Modern culture often labels creativity as natural given gift. Artists get showered with praise and proclamations of „you’re so talented,“ but truthfully, talent often only has little to do with it.
Creativity is a skill to be learned, practiced, and developed, just like any other skill as well. Juggling takes practice, as does surfing, coding, and driving a car and so on. Creativity is no different. The more you make creativity part of your daily life, the more it will grow and emerge.
Although we may have been reprimanded in school to „stop doodling and pay attention,“ it’s time to bring back the doodle. Doodling, contrary to popular opinion, does not demonstrate a lack of your focus. In fact, doodling can help you stay present and engaged during an activity in which you might otherwise find your mind drifting.
The truth is that every single individual can be creative. You simply require the right environment, stimulus, and support. Kids are awash with creative energy in part because they have not yet learned to fear the criticism of their peers or experienced embarrassment from failure. This is now why failure is lauded in adults it reflects creative, risk-taking endeavors. Though not all creative ventures will work out, ultimately some will. This is why Google goes to great lengths to provide employees with fun perks such as beach volleyball courts and free beer, a setup almost resembling an adult playground. The goal is to create an environment that lets employees feel relaxed and comfortable with vocalizing creative, even wacky, ideas. Businesses that value creativity need to do their best to foster a creative, safe space where unusual ideas are celebrated and where creativity is nurtured.
Though old-school business practice dictates group brainstorming as a powerful way to generate creativity, modern research has found that the group collective isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Instead, try new approaches to creative problem solving. Go for a walk. Physically move your body and consider your project problem from different locations. Physical movement has been shown to have a positive affect on creative thinking, just as theater pros suggest practicing lines in different poses and positions to generate new character approaches.
Sketching is a great way to preserve memories and make constructive use of time that might otherwise be spent fiddling on a phone. Buy a small, lightweight sketchbook that can easily fit in your bag. Start sketching whenever you have even a few spare minutes. Though you may be disappointed in your sketches at first, the more you draw, the better you’ll get. Don’t overanalyze your results, simply draw for the enjoyment of the process, not the end piece. Creativity seeps across activities, so sketching just a few minutes a day can result in a major boost of workplace creativity.
Many creative design companies encourage employees to keep toys on their desks–from Legos and Lincoln Logs to Play-Doh and origami paper. Building something physically with your hands, as opposed to typing on a keyboard, can be just the creative jolt you need.
Flash fiction is a form of writing consisting of extremely short pieces. There are many flash fiction writing groups online in which members write 100-word stories based on a provided prompt. That’s right, just 100 words. No one can say that’s out of their league.Have your own try at flash fiction writing. Join a community online, or start your own at work. No pressure, no need to share; it’s just a chance to get those creative juices flowing!
You could do anything except for doing absolutely nothing. What you do does not matter so much. But some ways of how to be creative are proven to turn on your genius even when you are deep in the gutter of self-doubt.
Do what you are under-skilled to do – if you know pretty well what you are doing you are probably jaded by now. Facing a tremendous creative challenge makes you go scrambling for solutions. That’s where creativity starts – either you sink or you swim.
Most creative ideas will seem silly at first. Get used to it.
Visualize – the cheapest hack for how to be creative is visualizing what you are doing. Visualizing anything at all gets you half way there. Persevere.
Do faster than you doubt – no matter how much you motivate yourself, self-doubt will creep in. The good news is there is a window of opportunity right before it to just get something done.
Mix unmixables – if there are two things you like, put them together. Mixing is creating.
Allow randomness – randomness is free, it’s floating around in your brain anyway. How do you capture it though if that giant wall of defense mentality is in the way? Write down your thoughts in the shower. What do you think about when you have nothing to think about? That’s it. You thought it was useless mind garbage, and it turns out that’s your most creative thoughts.
Dive deep – when one thought leads to another and then to another, your mind is just taking you on a tour of how it works. Don’t cut it off just because it’s irrelevant. Maybe that’s a hidden insight you just don’t see yet.
Think simple – to figure out what you are thinking, put every though into one sentence. That’s it. If you can’t, you probably don’t know what you are thinking. Your mind may just be digesting shreds of some other dogma you heard somewhere.
Make connections – the brain works by connecting neurons. The more physical connections the better you know something. Of course you can’t hack your brain to physically connect things, but we know that just thinking about how things connect builds those physical neuron connections.
Face your fears – whatever you are afraid of you fear for a reason. Self-doubt, hidden potential – whatever the reason is the fear is not helping you. Once you face your fear you will get emotional about it. Channel that emotion into creating something.
Stay hungry – as Steve Jobs famously said. Hungry people have nothing to lose. What do you have to lose? Do you have a better path in life than being creative?
