The Accidental Creative

Ideally you will be able to take an entire day for this quarterly session, but, understandably, you may not be able to break away from your life in order to do so. If this is the case, the Quarterly Checkpoint can take place an hour at a time in the mornings or evenings over the course of a week.

Focus: Challenges, the Big 3, Clustering Relationships: Circles, Head-to-Heads, Core Team Energy: Whole-Life Plannin, Pruning Stimuli: Study Plan, Notation, Purposeful Experience Hours: Idea Time, Unnecessary Creating

Simplicity is key. Simple rituals become habits, and good habits yield results.

A big factor in shifting from obligation mode to opportunity mode is thinking regularly about how you are investing in your capacity to do better work in the future and taking accountability for your own creative growth.

“Unnecessary Creating” is a misnomer; it’s very necessary, indeed. Start small. Take notes on ideas you’re excited about and things you’d like to do. Start a Project Queue. Set some time on your calendar.

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.” —Alan Alda

Unnecessary Creating should have a set regular time for engaging in this creativity-inducing practice. Building this predictable infrastructure for your Unnecessary Creating will give you something to look forward to and will create a break in the middle of your hectic weekly rhythm. I’d recommend an hour per week as a starting place, but if you’re

Putting time on your calendar to generate ideas is worth it. It will change your life and your career. Remember: Successful, consistently brilliant people do the little (too obvious, too simple, too commonsensical) things that no one else is doing. This is what will set you apart, too.

Past. What are some assumptions that are presently keeping us in gridlock around this problem? Are there any assumptions that need to be challenged or that could serve as a starting point for idea generation? Try to challenge one of these assumptions by generating ideas designed to disprove it. Conceptual. What are other problems and corresponding