explorer play personality that forever pushes us to the limits of what we know, and over the edge into the unknown. This play personality is largely responsible for discovery, innovations and inventions in our lives, some of which are beneficial and some deadly.

Best selling author, Peter Simms wrote in a recent article for Tech Crunch, “In an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think, Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, surveyed over three thousand executives and interviewed five hundred people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products, including the likes of Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and VMware’s Diane Greene. They found several “discovery skills” that distinguished the innovators from the non-innovators, including experimenting, observing, questioning, and networking with people from diverse backgrounds. As Gregersen summed up their findings: “You might summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: ‘inquisitiveness.’”

We’re wired to be incredibly inquisitive in our early years. It’s how our brains develop and mature. In infancy and early childhood, we’re constantly making neural connections to help us learn to navigate and make sense of the world. By the time a child is three years old, a baby’s brain has formed about 1,000 trillion connections — about twice as many as adults have. When a connection is used repeatedly in the early years, it becomes permanent. This is where education comes in, and this is the answer to the question, “where did your creative mojo go?” We haven’t been educated to keep strengthening the imaginative and inquisitive aspect of our minds, and make it a permanent faculty. Instead, quite the opposite has happened when we started school.

Why Do Schools Kill Creativity?

To understand why this is so, Sir Ken Robinson gives a good description of how our education system has been created in a talk he gives on TED. He says that basically, our education system was set up in the era of industrialization, when the world needed good workers (for things like factory production lines). As a result, we’ve been educated to be good workers rather than creative thinkers. That is, we’re given reams of information to learn and memorize, and we’re tested and graded on our ability to memorize and replicate prescribed “knowledge” rather than figure things out for ourselves and engage in our own creative process. The education system hasn’t been changed to suit the needs of today, so we’re currently experiencing a major disconnect in what skills are needed the most (creativity and innovation) and what’s available (regurgitated knowledge from a bygone era).

Remembering my own experience of school years, I have to say, I was stupefyingly bored and uninspired for most of the time. I honestly couldn’t understand the point of spending hours in classes that would have absolutely no relevance to me once I left the institution of education and spent most of my time going through the motions to keep the guards, sorry – teachers, happy. I was constantly getting remarks on my school reports like, “Neroli is an intelligent and capable student, she just doesn’t apply herself.” Of course I didn’t freakin apply myself! What’s the point? Most of it seemed like senseless rubbish that had absolutely no bearing or use for my teenage life or any of my life in the foreseeable future!

Upon leaving school and university, I spent the next decade and a half trying to make up for lost time by self-educating through travel and learning from life experience and those who could teach me useful things about how to navigate the world and my relationships. And I don’t mean to pick on educators, I’m guessing they were doing what they could within an antiquated system. Many teachers I know have been equally frustrated by the system that clearly didn’t serve the needs of those within it.

The New Wave

The good news is, there is a growing movement of teachers/educators, researchers, speakers and authors who are creating the much needed shift in the way the education system works (or doesn’t as the case may be). The New York Times ran a fascinating article recently about a project organized by a high school in Massachusetts. A select group of students from near drop-outs to model students were allowed to run their own school within the school. The students called it the Independent Project, and designed their own curriculum, self-educated as much as possible and created their own kind of “testing” or feedback mechanisms for their work. The results of this project were extraordinary, and attest to the fact that when students are allowed to self-manage and learn things that are relevant to their lives, they actively engage in, enjoy and thrive on the process of learning. It’s an a amazing concept for education and I thoroughly recommend reading the full article if this topic is of interest to you.

How To Find Our Creative Mojo

The other great news is that our brains are very “plastic”, and there is a growing body of scientific research into the study of neuroplasticity. This means, our brain continues to adapt and change throughout our lives, and we can retrain it to work the way we want it to. One of the ways we can retrain our brain to think inquisitively is found in an article by Gabor George Burt. Recently he promised to deliver some answers for how we can access the creativity of our inner child. In his post, he offers the following tip.

“Absorb the various mundane objects that you see. Now try to fabricate a game or a simple sport using them as props. These props are all things you see every day in the same way without giving them much thought. But now let your imagination take over, and see them as objects of fun. Go!
How did you do? How long did it take you to come up with something? Moreover, do you think that the game you came up with would be fun to try? Did you find the exploratory process of this exercise difficult? Meaningful? In essence, this simple exercise represents exactly the thinking process that we need to reconnect with, that came so naturally when we were children.”

Gabor goes on to say that in order to utilize this in your business, you take the existing elements and explore them from as many different angles and create as many different applications for them as possible, for further information on this, check out his post. I’ve included other tips for accessing your imagination and Explorer play personality in last week’s article and previous ones, which cover more exercises to fire up your creative brain, so best of luck with the brain retraining! And just remember, like any training, repetition is the key to success.

Once again, thanks for reading and if you have any insights or stories to share, I’d love to hear them.

Cheers, Neroli.

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