This post is the second of three posts to present some creativity-related beliefs from music and how to transfer them to the world business. While I am neither a professional musician nor a business consultant or a remarkably creative person these ideas might be inspiring for some of you.
In my first post I argued how creativity can be fostered by exposing yourself to stimulus. In the next few paragraphs I will continue my explanation of the three-stage process by introducing the concept of capturing creativity.
Creativity does not work from nine to five like a “normal” office worker. Instead, creativity is more like a suicide bomber. It suddenly appears, explodes and then vanishes. Unfortunately, you can never know when it will reappear again. What you can do, however, is to prepare yourself for your sudden spark of creativity: Arm yourself with recording devices, notebooks or useful smartphone apps and stay prepared to capture your personal two seconds of creativity - come what may. (Compare this idea also with Robert Fabricant's (@fabtweet) notion of the externalization of ideas.)
In my few short years of casual playing and writing music in and for bands and orchestras one theme has reappeared again and again: If you have an idea - be it a melody, a chord progression, or a couple of lyrics - you should record it immediately. "Recording" takes different forms whether it occurs in a group context or in an individual context: When we improvise in my band we always have a recording device running, be it a rather old-fashioned MiniDisc or an iPhone. This allows us to capture creative moments and then listen to them individually, refine them and finally write down important parts.
Turning to the individual context, if you are on your own and you have a cool idea you should write it down immediately too, before it disappears. If you are interrupted by a phone call or an important e-mail you better start multi-tasking than forgo a potentially disruptive idea. (Here I apologize to all those people who had phone conversations with me while I was writing down a song ;-)). If you do not have pen and paper at hand there is another trick used by many musicians I had the opportunity to talk to: Call yourself at home and sing the tune onto your answering machine (in the 21st century you can also record it onto your smartphone). It may sound weird but it is much worse to come home from a long day not remembering that one exciting melody.
During the last year I tried to apply the principle of absolutely recording spontaneous ideas to business. First, I was struggling because I missed appropriate tools (calling my answering machine did not seem quite appropriate). Nowadays I think there are two ways to make use of spontaneous creativity in business. The more bohemian one is the good old Moleskine, the techie way is to use Evernote on your smartphone. Both are very effective!
The first and foremost requirement, however, is to have the discipline to write down even seemingly bad or unimportant ideas that spark spontaneously. Some ideas are gems that need to be polished to recognize their beauty, some ideas are just crap. Still other ideas might not be useful now but can turn out to be important later in your life. By writing down all ideas you make sure you do not miss the gems, while you can still get rid of the crappy ideas later on. The initial concept for this blogpost sparked when I was traveling home from university. Although I did not have time to write down the full post I still could jot down the most important ideas using Evernote. Usually, it is worth taking 20 seconds to write your thoughts down. Furthermore, it might lure at least some people into thinking that you are a quite creative person!
What do you think of this post? Write a comment!
In part III I will write about how to communicate the ideas you have recorded to others. Follow me on Twitter and I will let you know when it will be posted!
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