How To Unlock Your Hidden Creative Genius
This page pulls together my most essential information about creativity. I’ll share how creativity works, find your hidden creative genius, and create meaningful work by learning how to make creative thinking a habit. I’ve tried to present the basics of everything you need to know to start mastering creativity, even if you don’t have much time. We will know how to unlock your hidden creative genius.
How to Be Creative
Step 1: Give yourself permission to create junk.
In any creative endeavor, you have to give yourself permission to create junk. There is no way around it. Sometimes you have to write four terrible pages just to discover that you wrote one good sentence in the second paragraph of the third page.
Creating something useful and compelling is like being a gold miner. You have to sift through pounds of dirt and rock and silt just to find a speck of gold in the middle of it all. Bits and pieces of genius will find their way to you if you give yourself permission to let the muse flow.
Step 2: Create a schedule.
No single act will uncover more creative genius than forcing yourself to create consistently. Practicing your craft over and over is the only way to become decent at it. The person who sits around theorizing about what a best-selling book looks like will never write it. Meanwhile, the writer who shows up every day and puts their butt in the chair and their hands on the keyboard is learning how to do the work.
If you want to do your best creative work, then don’t leave it up to choice. Don’t wake up in the morning and think, “I hope I feel inspired to create something today.” You need to take the decision-making out of it. Set a schedule for your work. Genius arrives when you show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way.
Step 3: Finish something
Finish something. Anything Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire on your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something.
There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.
Step 4: Stop judging your own work.
Everyone struggles to create great art—even great artists.
Anyone who creates something consistently will begin to judge their own work. I write new articles every Monday and Thursday. After sticking to that publishing schedule for three months, I began to judge everything I created. I was convinced that I had gone through every decent idea I had available. My most popular article came eight months later.
It is natural to judge your work. It is natural to feel disappointed that your creation isn’t as wonderful as you hoped it would be or that you’re not getting any better at your craft. But the key is not to let your discontent prevent you from continuing to do the work.
You have to practice enough self-compassion not to let self-judgment take over. Sure, you care about your work but don’t get so serious about it that you can’t laugh off your mistakes and continue to produce the thing you love. Don’t let judgment prevent delivery.
Step 5: Hold yourself accountable.
Share your work publicly. It will hold you accountable for creating your best work. It will provide feedback for doing better work. And when you see others connect with what you create, it will inspire you and make you care more.
Sometimes sharing your work means you have to deal with haters and critics. But more often than not, the only thing that happens is that you rally the people who believe the same things you believe, are excited about the same things you are excited about or support the work you believe in — who wouldn’t want that?
The world needs people who put creative work out into the world. What seems simple to you is often brilliant to someone else. But you’ll never know that unless you choose to share.