From the book Creative Confidence by Tom & David Kelley.
Introduction: The heart of Innovation
At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you. It is the conviction that you can achieve what you set out to do. We think this self-assurance, this belief in your creative capacity, lies at the heart of innovation.
Creative confidence is like a muscle—it can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience.
[The] combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the abilitiy to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.
Individuals who come to believe that they can effect change are more likely to accomplish they set out to do.
When people transcend the fear that block their creativity, all sorts of new possibilities emerge.
Chapter 1: Flip – From Design Thinking to Creative Confidence
Don’t wait for the proverbial apple to fall on your head. Go out in the world and proactively seek experiences that will spark creativie thinking.
Inspiration is fueled by a deliberate, planned course of action.
The key is to be quick and dirty—exploring a range of ideas without becoming too invested in one.
Creative thinkers […] are careful not to rush to judgment. They recognize that there are many possible solutions and are willing to “go wide” first, identifying a number of possible approaches before converging on the ideas most worth implementing.
Chapter 2: Dare – From Fear to Courage
His research has found that creative people simply do more experiments. Their ultimate “strokes of genius” don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people—they just do more. They take more shots at the goals. That is the surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.
As you move from level to level, success can flip your mindset to a state of creative confidence.
But even after you overcome your initial fear of failure and the creative confidence, you need to continue stretching yourself. Like a muscle, your capabilities will grow and strengthen with practice.
Relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices.
You can get better faster at coming up with you ideas if you give yourself and those around you the leeway to make mistakes from time to time.
As Brown writes: “When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts.”
Chapter 3: Spark – From Blank Page to Insight
The more fresh new ideas cross your field of vision each day, the greater your insights will be.
If you want a good idea, start with a lot of ideas.
To keep your thinking fresh, constantly seek out new sources of information.
As Stenberg says, you can choose to be creative. But you have to make an effort to stay inspired and turn creativity into a habit.
So if you find yourself stuck on a problem, take 20 minutes or so off the grid; let your mind disengage temporarily. you may find a solution arriving like a flash of insight.
“Chance favors people who do lots of experiments and then pay very close attention when something unexpected happens.”
Chapter 4: Leap – From Planning to Action
It’s hard to be “best” right away, so commit to rapid and continuous improvements. The messiness of such trial and error may seem uncomfortable at first, but action allows most of us to learn at a faster rate; it’s almost a prerequisite for success. Otherwise, the desire to be best can get in the way of getting better.
If you want to make something great, you need to start making. Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process. So don’t get stuck at the planning stage. Don’t let your inner perfectionist slow you down. All the overplanning, all the procrastinating, and all the talking are signs that we are afraid, that we just don’t feel ready. You want everything to be “just right” before you commit further or sharing something with others. That tendency leads us to wait rather than act, to perfect rather than launch.
The faster the experiment, the more likely you are to try.
Starting small gets you from a state of rest to a state of motion, and you’ve started to build momentum for the bigger challenges ahead.
Chapter 5: Seek – From Duty to Passion
[…] that creative state in which time seems to slip away and you are completely immersed in an activity for its own sake. When you are in a state of flow, the world around you drops away and you are fully engaged.
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