Jumpstart Your Creativity
Read Jumpstart Your Creativity Online
Authors: Shawn Doyle and Steven Rowell,Steven Rowell
JUMPSTART
your
CREATIVITY
your
CREATIVITY
â10 JOLTSâ
TO GET CREATIVE
AND STAY CREATIVE
SHAWN DOYLE
AND
STEVEN ROWELL
© Copyright 2013âShawn Doyle and Steven Rowell
All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page copying for personal or group study is permitted and encouraged. Permission may be granted upon request.
Sound Wisdom
167 Walnut Bottom Road
Shippensburg, PA 17257
www.soundwisdom.com
This book and all other Sound Wisdom books are available at bookstores and distributors worldwide.
ISBN 13 TP: 978-1-937879-28-0
ISBN 13 Ebook: 978-1-937879-29-7
For Worldwide Distribution, Printed in the U.S.A.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 /17 16 15 14 13
DEDICATIONS
FROM STEVEN TO:
Mom and Dad, thank you for loving me unconditionally and for all the sacrifices you made throughout the years to help me become the person I am today. Thank you for being such loving grandparents too. Ali and Farahnaz, thank you for your love and support. You inspire me to be a better person in so many ways. Dorothy, your spirit lives and fills the hearts of so many; may Kia bring you more great smiles, laughter, and never-ending joy!
My adventurous wife, Jamila, my anchor and my lighthouse, here's to living our dreams and to love, honor, cherish, adore, and edit! My son, you fill my heart and give me great joy and purpose in life every day. Head hug little mister! My big brother David, thank you for persevering and inspiring me to live a life of character.
My best friends Travis Mann and Mike Kennedy, thank you for listening all these years and still taking my phone calls. Adam Hommey, thank you for being you and never settling for less, ever. Glenn Gleason, I love you and miss you every day, R.I.P.
Finally, my mentors, teachers, and inspirations, Walter and Jayne Naff, Lambuth Tomlinson, Will Rogers, Dwight Sypolt, George Kalogridis, Leo Buscaglia, Sam Walton, Fred Smith, Joe Polish, Tom Antion, Andrew Ulichney, M.D., Greg Bogdanovich, Tom Peters, Tony Robbins, Michael Silver, M.D., Jack Canfield and Brendon Burchard, thank you for sharing your gifts, wisdom, and truth with me over the years.
FROM SHAWN TO:
Rachael, with all my loveâI will always leave the light on for you!
Group and Organizational Creativity
IDEATION TECHNIQUES
There is a fountain of youth: it is your
mind, your talents, the creativity you bring
to your life and the lives of people you love.
When you learn to tap this source, you will
truly have defeated age
.
âS
OPHIA
L
OREN
WELCOME
to
How to Skin a Badger!
(Oh sorry, that is the other book title we are working on.) Welcome to
Jumpstart Your Creativity!
Think of this book as a powerful generator with big jumper cables to give you ten jolts to fire up your creativity. I am Shawn Doyle and this is Steven Rowell, we are your creativity expert hosts.
In this day and age of information overload and cynicism with sound bites like “life would be great ifâ¦,” “I'm just surviving,” or “We used to, we used toâ¦,”
we
say there is great hope among us! Creativity abounds with fervor, zest, and zeal! All of the technology we take for granted today came from creative people who had the courage to pursue their dreams. The post-it note, the Segway, the iPhone, even the
100-miles-to-the-gallon hybrid car made by Philadelphia high school students were all made possible because of, yesâyou're smart you guessed itâcreativity.
Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner made the highest and fastest jump in history, leaping out of a helium balloon at an altitude of 128,100 feet, reaching a maximum speed of 833.9 miles per hour, or Mach 1.24, and safely landing on earth after a mile-long parachute ride. Future NASA astronauts will wear the identical suit that Baumgartner wore. This was made possible by the collaboration, expert science and math, and the creativity of more than 300 people including more than 70 engineers, scientists, and physicians who have been working for five years.
Most of us will never participate in such a creative, breakthrough, world-record-setting project (if you fall from a high distance, you really need to have a team of expertsâdon't try it at home). You may only have to be creative a few times each monthâcoming up with an alternate route during rush hour, new ways to get your kids to clean up their rooms, or creative financing to keep your lights on and a roof over your head, or a big project at work.
No matter how mundane or extraordinary our lives may seem to us, our ability to access greater creativity is one engine for innovation in our daily lives, hopefully to better our lives, our families, our communities, towns, countries, and some day the world (we are optimists)!