Be brave – creativity ruffles feathers, even offends people. True genius can scandalize. Be brave in the face of criticism.
Use what you got – if you just need a few more classes or just another book to read before you start – hold that thought – if you really want to create do it here and now and with what you got. And if it turns out awful – improve it. But don’t put creation off until better times. They never come.
Better done than perfect – get it done now, and you can always iterate later, but let it sit around because of your perfectionism, and it dies.
Destroy (creatively) – adding things to something is not the only way to create. Destruction is creatively in the reverse order. A bra was created by destroying the corset.
Don’t ask “why?” ask “why not?” – ask why not and you will often be stumped. There is often no reason not to do something.
Collaborate – there is someone out there in the world right now who is thinking about the same things you are. Why put your brains together?
Stretch ideas – stretching your mind and ideas means pushing them to go where they don’t want to go. It hurts like doing splits. But it opens you up to new possibilities.
Serve your reader ( viewer, user, etc) – whatever you create it’s for someone to use. Visualize what they will see it. Make it easy on them.
Useless unless used – clear your mind from pseudo-knowledge – things that were imposed on you in school or elsewhere. If what you know is not helping you, let it go. It may not even be true after all.
Do first think later – yes, that is a reverse of the regular parental advice. The problem with thinking first is that you’ll probably talk yourself out of doing it. So better do first. Doing is creating.
One man’s trash is your treasure – you source of creativity might come from something others think is trivial or even worthless. Free stuff that no one wants may be your creative playground.
Finish before you lose faith in you – when you are about to give up you must finish first. That way after you gave up you can have a finished product for people to see. It be turn out to be a masterpiece. No one bought Van Gogh’s paintings before he killed himself. Lucky for he finished most of them before going completely mad.
Listen for the hidden insight – creative insight is something obvious that we all take for granted, but not you because you watch closely what people say and do.
Imagine that all is possible – if it’s impossible now, it will probably be possible in the future. Don’t let perceived impossibility stop you.
It’s always to early to quit – quitting means stop doing. That’s not an option for creators. You have to keep at it. You’ve got no other choice. No one is going to do it for you. It will never get itself done. Keep going.
The rest of the world likes to think of us “creative types” as fun-loving, free-living quirky folk who flit around without a care in the world. They have this idea that it’s easy to be creative. Whether you’re having difficulty getting the creative process started, or your mind is clogged with far too many overlapping thoughts and partial ideas from who-knows-where, the pressure to consistently create quality work is stressful. And stress just makes the situation worse. So when you face these stumbling blocks, what do you do? Fortunately, there are some fairly easy fixes for creative droughts like this.
Start collecting interesting ideas from articles, books, blog posts you’ve read, funny things that come up during the day. Jot down notes whenever an interesting idea strikes you, clip articles and tape them into your notebooks, become an Evernote junkie. Save information, write down whole paragraphs, sentence fragments, titles, slogans – anything that strikes you as interesting. It’s much easier to be creative when you’re surrounded by interesting ideas.
Real creativity comes from intersections. Intersections of ideas, of cultures and of disciplines. We all have a pretty finite scope of experience. Just by the fact of being who we are, we develop a kind of tunnel vision. Electricians think about watts and volts most of the day – so their mental world is heavily influenced by that type of thinking. Writers think about words, structure and how to communicate ideas. So our world is influenced by that kind of thinking. To be creative, you need to start looking at where your world collides with other worlds.
Let’s say you’re an architect working on a project. While most of your research and preparation for the project would be architectural in nature. Go read about water polo or gaming. Grab a book or magazine on a topic you wouldn’t normally read. Genius often happens when two unrelated areas collide.
A great way to be more creative and generate some brilliant ideas is to do some mega-brainstorming. Just get out a pen and paper or open up your laptop and generate as many ideas or thoughts on one given topic as you can – before you stop to evaluate any of them. Write every single idea down without thinking – even if they’re totally bizarre.
The important thing when doing this exercise is that you postpone judgment of your new ideas because if you judge it too soon, your brain will compare it only to what is already known within your established area of expertise.
Learn to trust that your brain can spot the significant. If something – anything – jumps out at you and makes you notice it, then it likely resonates with you on some level. It has some importance to some remote corner of your brain. That’s why you noticed it.
You may not know why it’s important just yet, but it will cross-reference with something for you in the future and possibly give you your next big idea. This is why if you want to be creative, it is vital to record your thoughts and ideas. You need to let your neurons make the connections for you… it’s their job.
Over time, you will collect huge volumes of information. Make sure you review all your saved notes on a regular basis. Remember: if you made the effort to write it down or save it, it must have had some value to you. Going back over old notes and comparing them to newer notes will often result in an explosion of ideas from those interesting intersections I’ve been telling you about.
