Posts Tagged ‘creativity’

What To Do When You Run Out Of Ideas

It’s happened to everyone at one time or another. You’re going along, producing and feeling creative, and then, suddenly, you run out of ideas. You’re stuck. You search high and low for inspiration. You look back on your earlier work, searching through your past ideas, trying to locate your muse, looking for something to trigger a creative explosion. But it’s all for naught. You’re blocked. Regardless of what business you’re in… Continue reading

April 29 2009 | By Susan | Tagged: creativity, entrepreneur, inspiration, small business | 10 comments»

Limits Revisited

Earlier this week, I wrote a post about limits and how limits engender creativity. Unfortunately, I opened with a lengthy discussion of my recent forays into SLR photography, and the point of that post seems to have gotten lost. Since it’s an important point, I thought I’d revisit it, this time without talking about cameras.

As humans, we are limited beings. We have no wings… Continue reading

March 30 2009 | By Dustin | Tagged: art, attitude, creativity, limits, music | 4 comments»

Limits and Creativity

I want to tell you a story about two photographers. For a while now, I've been wanting to get more into photography, hoping eventually to buy a nice digital SLR camera. So I was quite thrilled when a photojournalist friend offered to give me some of her old film equipment to learn on. The camera, a Nikon FM2, is a fully manual model first introduced almost 30 years ago. It only… Continue reading

March 25 2009 | By Dustin | Tagged: challenge, creative, creativity, limit | 26 comments»

The Idea Generator Brings Brainstorming to the iPhone and iPod Touch Platform

Considering the variety of applications you can download for the iPhone and iPod Touch from Apple’s comprehensive AppStore, it was only a matter of time until someone introduced a brainstorming tool for these popular devices: The Idea Generator. Developed by creative consultancy The Director’s Bureau, this intriguing tool uses randomly-displayed words to help you generate ideas for your next creative project. Continue reading

March 23 2009 | By Chuck | Tagged: brainstorming, creativity, idea, idea generator, iphone, ipod | 8 comments»

Go Out and Play!

We all know that play is important for kids. Play teaches them coordination, adult roles, social interaction, and basic problem-solving skills. But somehow, we’ve fallen prey to the idea that play is only important for kids. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Bzzz! Wrong!… Continue reading

March 18 2009 | By Dustin | Tagged: adult, career, creativity, play, thinking, work, work-life balance | 18 comments»

4 Pocket-Sized Tools to Help You Generate Killer Ideas Any Time, Anywhere

The ability to generate creative, profitable, problem-solving ideas is growing in importance, especially with the global economy stuck in the doldrums. But how can you be creative on demand? Here are four pocket-sized card decks that you can take anywhere – to your next team meeting or to a quiet park where you can brainstorm free from distractions – to help you generate your next breakthrough idea. Continue reading

March 6 2009 | By Chuck | Tagged: brainstorming, creativity, idea, ideation, innovation, mind | 22 comments»

How to Think What Nobody Else Thinks

How can you think of things that no-one else thinks of? The answer is by deliberately taking a different approach to the issue from everyone else. There are dominant ideas in every field. The brilliant thinker purposefully challenges those dominant ideas in order to think innovatively.

Albert Szent-Gyorgy, who discovered Vitamin C, said, ‘Genius is seeing what everyone else sees and thinking what no-one else has thought.’ If… Continue reading

March 3 2009 | By Paul | Tagged: creativity, genius, idea, innovation, lateral thinking, originality, think | 25 comments»

Free Your Mind with XMind

Mind-mapping is a popular tool for brainstorming ideas, outlining projects, and organizing information. While some people feel most comfortable mind-mapping with pencils or pens and paper, others enjoy the ease and accessibility of software-based mind-mapping, and there are a variety of tools designed to help make, share, and store mind-maps on your computer. Some, like MindManager and iMindMap are powerful, enterprise-level programs, with price tags to match; free… Continue reading

February 24 2009 | By Dustin | Tagged: brainstorming, creativity, idea, mind mapping, mind-map, xmind | 20 comments»

Sync Your Brain And Your System Using a Mind Dump

One of the keys to any productivity system is to actually put things into the system. Who knew? Obvious though it may seem, many of us have trouble taking the time to enter our thoughts into our task-manager, to-do list, or organizational system. This can happen for any number of reasons - no paper nearby, no easy way to record your ideas - but our productivity can be hurt by not inputting… Continue reading

February 24 2009 | By David | Tagged: brain, capture, creativity, idea, mind-dump, trigger, weekly review | 10 comments»

How to Cultivate an “Insight Outlook”

One powerful way to live a more creative life is to cultivate an "insight outlook" -- the art of looking more deeply at everything we experience with an open, inquisitive spirit. Creative people are intensely observant, paying careful attention to everything they think and hear. They realize that their environments – the people they talk to, the places they go, the things they read or hear on the radio or… Continue reading

February 18 2009 | By Chuck | Tagged: association, brain, creativity, ideas, problem-solving, thinking | 6 comments»

Think Laterally

Lateral thinking is a phrase coined by Edward de Bono as a counterpoint to conventional or vertical thinking. In conventional thinking we go forward in a predictable, direct fashion. Lateral thinking involves coming at the problem from new directions – literally from the side. De Bono defines the four main aspects of lateral thinking as follows:

The recognition of dominant polarizing ideas.
The search for different ways of looking at things.
A relaxation

February 9 2009 | By Paul | Tagged: assumption, brainstorm, creativity, de bono, discovery, imagination, lateral, puzzle, thinking | 6 comments»

Change your Mindset for a Great 2009: Create the Abundance Mindset

How do you do that? You give away what you got. It's not that complicated, really. Short on time? Some people are always running out of time - like it was cash or something. They run out of time and they're always in a panic to get things done. If you're always out of time, then do the sensible thing - give your time away. Does that sound crazy? Well, it might to… Continue reading

February 2 2009 | By Steve | Tagged: abundance, attitude, confidence, creativity, giving, mindset, prosperity, time | 8 comments»

The Power of Intentional Attention

Are you taking it all in? That is, are you sure that you’re noticing everything that matters to you, or could matter to you if only you’d noticed it? Could you do more with your life – or just enjoy it more – if you were more actively engaged in the world around you, in your day-to-day activities, your conversations, and the beauty of your everyday surroundings? Most importantly, do you… Continue reading

January 19 2009 | By Dustin | Tagged: attention, capture, creativity, intention, value | 13 comments»

Hunt, Gather, and Build: A Review of “Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method”

Gerald M. Weinberg has written dozens of books and hundreds of articles on computers, technology, consulting, and the craft of composition. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method is an excellent survey of the methods he has used in order to produce this voluminous output. The comprehensive table of contents provides the reader with a clear, useful map of what lies ahead, and the exercises sprinkled throughout this short, readable book… Continue reading

January 19 2009 | By Art | Tagged: capture, creativity, gerald-weinberg, writer, writing | 2 comments»

The 80 Best Lifehacks of 2008

And so we arrive yet again at the end of another year. 2008 was at best a mixed bag – while the world was electrified by the US election and it’s promise of change, the global economy was shaken to its core as a decade of financial mismanagement and willful blindness finally caught up with us. Gas prices spiked, leading us all to ask some difficult questions about sustainability, efficiency… Continue reading

December 31 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: 2008, achievement, app, back-to-basics, Communication, creativity, goals, gtd, habit, iphone, networking, new year, Productivity, review, success, web | 39 comments»