What is Creativity and How to Improve Creative Skills

Critical and creative thinking are the two most basic thinking skills. Critical thinking is a matter of thinking clearly and rationally. Creativity consists in coming up with new and relevant ideas. To be a good and effective thinker, both kinds of thinking skills are needed.

For many people, creativity is something reserved for scientists or artists. But this is to ignore the fact that we are faced with countless problems in our daily life, and it is precisely creative thinking that helps us come up with solutions to these problems. We need to make use of our creativity whether we are thinking about how to get more marks or how to make our freinds happier.

Many students also seem to think that creativity is a matter of waiting for inspirations. How inspiring ideas come about is however regarded as a rather mysterious process, and it is just a fact that some students are more creative than others. But it would be a mistake to think that creativity is a passive state of mind. While it is true that there is no special algorithm for creativity, there are thinking skills that can be taught and things one can do to enhance one's creativity.

To come up with something new is to produce something that is distinct and special. In order to be creative we must be ready to deviate from the ordinary and the traditional. This implies a certain courageous exploratory attitude and curiosity in one's character.

But where do new ideas come from? The simple answer is that new ideas are actually old ones rearranged in a new way. This applies to everything under the sun whether making a small toy car or making a big space shuttle. How do we generate new ideas from old ones? Simply speaking, ideas are usually composed of different elements, and we look for new combination of ideas by joining different ideas together, deleting some elements, or replacing some elements by other ones. As a concrete example, consider the so-called "FASTSKIN" swimsuit that was introduced by the company Speedo around 1996. Main goal in designing a swimsuit for athletes is to reduce the total amount of drag over the surface of the swimsuit. The company's researchers noticed that sharks are able to move very fast in water in part because of V-shaped ridges. Researchers designed swimwear fabric emulating sharkskin that produced less drag and turbulence. At the Sydney Olympics in 2000, 28 of 33 Olympic Gold Medal winners wore this type of swimsuit, testifying to its success. So the ingredients for creativity depend on the store of ideas that are available for recombination. If you have a limited domain of knowledge, you will have fewer resources to draw from in forming new ideas. This is why curiosity and a knowledge base can significantly enhance one's creativity. This is also why it can be useful to try to solve a problem by consulting other people with different expertise.

WISH YOU ALL MORE CREATIVE SKILLS!!!