I told my friend Graham that I often cycle the two miles from my house to the town centre but unfortunately there is a big hill on the route. He replied, ‘You mean fortunately.’ He explained that I should be glad of the extra exercise that the hill provided.
My attitude to the hill has now changed. I used to grumble as I approached it but now I tell myself the following. This hill will exercise my heart and lungs. It will help me to lose weight and get fit. It will mean that I live longer. This hill is my friend. Finally as I wend my way up the incline I console myself with the thought of all those silly people who pay money to go to a gym and sit on stationery exercise bicycles when I can get the same value for free. I have a smug smile of satisfaction as I reach the top of the hill.
Problems are there to be faced and overcome. We cannot achieve anything with an easy life. Helen Keller was the first deaf and blind person to gain a University degree. Her activism and writing proved inspirational. She wrote, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved.”
One of the main determinants of success in life is our attitude towards adversity. From time to time we all face hardships, problems, accidents, afflictions and difficulties. Some are of our making but many confront us through no fault of our own. Whilst we cannot choose the adversity we can choose our attitude towards it.
Douglas Bader was 21 when in 1931 he had both legs amputated following a flying accident. He was determined to fly again and went on to become one of the leading flying aces in the Battle of Britain with 22 aerial victories over the Germans. He was an inspiration to others during the war. He said, “Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind, you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything. Go to school, join in all the games you can. Go anywhere you want to. But never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible.”
How can you change your attitude towards the adversity that you face? Try these steps:
- Confront the problem. Do not avoid it.
- Deliberately take a positive attitude and write down some benefits or advantages of the situation.
- Visualise how you will feel when you overcome this obstacle.
- Develop an action plan for how to tackle it.
- Smile and get cracking.
The biographies of great people are littered with examples of how they took these kinds of steps to overcome the difficulties they faced. The common thread is that they did not become defeatist or depressed. They chose their attitude. They opted to be positive. They took on the challenge. They won.
Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.
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Since publishing a series of posts on dating and living in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asked several times how I came up with the idea to see dating as a kind of metaphor for life. The immediate source of the story was pretty mundane – someone asked me a question about another article and I used going on a date as an example to illustrate my answer, and thought “hey, there might be something to this more generally!”
But the response to those stories has gotten me thinking about ideas and creativity more generally. Writers are asked all the time about where we get our ideas. So are musicians, painters, actors, designers, and other creative people. It’s a source of fascination for many, who perhaps see in the talent of others something they feel is missing from themselves.
Interestingly, most of the creative people I know don’t see their creative impulses as particularly exclusive. What separates the creative from the not-so-creative isn’t so much the ability to come up with ideas but the ability to trust them, or to trust ourselves to realize them. That trust lies at least in part in knowing we have the skills to bring forth a finished product from an initial idea, which is why so many creative people tend to take a craftsman’s (or woman’s) approach towards their work (and resent those who squander their ideas by refusing to do the groundwork needed to make them real), but skill is only part of it. There are plenty of skilled but not-particularly-creative people – hacks – in every field. What separates the creative from the not-so-creative is the willingness to take risks with ideas, to push both the idea and the self beyond the safe and comfortable.
There are two schools of thought about where ideas come from. One is the “artist as antenna” concept, in which ideas float in some barely perceptible aether waiting for someone to pick them up, the way a radio picks up a song when it’s tuned to just the right frequency. This is Keith Richards waking up in the middle of the night with the main riff from “Satisfaction” fully-formed in his head.
The second school holds that ideas are the product of hard work and thoughtful concentration. “It’s just work,” says Andy Warhol to Lou Reed about songwriting in Reed’s album, with John Cale, Songs for Drella. Sit down with a pad and pencil and think, and don’t get up until you have something! This school is the writer grinding out his or her 4 pages a day, the mad poet storming up and down the street in search of the perfect word to express exactly what s/he’s feeling, and the designer who sits down with a brief and just starts working.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle – we get ideas from within ourselves and from without, or more to the point, from the interaction of the two. It is in the active engagement of the artist with his or her world, through preparation, conscious attention, curiosity, effort, and a dash of serendipity, that ideas are born:
- Preparation: Ideas come to those who are prepared to receive them, whatever the origin. Scientists have ideas about science, not poetry – unless they have also practiced at the craft of poetry. And vice-versa – it’s the rare poet who is struck by an idea that advances our understanding of molecular biology. Skillful musicians have ideas that translate into beautiful songs, and skillful writers create daring novels that illuminate our lives. Those who haven’t prepared themselves to be creative rarely are.
- Attention: Paying attention to the world around us – whether the immediate activities of people in our vicinity or the distant events reported through the media, or anywhere in between – is one source of ideas. You’ve heard the saying that “necessity is the other of invention” but it also takes someone paying close enough attention to recognize that need in the first place.
- Curiosity: Creativity often comes from the drive to understand and take things apart, literally or figuratively. It stems from the desire to know “what if…” and to follow that question until it gets somewhere interesting.
- Effort: Whether you’re the antenna or the bricklayer, creativity takes a commitment to work. “Ideas are cheap,” the saying goes. “Execution is hard.” Ideas need to be captured, given attention, followed up on, and committed to a plan of action, or they disappear back to wherever they came – whether “out there” or deep in your unconscious mind. And they rarely come back.
- Serendipity: Serendipity is two things. First, it’s the luck to be at the right place at the right time, to be Newton at exactly the moment the apple falls from the tree. The second is the openness to making connections between unrelated things or events – to see in a bathtub a lesson about physics, or to see in a date a lesson about life.
These elements of creativity all play together, of course. How many millions of baths were taken before Archimedes had his “Eureka!” moment? Yet it was Archimedes who was prepared to understand what it meant when he climbed into his bath and saw the water level rise, Archimedes who paid attention to what he saw, Archimedes who was curious enough to wonder what was happening, Archimedes who was willing to do the follow-up work to translate his experience into a general principle about volume and displacement, and Archimedes who just happened to bring all this with him into the bath on that fateful day.
The thing is, these are all things each and every one of us can cultivate in her or his own life. They aren’t God-given gifts reserved to the few. And they apply well beyond the world of the arts – marketers, parents, teachers, factory workers, salespersons, electricians, computer programmers, and just about everyone else face situations that call for creative responses, though we often miss them for lack of preparation, attention, curiosity, effort, or serendipity. Start making a conscious effort to develop these elements, though, and I bet you’ll start engaging with your world more creatively in short order.
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
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