In the bathroom, bed or bus, not infrequently these are the places where it is claimed that creative people get the ideas there that later made them world famous. As the following and many other examples show, creative ideas often come precisely when the person in question is, to all appearances, thinking about something else or nothing in particular.
The genesis of great ideas
- Archimedes, for example, rushed out of the bath into the streets of Syracuse shouting, “Eureka!” He had solved the problem that had been bothering him for days: how to measure the volume of an irregularly shaped body, such as a golden crown.
- Frederick von Kekule, slumbering sitting by the fire, had a dream that gave him the idea that the structure of the benzene molecule, which seemed so difficult to explain, could be ring-shaped. The result was the birth of a new branch of science, the chemistry of aromatic compounds.
- When Henri Poincare boarded a bus for a geological excursion, he had a sudden intuition about an elementary mathematical property of certain functions that he had discovered shortly before and that had been on his mind for days.
Creativity is encountered everywhere
Is creativity a skill that distinguishes only the great poets and thinkers to the greats of advertising and fashion? No, creativity is encountered everywhere. Possibly some spontaneously hum their own upper voice to a hymn or improvise jazz on the living room piano. Others, on the other hand, show how creative they are when they put together a costume for the ball in the twinkling of an eye or repair a broken car without much prior knowledge.
Certainly, whether this idea or that person is creative is debatable. But what does it mean to be creative? Creativity, according to one of the countless definitions, is the ability to produce more, more original, more economical ideas, points of view, possible solutions and opinions than the average in a shorter time than others. Such abilities slumber, one believes the science, in principle in each humans. It is therefore a matter of awakening, developing and strengthening these abilities.
Creativity needs free space
The worst enemy of creativity is routine, be it the monotony of thought or the excessive demands of the daily grind. Creativity needs free space and, apart from quite spontaneous ideas, the opportunity to think things through in peace and quiet.
From a professional point of view, creative people not infrequently withdraw for hours or days at a time until they have come up with a good idea or a creative thought. For the average person, this is an almost impossible procedure, because who has the time to let ideas grow and mature in their “closet” for days on end? And yet there are people who suddenly have an idea that will not let them go until they have implemented it.
Creativity versus actionism
Having good ideas is only one side of creativity, implementing them consistently another. Those who get bogged down with good ideas and their implementation confuse creativity with “actionism”. Creativity is in fact the ability to analyze problems, to break them down into sub-problems and thus into solution steps, and then to tackle them “step by step”.
