List and select

One form of creativity is a kind of a Darwinian process: create many different ideas and select from those.  To come up with ideas, make a list of them as they come to mind. Look over the list to see what new things they bring to mind. Pairs of different ideas can often inspire new and even more different ideas.

You don’t have to do the process all at once. It may help if you put it aside and come back to it. Your unconscious mind may have been working on it while you were thinking of something else, and you’ll have been exposing yourself to other experiences. Both can prompt the new ideas.

Prof. “Mike” Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago suggests that you should try to (1) produce as many ideas as possible, (2) produce as many different ideas as possible, and (3) produce some unlikely ideas.

Csikszentmihalyi's research speciality is flow, that highly productive mental state of total absorption in an activity. Listing provides the conditions for flow:

1)      The goal is clear: come up with ideas.

2)      The feedback is immediate from how full the list is.

3)      The challenges and your abilities can be balanced. You can set goals for the number of ideas, how many different ones, and how many unlikely ones, and increase the numbers as you get skilled at the process. You do need to keep the goals challenging or you will get apathetic.

Finally, be appreciative of any new ideas: don’t insist on them all being revolutionary. Harvest those you get.

For more information, see Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.

"The best physicians are Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman."

This proverb was published in John Ray's (1627-1705) A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs (1670).

This proverb uses anaphora, beginning each item in the list with the word doctor. It uses tricolon, by listing three doctors. It uses rhyme between "diet" and "quiet." It uses consonance (indeed, alliteration), the repetition of consonants, in Merryman .

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