Creativity most often begins because of a grand idea or to overcome a problem, challenge, or obstacle. Peter Diamandisâfounder of the X PRIZE Foundation, graduate of MIT
and Harvard Medical Schoolâand award-winning journalist Steven Kotler co-authored
Abundance
, which started with a big, hairy, audacious goal:
Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity's grandest challenge.
The hundreds of X PRIZE competitions completed to date have unleashed creativity, innovation, and sheer determination for problem solving in the most unlikely places and with the most unlikely of characters. We are inspired by Peter Diamandis, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, as well as average Joes and Sallys who embrace their creativity every day. We have written this book for every Joe, Sally, Tom, Enrique, Lakisha, Yu, Rufus, and Caius who know deep in their heart of hearts they have creativity inside of them, can remember it from their childhood, and yearn to let it out once again.
Imagine a book on creativity that has no fluff, never wastes your time, is fun to read and gives you exact steps to generate better ideas, evaluate these ideas, and get better results! We embrace this big idea and hope that you benefit from our gift to you. We know that 91 percent of all people who buy a book never read more than the first chapter, so we have packed this first chapter with immediate actionable strategies on how to come up with new ideas using brainstorming that works. It's called
ideation
, and we'll show you how to use it right now.
First, to get a little business out of the way so you understand who is talking to you in this book and why we are qualified to teach you about creativity, we offer you our quick bios.
Shawn
(he is waving on the right but you can't see him as he is outside the margin) has been a trainer, book author, consultant, and cartoonist for more than two decades (more than he likes to admitâ¦shhh, he's 54). He has written fourteen books at the time of this writing, and is writing three more as you read these words. Shawn has resilience and discipline seldom seen and a generous spirit that inspires every audience. He is truly motivated by helping others improve their lives.
Steven
(he is waving on the left) has been a trainer, speaker, consultant, and book author for many years as well. He used to work for The Walt Disney World Co., (talk about creative!) and is known in many circles as the “Idea Doctor,” a name given to him by his clients that has stuck with him. He's a serial entrepreneur, classic ADD/ADHD, bright-shiny-object idea machine with a huge heart for helping others.
Many people tell us individually that we are “the most creative people they know.” Since we are both creative maniacs and we teach creativity in corporate and nonprofit classrooms across the United States, we feel somewhat qualified to help you jumpstart your creativity. So let's move beyond the resume propaganda and into what you really care aboutâlearning how to be more creative. (Note: our publisher's legal department objected to the term “propaganda” and asked us to take it out, but we thought it was really cool; so being the creative
rebels that we are, we stuck it back into the final manuscript and hope they don't notice.)
This book does
not
have the proverbial required introductory chapter that tells you what we are going to tell you. We figured we would show you some respect and just go ahead and cut right to the chase.
Okay, just in case you were thinking literally, the line above is not actually your brainâit is the title of this section. After traveling around the country teaching people how to be more creative, we realized most people approach creativity different from the way your brain really works. For example: I mention the word frog, you think:
Green, which reminds you of the grass on a golf course, speaking of golf, boy last week George really got plastered on the 16th hole, speaking of plaster I probably need to repair that hole in the wall that is there because I took that big mirror down and I need to remember to stop at the hardware store to buy some plaster; you know when I think of plaster it makes me think of the old days when people would put plaster on somebody's skin to remove diseaseâsome people call that “plaster.”
No, this is not the ramblings of an insane person, this is how most people really think. Most of us do not think in a linear way: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. We think more in terms of connections and associations as in that run-on sentence about the frog. In fact you could connect them in the following ways: golf-George-plastered-repair-old days. That is how our brain
really works, a loose series of connected associations that are all somehow related to one another.
Think of it as a spider web, a fishing net, a pinball machine, or Lady Gaga's “meat dress” (okay maybe the last one was not a good exampleâsorry for being a little too creative), but if you think of a web or a net, each string or strand goes from point to point. Are you with us so far? The point is, most people conduct brainstorming or ideation in a way that is not linked to how the brain actually works. The processes of brainstorming are often way too linear and that's why too often they don't work at all!
We pile people into a conference room, pull out a marker and a flip-chart and say, “Okay people, let's generate some ideas!” Most people we talk to detest brainstorming. Why do they detest brainstorming? We hear many reasons. Most of them are say, “It is highly ineffective and awkward,” or in the majority of cases, “The person facilitating the brainstorming does not do a good job.” Another common complaint is that people too often make comments or judgments aloud in response to others' contributions during the brainstorming and this shuts some participants down, keeping them from contributing any more to the discussion.