Suppose the reason you go to school, or to work, or to do anything is for you use your creativity and to contribute your unique gifts, talents, insights and skills in novel and appropriate ways.  What might that mean for you, your teachers, your employers, your clients, your governments?

Let’s pretend that creativity is what life is all about, and you want to stir your juices for an even fresher perspective than the one you have now, that you want to feel even more creative than you already are.  Here’s a simple tip: treat your brain.

Brains love exploring and connecting, making patterns and imitating, making new connections, being challenged and having a diversity of experience.  What’s one thing you can do to indulge your brain?  How might you help others treat their brains too?

World Creativity and Innovation Week is coming.  It’s April 15 – 21. Since 2002, people from all over the world celebrate in their own ways.  What might your celebration be in 2012?

Interesting Links

• The Creativity of Dual Process “System 1 Thinking (blogs.scientificamerican.com)
• Seven Strategies to Inspire and Nurture Creativity in Ourselves (psychologytoday.com)
• The Introversion-Creativity Link and the Role of “Alpha Power” (psychologytoday.com)
• 7 Deadly Sins of Creativity (marcandangel.com)

Enjoy

sourced from: The Psychology of Conformity from the Atlantic Magazine online

Related articles

• An easy way to understand innovation (creativityland.ca)

Here’s last year’s winner. Got me thinking about a creator’s high, wondered if the sensations are the same as the high runners experience. Ideas? Thoughts? Recollections? Insights?

For more info on the Getty Mishmash challenge Jan 19 – Feb 29, 2012

Related articles

• Get global bragging rights in Getty’s mashup contest (news.cnet.com)

Happy viewing.

Creativity teachings for leaders will embrace two activities moving forward: How to 1) give and 2) receive new ideas with honour, dignity and respect.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Just like you, I’m cleaning out old files before the end of the year.  Found this and could not resist posting it.  If you know the original author – please let me know so the right credit can be given.  Could be me, not sure.  The file is close to 25 years old.

The Fable: who says you can do it all, well?

Once upon a time the animals had a corporation. The daily work routine included running, climbing, flying and swimming and all the animals had to perform each of these functions.

The duck was good at swimming, better in fact than her manager.  She was praised for her ability in flying, but was practically hopeless in running.  Because she was slow in this area, her manager gave her all the running jobs, thinking this would help improve this skill. As a result, all her swimming and flying responsibilities were taken by others. She kept at running but only became average in swimming. Average is acceptable, so nobody worried except the duck.

The rabbit started as the top runner, but he had a nervous breakdown and had to quit because so much of his effort was spent trying to swim.

The squirrel came to the company as a star climber but his coordinator made him fly from the bottom up rather than from the treetop down. He developed charley horses from over exertion at the take off and began to get poor appraisals in climbing and running.

The practical prairie dogs contracted their offspring out to a badger when the corporation refused to permit digging.

At the end of the year, after all the appraisals were completed, an abnormal eel that could swim fairly well, and could climb and fly a little was made employee of the year.

“According to a new study, creative people are more likely to cheat than their less creative colleagues because their talent increases their ability to rationalise their actions.

Francesca Gino from Harvard University and Dan Ariely, from Duke University, set out to explore whether more creative people would cheat under circumstances where they could justify their bad behaviour.

Their findings, published by the American Psychological Association, suggest that creative sparks may lead individuals to take unethical routes when searching for solutions to problems and tasks.

Gino and Ariely carried out five experiments to test their thesis and found that the more creative participants in the study were significantly more likely to cheat. It also emerged that there was no link between intelligence and dishonesty – i.e. more intelligent but less creative people were not more inclined toward dishonesty.

“Dishonesty and innovation are two of the topics most widely written about in the popular press,” the authors wrote. “Yet, to date, the relationship between creativity and dishonest behavior has not been studied empirically.

“The results from the current article indicate that, in fact, people who are creative or work in environments that promote creative thinking may be the most at risk when they face ethical dilemmas.”

However the authors concede some important limitations in their work, most notably that they created situations in which participants were tempted by money to cheat. They suggested that future research should investigate whether creativity would lead people to satisfy selfish, short-term goals rather than their higher aspirations when faced with self-control dilemmas, such as eating a slice of cake when trying to lose weight.”

Author: Brian Amble
from http://www.management-issues.com/2011/12/5/research/creative-people-are-more-likely-to-cheat.asp

Related articles

• Why Creative Types May Be More Likely to Cheat (healthland.time.com)
• Are Creative People More Apt to Deceive? (psychcentral.com)
• Creative types more likely to cheat (scienceblog.com)
• The Creative Situation of Cheating (thesituationist.wordpress.com)
• Creative excuses: Original thinkers more likely to cheat (eurekalert.org)
• Study: Creative people more likely to cheat (cbsnews.com)

Image by Peter Wick via Flickr

“Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It’s your power to create mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet and that you want to bring into being. It’s the magic wand you use to shape your future.

And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning out images of what you will be doing later.

The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of yourself eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of some year building your dream home by a lake or sea.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned with your deepest desires. In fact, it’s an indispensable tool in creating the life you want; it’s what you use to form images of the conditions you’d like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests on this planet unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We’re often just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values. That’s the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and from our parents at an early age and from other influential people in our past.

Fearful fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Those fearful fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end meditations.

Every time we entertain a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we rouse and dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we’re blasting ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren’t good for us and that we don’t really need. Anytime we surrender to the allure of these false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imagination is practicing a form of black magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that the Zen Buddhists deride as the “monkey mind.” It’s the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly spins out pictures that zip around with the energy of an agitated animal. If we can stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind’s slapdash chatter, we can be fully attuned to the life that’s right in front of us. Only then are we able to want what we actually have.

But whether our imagination is in service to our noble desires or in the thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one constant: The prophecies of our imagination tend to be accurate. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are all-too-often reflected back to us as events that confirm our expectations.
Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let’s consider that possibility. What if it’s at least partially true that what we expect will happen does tend to materialize?

Here’s the logical conclusion: It’s downright stupid and self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect blessings.

That’s one reason why I’m reverent in composing my messages for you. If I’m to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy.”

__________

Excerpted from the revised and expanded edition of Rob Brezsny’s book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.