Creativity is a tough thing. Whether you are painting, composing music, writing a story, doing scientific research, developing a business, or finding an original perspective for a paper or a presentation, it’s difficult to pin down exactly what enables some people to find new angles and modes of expression, while others cannot.  A lot of being creative is finding novel ways of looking at and arranging already existing forms and ideas. The first thing that this requires is that you have a wide variety of impressions from which to sample. The more broad your experience, the more fuel for your creative flames.

Getting Creative Principles:

1. Cross Genres

A lot of great “novel” ideas are really just new ways of applying established ideas from one field to an entirely different field. For instance, Darwin only came up with the theory of natural selection after reading the work of an economist named Malthus and applying his ideas about economics to biology. Post-modern artists revolutionized the art world by expressing philosophical ideas in art. Bands like Limp Bizket and Linkin Park have sold a whole lot of albums by fusing hip hop vocals with hard rock.

These days the whole world is divided into specialties. No one is just a teacher or a doctor or a banker. They are a math teacher, or a heart surgeon, or an international finance banker. As a result of this, there are loads of great ideas out there getting used in one narrow specialty or another that never get communicated to other professions where they might be put to great use. The same thing holds true in the art and music worlds, and in academia. There is real opportunity in this for open minded people to make tremendous contributions to their discipline of choice by learning about and applying ideas from seemingly unrelated disciplines. To take just one example, ReEvolution was founded by a medical student with a background in philosophy, anthropology, evolutionary biology, exercise science, and nutrition.

No matter what you do, it’s a sure bet that there are concepts out there in anthropology, or art theory, or economics, or international relations that could be applied in your discipline to amazing effect. The broader your exposures, the more likely you are to come across concepts and methods that you may be able to apply in novel and phenomenal ways. Resist the impulse to focus exclusively on the established material in your chosen field – there are more than enough people doing that already. Rather, embrace a variety of fields that interest you with an eye to synthesizing their various paradigms into a novel perspective. Not only is this a great way to make a meaningful contribution and get ahead in the world – it’s a lot more fun than walking down the same path as everybody else!