I’m finally getting round to reading all the blogs and watching all the videos I’ve bookmarked over the past year and came across John Cleese’s lecture on creativity.
Even though i’ve seen it several times before I keep it there as it’s always a useful reminder on how to switch your to ‘open’ to ‘closed’, and how to make your life more creative.
- Open: you can take a wide view of the situation and ponder solutions
- Closed: your tunnel vision takes you straight into making a decision and implementing a solution
Cleese offers 5 factors for making your life more creative:
- Space: you need to escape your daily pressures
- Time: you need to occupy that space for a specific period of time
- Time: give yourself as long as possible to come to a decision, no matter how uncomfortable the feeling of indecision or not taking the obvious ‘solution’ may feel
- Confidence: fear of making a mistake will inhibit creativity
- Humour: gets you from the closed to the open mode as quickly as possible
I definitely recommend watching the lecture in full:
The excellent Brain Pickings website is full of signposts to resources to help with your creativity.
Elena Plaiter 