Bad Patterns Stifling Your Creativity?

What patterns are you following that are stifling your creativity? Some patterns of activity or behavior are useful. Habits aren’t all bad. Habits allow us to perform regular, routine tasks without wasting valuable mental energy on those tasks. But of course, there are good habits and bad habits. Bad patterns and good patterns.

Admitting you have a pattern is the first step

My friend Scott once told me about a philosophy class he took in college and the surprising exercise his professor asked the class to perform. Each student was asked to note every location they visited during the day, for an entire week. At the end of the week, the students drew lines between each location to see how far afield they had traveled.

Scott admitted to me that he expected the pathways to extend far and wide on his map, as he was an adventurous sort who tried to stir things up, whether on his bike or on his own two legs. But when he finished the exercise, he was shocked to see that the pattern of his meanderings was cramped and narrow. He rarely varied his pattern during the entire week, even though he knew he would be documenting his travels.

The exercise illustrated the vast difference between what we imagine to be true about ourselves and the reality. The facts are:

• We believe we are more adventurous, courageous, and risk-taking than we really are.
• We believe we are more aware of ourselves and our habits than we really are.
• We give up searching for alternatives far too soon and settle for the most well-known or common choices.

Randomly explore the Web

Here’s an experiment for you to try:

1. Go to either Yahoo! News or Google News.
2. Find the first article.
3. Locate the third paragraph.
4. Choose any phrase you like and enter it into a search engine.
5. Click into the first result.
6. See if there’s anything of interest.

When I performed this exercise on Yahoo! News, I searched on the phrase fundamental system from a political news item that was at the top of their list of articles.

I came to a mathematics site at:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FundamentalSystem.html

After using the site’s built-in search for the term art I found http://mathworld.wolfram.com/WallpaperGroups.html, which illustrates a set of patterns (ironically enough) that you might find useful if you are an artist trying to find a little inspiration. In fact, the site contains a huge number of mathematical definitions and examples of odd theorems that you might find stimulate your imagination.

When I performed the exercise on Google News, the first article I found happened to be about the same political event, but was from a different news source. In the third paragraph, I searched using the phrase I found there, pursue grand. The first site in the results list was a pretty boring text document:

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06594/nsf06594.txt

I scanned the first few paragraphs and spotted the site www.grants.gov mentioned in the text. I went to Grants.gov, and searching for art with their internal grant search engine, I found several links to grants available for art organizations and artists.

An exercise like this can change the way you think about your business and your approach to getting new business. It can help you become more open to creative possibilities beyond your normal patterns of behavior. And, it can help keep your ideas fresh.

Randomly explore new work environments

If you work alone or on a small team, try to explore different work environments from time to time. In a previous post, Work Alone? Work at Home? How Freelancers, Consultants, and Contractors Beat the Solo Blues, I mentioned going out to a cafe or coffee house to work. I realize that this can be quite distracting for many people. While it might allow you to come up with some unique ideas, it’ll probably also allow you to procrastinate.

Instead, try heading over to a public library for half a day of work. Many libraries now provide free wireless Internet access, in case you need to be online. For the price of a parking pass or a few quarters, many community colleges and universities will let you go into their libraries to work, without being a student.

Maybe you know of other places that afford quiet workspaces for free or at low cost. If so, please let me know what they are.

Explore new surfaces

If you write, design, or otherwise produce something tangible, and you usually perform those tasks on the computer, try a different surface. At least in the beginning of a new project, start with pen and paper. That’s how I started this post and within two sentences of random doodles, I remembered the story my friend Scott told me about his philosophy class, which I think is a good illustration of the problem we all have with life patterns.

Changing the tools you use can be a liberating experience. Why is that? I think it’s because we don’t consider ourselves all that good with rarely used tools. For instance, my handwriting is barely legible and I hate to reread it.

As a consequence, I’m less concerned about putting ideas onto paper, because I don’t have to try to be perfect. After all, I’m writing with my lousy penmanship. That lack of concern frees my mind to explore using other images, words, metaphors, and experiences. It doesn’t make sense, but then most things having to do with creativity make no sense.

Give these methods a try. Or if you have ways of breaking out of your patterns, please share them by leaving a comment.