Week 1B

http://changethis.com/

"14 Ways to Get Breakthrough Ideas" is a serious of processes and steps that Mitch Ditkoff suggests doing in order to increase creativity.  It includes obvious ones that have been told to us since the dawn of time, such as immerse yourselves in things, and tolerate ambiguity, along with other, more unique suggestions, such as "hang out with a diverse group of people".  I hate to be a Negative Nancy with these kinds of things, but I believe that the majority of these things are essentially crappy suggestions, and I get a little pissed that this guy is making so much money off of lists like these.  If we as people do things like number 4, "Make New Connections", and do the suggested act of making a list of words to connect, we are automatically going to think of words that we want to connect, not words that might fall into place.  As soon as we go out of our way to try to achieve breakthrough ideas and find spontaneous creativity, the process becomes useless, since we are now looking for ideas, instead of just letting ideas come to us naturally.  Being self aware has a negative effect on creativity, the best way to think creatively is to just be creative, not going out of your way to do so.

Some of the items on this list can lead to new ways of being creative, however.  Number 10, "Hang Out With a Diverse Group of People", can open a person up to whole new walks of life that they never would have experienced before.  Everybody has different upbringings, different backgrounds, different beliefs, different ways of doing things both small and large, so everybody has all of these stories to offer you, allowing you broaden your horizons and open up to new subjects to think about.  Hanging out with new people won't give you new ideas instantly, but can open up paths to new ways of thinking.
Again, save for the one or two somewhat decent list items, they are all pretty cookie cutter, or are actually hurtful to creativity.  Number 7, "Listen to Your Subconscious" is just a foolish thing to suggest to somebody.  As soon as we are aware that we are listening to our subconscious, can we really call it our subconscious anymore?  We can't set a time and date and select when we listen to our subconscious, we just do, and any other instance is counter productive, and we spend more time looking for answers than actually finding them.
The same argument goes for number 12, "Look for Happy Accidents".  We can't go around our entire lives just watching accidents and hoping that they work out into some sort of miracle, or else a lot of things would never get done or invented.  And once we start looking out for these accidents, again, are they really spontaneous, or are we creating these accidents ourselves in hopes that they will be some sort of breakthrough idea?  If the items on this list work for some people, that's great, more power to them, but in my opinion, a lot of them are too distracting from a real creative process.

I've decided to do the activity for number 10, "Hang Out with Diverse Groups of People" since it seems like that's the only list item that I really approve of.  Make a list of 10 people different from my usual crew.  These 10 people are all residents in my dorm that I have relatively easy access to.

The Spanish girl upstairs
A homosexual friend of mine
The quiet, reserved photography major
The guy who wants to make documentaries
The extremely anti social guy who always looks down
Man who goes to the gym every day
The African American ITS major down the hall
The girl I met this weekend who is a communication disorders major
The girl I went to high school with but never made any real connection with
and Stephanie

Admittedly, I had a small bit of difficulty putting this list together.  Outside of my normal group of friends, I don't really know anybody right off the top of my head that would be diverse enough to promote new ways of thinking.  I believe the easiest one to spend time with first would be the homosexual friend, as we are already on very good terms and he seems to be very accessible.  I don't know when the time table for this meeting could be, this weekend, this month, I don't know, but I don't want to plan any such meeting, as this goes back to my idea that looking for something creative hinders the creative process.

I apologize to everybody that found this article actually helpful.  If doing all of these things helps you be creative, more power to you, but to me, you can't force creativity, it just is.