Welcome to Conspire’s Fun Friday Links, a weekly collection of interesting discoveries from around the Web. Most of the time, the goal is to get you thinking differently about innovation, collaboration, business culture, and life in general. Other times, we may toss an infographic or fun video your way. Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
To Be Creative is to Decisively Use These Six Things
Running up against roadblocks is a natural, though frustrating, part of the creative process — and there’s plenty of advice out there for pushing past them. But what if what it really came down to was just good old fashioned decision-making? From Creative Something:
“The Investment Theory of Creativity states creative people are the ones who pursue new or unfavorable ideas, only to ‘sell’ those same ideas later on once they have had a chance to evolve.
This theory makes a lot of sense, to be creative we must be able to see ideas that are new for what they might become, and we must be capable of turning around or drawing out the evolution of unfavorable ideas as well.
How do we learn to do that?”
Sesame Street Rules for Business
As it turns out, educational kids’ shows are valuable for quite a few more reasons than just learning multiplication tables or how to be polite to your neighbors. From Inc.:
“When thinking about the growth of your company, the challenges can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. It feels like there are so many things you need to get right and many opportunities to fail … or at least make (costly) mistakes. Let’s face it, as an entrepreneur, you’ve invested so much of yourself and your resources, there is a lot of pressure to succeed. Regardless of how large your team is, there’s also a drive to ensure the success of those who have chosen to help build alongside of you.
[There] are many incredible things all around you if you just look for them. As a child, it was easy to tap into your creativity because you felt free to discover, explore and enjoy the journey of exploration. When you’re feeling stuck, it’s worth taking a break and seeing what’s around you. The simple act of paying closer to attention while your subconscious mind works on the problem at hand can lead to an unexpected breakthrough.”
Innovation is a Choice
It can be tricky to figure out who within a company the onus of innovation should fall on — is it leadership? The board? The budget gatekeepers? All of the above? But fall on someone it should, or you’re setting yourself up to repeat avoidable mistakes. From Innovation Excellence:
“Whether our business model is working, isn’t working, or hasn’t worked, what we think and do about it is our choice. What that means is, regardless of the magnitude of the external force, we decide if it’s large enough to do our work differently or do different work. And because innovation starts with different, what that means is innovation is a choice – our choice.
Really, though, external forces don’t create new behavior, internal forces do. We watch the culture around us and sense the external forces it creates on us, then we look inside and choose to apply the real force behind innovation – our intrinsic motivation. If we’re motivated by holding on to what we have, we’ll spend little of our life force on innovation. If we’re motivated by a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo, we’ll empty our tank in the name of innovation.”
The post Fun Friday Links: Creativity is a Decision, Sesame Street Rules, and the Choice to Innovate appeared first on via @Mindjet's Conspire #ideasquad.