Jumpstart Your Creativity by Shawn Doyle and Steven Rowell, Steven Rowell Read Free Book Online

energy out of people’s creative potential, and may kill it altogether.
    â€¢ After having a creative success, especially a tremendous success, too often people become consumed with thinking, “How am I going to beat that?”—resulting in creative paralysis.
    Elizabeth Gilbert offered a wonderful reframing of our approach to creativity in her 2009 TED Talk when she said:
    But maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish, if you never happened to believe in the first place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being comefrom you but maybe you just believed they were on loan to you, from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along to someone else when you are finished. This changes everything.
    Wayne Dyer says in his new book
Wishes Fulfilled: Mastering the Art of Manifesting
, that he doesn’t write his books, instead he writes them by connecting to the “source.”
TAKING ACTION DESPITE OUR DIFFICULTIES
    Creativity can’t happen unless people decide to pursue it. —Robert Sternberg, psychologist
    Okay, but don’t get down—there is good news. David Kelley, founder of IDEO, a global design consultancy, teaches “creative confidence” at the d.school (Institute of Design) at Stanford University. He believes people fail to pursue creativity because of their lack of creative confidence. Kelley says of teaching creative confidence, “It’s to help them rediscover their creative confidence—the natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. We do this by giving them strategies to get past four fears that hold most of us back: fear of the messy unknown, fear of being judged, fear of the first step, and fear of losing control.”
    The opportunity of creativity is the mix of finding meaningful work and purpose in our lives, with self-expression and procreation, with the massive need to add more value. In this information age, we are now desperate for creative thinkerswho can digest and synthesize the mountains of data and experiences made instantly accessible by the Internet, and apply it all to the problems at hand, creating something anew out of the chaos.
    Despite a dreadful high school dropout rate of 56 percent and a college acceptance rate of only 30 percent at West Philadelphia High School, the West Philadelphia Auto Academy formed Team EVX to compete in the Automotive X PRIZE. Building a 100-mile-per-gallon (mpg) car created a project-based learning opportunity that provided students with real world experience ranging from engineering to public relations. The group engineered two impressive automobiles, with one achieving 65-mpg capabilities. It was also one of the youngest groups to compete in the global contest. View this video to learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-vqJVJQeNM .
    So keep your chin up—there is hope! In the next chapter you will discover that you are creative and have immense power within you to make a difference in this world through creativity. The rest of this book provides practical tools so you can engage and create, so let’s get busy.
    WORK IT
    Make a list of what fears or mental blocks keep you from unleashing your creativity.
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    Did you have any “Use a brown crayon…trees aren’t blue” experiences growing up? Is there an opportunity to shake off these limited thinking