Are You Stuck in a Creative Rut?

Are You Stuck in a Creative Rut?

I often generate great ideas, but over the past year or so, the creative pump has not been working properly. I get some ideas, but far from the amount that I am accustomed to generating so I am feeling very frustrated. Many people have a vision of a light bulb and ta-da, like magic, a great idea hits you like a ton of brick. Although it is a compelling image, great ideas are seldom born that way. You have to create a fertile ground for the ideas to percolate before your Eureka moment occurs.

5 Steps to Generating Great Ideas

Step One: Preparation
Step Two: Working Over the Problem in Your Mind
Step Three: Incubation
Step Four: Illumination
Step Five: Verification/Implementation

Related Posts

Summary of a Technique for Producing Great Ideas by James Webb Young
The Formula for Generating Great Ideas
The Secrets of Creative Problem Solving

I have been stuck-in-a-creative-rut, but did not recognize it until a few days ago. And you would not believe how it happened – during a tarot card reading. I attended an event, and there was someone who knew how to read Tarot cards, so I went for it, and it was a lot of fun. During the reading, I realized that I had been suffering from creative burnout. Let's dissect this…I have been pursuing an informal liberal arts education so I have been reading the classics. But there are times when I get bored, so I step out of that mindset and read other books. The problem for me is that when I evaluate my recent reading habits, the books are not as diverse and they could be, and I kept on reading the same kinds of books. Yes, there were the odd times when I read books I usually wouldn't read, but it was infrequent.

There is much that we can learn from classic literature, but we have to find a way to bridge ancient and modern wisdom to gain the most benefit from reading. I do not read a lot of business books because I do not think that most business books make you think. Additionally, I have often read that the most successful people do not read business books for the same reason. But we have to be careful of adopting a rigid mindset, because that will hinder creativity.

Yesterday, I decided to take a day off, and I grabbed a book to read, then I shortly abandoned it, then I grabbed another book, and I shortly abandoned that one as well. I realized that those books were not the books that I should be reading, and that's why I could not get into them. I will read those books, but there are other books that I need to read first. Despite not reading many business books, I went against my beliefs and purchased several because I found the titles on two different lists and they sounded interesting to me. I am currently reading Storyscaping: Stop Creating Ads, Start Creating Worlds by Gaston Legorburu, Darren McColl, and I am thoroughly enjoying it because I am learning things that I can apply right now. I will immediately follow Storyscaping with Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology by  Bob W. Lord and Ray Velez; Think Like A SheEO: Succeeding in the Age of Creators, Makers and Entrepreneurs by Vicki Saunders and M J Ryan; Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science by Alex Pentland; and The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. These books are not your ordinary business books.

I am reading the books listed above because I need to get out of my creative rut, but I also need to step beyond my comfort zone and open myself up to radical ideas. This is the time for me because I have been paying close attention to reading globally – reading books by authors born in a variety of countries. The more I think about the concept of reading globally, the more I realize that it is much more than that, and I finally got what it meant to read broadly. When someone recommends that you read broadly, that sounds vague. Now that I intentionally read books written by authors born in a variety of countries, to me, reading broadly means, multicultural diversity, gender diversity, genre diversity, age diversity, historic period diversity and so on.

So if you are like me, and stuck in a creative rut, the best thing to do is to start reading broadly. And if you are unsure of where to start, I have a few suggestions for you since I have reviewed books on this blog since the Spring 2009.

Further Reading

1. Review – Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy by Isadore Sharp
2. Book Review: The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles fro Breakthrough Success
3. Review: The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service
4. Review of Bunker Bean by Harry Leon Wilson
5. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, a Book Review
6. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, Book Review
7. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Review
8. BrainRead – Effective Speed Reading – Reading like the Swedish by Göran Askeljung
9. A Look at Foundation’s Edge, Foundation and Earth and Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov
10. The Call of the Wild by Jack London, a SummaReview
11. Summareview of The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Book Review
13. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Key Takeaway

Reading broadly is critical for generating great ideas and for creative problem solving.

3 Ways to Apply the Information

1. Read the blog posts listed under Further Reading.
2. Choose one of the books to read.
3. If any of the posts resonates with you, please share on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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Author Bio: Avil Beckford, an expert interviewer, entrepreneur and published author is passionate about books and professional development, and that's why she founded The Invisible Mentor and the Virtual Literary World Tour to give you your ideal mentors virtually in the palm of your hands by offering book reviews and book summaries, biographies of wise people and interviews of successful people. Connect with me on Facebook and Twitter.

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