As you gather more information, you will naturally and immediately make the obvious connections. For instance, after clipping articles and writing notes for a few weeks, you might connect different pieces of information on, say time management – and a fresh, new angle for your writing will come to you. The more information you collect, the more obvious connections you will make – generating a greater number of ideas.
If you’ve been collecting information from unusual places, go back over your notes and see if you can discover an overlap between your area of expertise and the new, unusual areas. Hunt for intersections in the random and unrelated. It is in this intersection between the usual and the random that some of the best ideas are born. These ideas may seem weird or different at first, but don’t dismiss them. Instead, be ready to receive them when they come.
When you have been stewing over a project and everything looks like a big gnarly knot to you, often the best thing you can do is to shut down, log off and let it incubate. Go do something totally unrelated and come back to it later. Maybe later that day, maybe later that week. Just get away from it for a while. Ideas have a way of incubating in our brains when we stop actively obsessing over them.
Hopefully you’ve got a few new ideas from this post – or a new angle on an old idea. Reading is well and good – but for positive change to occur, you have to implement. Some of these tips are mere perspective shifts that you can put into play right now. Others are habits that you’ll have to make an effort to form over time.
In order to become an advertiser in today’s fast paced and fiercely competitive business world, it is important to have the right knowledge, skills and educational qualifications to stand out in the crowd of new and varied services and products that all seem to be vying for your customer base!
If you are fueled by the passion to present a product or service as positively as possible so it communicates with the potential customer- visually, vocally, via the written word or a combination of these methods – then check out the steps for becoming an advertiser below:
Personal aptitude for an advertiser’s job is essential to securing it in the future apart from having the necessary qualifications for the same. This means being an original thinker, good at conceptualizing and actualization of ideas, clarity of vision and insight into the customer’s needs, creative thinking skills combined with knowledge of marketing strategies to improve sales and enhance business visibility.
A minimum Bachelor’s degree in Arts, e.g. Public Relations, Design, etc. with specialized course in advertising, creative or fine arts or sales or, a B.Sc. in Advertising Marketing is the minimum for starting off as an advertiser. Follow this up with a master’s program in communication arts, or market research, concept creations, creation and management of marketing campaigns based on prior research and use of different mediums for promoting services and products to improve your job scope in bigger and better agencies or branch out on your own after gaining sufficient experience as an Advertiser. You should know the various means and reach of advertising using different channels, such as television, radio, print ads, billboards, besides the Internet and possess the ability to discern which one (or a combination) of these will best suit your product/service.
Advertising has always been a glamorous career option. However, the kind of growth this particular skill set has witnessed over the recent years is phenomenal. Of the many other duties that will constitute your life as a freelance Advertiser some important ones, include:
There is no doubt that you need skills to perform a task well. It holds true even for Advertising, a field, which is witnessing a digitisation, with newer practices evolving each day. Some specific skills, which will hold you in good stead as an advertiser, include:
You can develop and hone these skills through various platforms. Entrepreneur, Open2Study,ELearn, Unversal Class and Lyndaoffer many online courses where you can learn the basics of or hone your already established skills on Advertising.
Advertising is one of the most lucrative career options today. The social media revolution has made it even more apparent. Recent studies have suggested that social media generates more than 70% of revenue through adverts. In this world, where opportunity is plentiful, let’s see what kind of things can give you an edge over completion. Most freelancers face minor hiccups; you will have no colleagues to moan too, or to share lunches with and the instability caused by the absence of a weekly cheque. However, you can become successful, or indeed set off down the path to success, by following certain tips, as
Advertisers earn handsome salaries and are usually quite well off. They are the face of the organisation. Thus, their remuneration depends on many factors, and they are usually rewarded for a good outreach and sometimes punished for a lack of one. You may view it as you wish, but the fact remains that if you are good with your work, there is enough money to be earned. As with other freelance opportunities, there are essentially two types of engagements offered, the fixed-price model, and the hourly payment model. Therefore, what can you earn as a freelance advertiser?
Usually freelance portals offer various kinds of payment models. In the fixed-price model, the price is usually pre-determined. The hourly model is the most popular and employers usually pay a predetermined sum per hour. Finally, in the project-budget based model, you often need to auction for such projects. Usually a fixed price model may range from 20- 200€ and upwards, while you have to pitch for hourly projects, and budget payments, which usually range from 5- 35€ an hour. On an average people can earn 22€ an hour.
It is not tough to find work as a freelance advertiser. It is among the top careers and many organisations are waking up to the advantages of having a good online advertiser in place. As with other freelance initiatives, the first agenda you must have is to create a Facebook page and market the services you offer. Furthermore, invite your friends, family, and acquaintances to like the page. Werbeagentur Aschaffenburg