The Accidental Creative

Are there important principles in your life that are being neglected and need to be revisited? Are there projects that you’ve always dreamed of pursuing but can never find the energy to get moving on? Now is the time to get these on paper and to start analyzing what can be done over the next quarter to initiate them.

Purposeful Experience: Do you have one on your calendar this week? When will it happen?

Discipline involves establishing and hitting specific marks and doing what needs doing regardless of how you feel in the moment.

The reality is that we are not capable of operating without boundaries. We need them in order to focus our creative energy into the right channels.

▶ WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE PROMPTING ON? This final question is designed to help you cultivate group accountability for the work you’re doing.

Commitment to the process is critical in this gestation period. While many organizations treat it like a linear progression toward the end product, great creative work requires risk and experimentation, which means some degree of unpredictability.

It’s not what you know that matters, it’s what you do. Regardless of what others may promise, there are no quick fixes or easy steps to supercharge your creativity. You will unleash your latent creative ability through regular, purposeful practice of the principles in this book.

When we phrase our objectives simply and in the form of a question, we lead our minds directly to solving the problem.

Study: When will your personal study times be this week? Put them on the calendar. What will they consist of? Take a look at your Stimulus Queue and map your week’s stimuli. Notation: Take just a few minutes to glance at your notes from the previous week as well as the indexes in the front of your notebook.

Try to give yourself—as much as you are able—no less than a half hour of uninterrupted time whenever you are doing design, writing, or other largely conceptual work, and an hour is preferable.