Creativity is a process

Creativity is a process

• You need “negative capability” – suspension of judgment until you have chased down a number of ideas
• The creative impulse is one piece of the process, but at some point you need to sit down and do the work
• Creativity is a spiral of excitement and despair and you have to keep working at it
• “Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just get to work”
• Creativity proceeds through cognitive stages. There is a preparation stage, an incubation stage (where you let the task go for a while), an insight stage, and a verification stage.
• Collaboration makes a creative process better. There is no “lone creator” – the members of the group makes up a single meta-creator. The conversations create more than the sum of the individual viewpoints
• You have to believe that criticism of your ideas is not criticism of you, and you have to be willing to let go of your ideas as well
• You have to work with people who are very different to you
• When you work in a group, what you create is much grander
• Additional perspectives make the result better, 
• Nothing is original. There is no creation without being influenced. 
• We create new ideas by remixing. You innovate by transforming on top of platforms that already exist. 
• Anyone can be creative in the domain that best works for them. It could be a work of art, it could be making dinner. It could even be making process or product improvements in your own organisation.