Divergent Thinking

Or also called Brainstorming.

"Brainstorming programs are ways to stimulate people to increase the fluency, flexibility, and originality of their ideas and responses.

Produce as many ideas as possible.

Identify a key word and then try to generate as many synonyms as possible.

Have as many different ideas as possible.

Quantity is importatnt, but try to avoid redundancy.  Variety in conversation, in the selection of music, in a menu, is generally appreciated.  It pays off to learn how to alternate topics of conversation, types of restaurants, kinds of shows, ways of dressing.

Try to produce unlikely ideas

It is more difficult to learn how to think in original ways than to learn how to be fluent and flexible.  It requires cultivating a taste for quality that is not necessary in the other two.

Changing Internal Traits: Shift from openness to closure

"Perhaps them most important duality that creative persons are able to integrate is being open and receptive on the one hand, and focused and hard-driving on the other.  Good scientists, like good artists, must let their minds roam playfully or they will not discover new facts, new patterns new relationships."

To keep enjoying something you need to increase its complexity

I think I get this, but not quite sure.  In the previous paragraph, he talks about trying to get more enjoyment out of mundane activities like brushing your teeth.  I have found if I try to be more precise in mundane activities, it helps to resent them less.  But in the next segment he goes on to say that that

Generally it is more satisfying to become involved in activities that are inexhaustible--music, poetry, carpentry, computers, gardening, philosophy, or deep personal relationships.
Most domains are so complex that they cannot be exhausted in a lifetime, not even the lifetime of the human race...

Have a specific goal to look forward to

Creative individuals... believe that there is something meaningful to accomplish each day, and they can't wait to get started on it... Before falling asleep (you) review the next day and choose a particular task that, compared to the rest of the day, should be relatively interesting and exciting... Eventually most of the day should consist of taks you look forward to, until you feel that getting up in the morning is a privilege, not a chore.

Again, the key to his post and the last is having that system of goals and plans so that you don't get distracted, discouraged or derailed when you have your own work to do instead of external pressures.  I've tried the card system, the calendar, lists.  I still don't have it down, but feel that I learn a bit from each system.  Just need to implement relentlessly!

Focus, don't get distracted

From the section on enhancing personal creativity,

Entropy, the force behind the famous Secon Law of Thermodynamics, applies not only to physical systems, but to the functioning of the mind as well  When there is nothing specific to do, our thoughts soon return to the most predictable state, which is randomness or confusion.... When there is not external force demaning that we concentrate, the mind begins to lose focus.  It falls to the lowest energetic state, where the least amount of effort is required. When this happens, a sort of mental chaos takes over.  Unpleasant thoughts flash into awareness, forgotten regrets resurface, and we become depressed.  Then we turn on the TV...Taking refuge in passive entertainment keeps chaos temporarily at bay, but the attention it absorbs gets wasted.  On the other hand, when we learn to enjoy using our latent creative energy so that it generates its own internal force to keep concentration focused, we not only avoid dpression but also increase the complexity of our capacities to relate to the world.

Follow "sparks" of interest

From Creativity, the fourth suggestion is to explore things that cross our path that interest us, an idea, song, or (in my own case), the origin of a word.  

"We are too busy to explore the idea, song, or flower further.  Or we feel that it is non of our business.  After all, we are not thinkers, singers, or botanists, so these things lie outside our grasp.  Of course, that's nonsense.  The world is our business and we can't know which part of it is best suited to our selves, to our potentialities, unless we make a serious effort to learn about as many aspects of it as possible.

  If your take time to reflect on how best to implement these four suggestions, and then actually start putting them into effect, you should feel a stirring of possibilities under the accustomed surface of daily experiences.  It is the gathering of creative energy, the rebirth of curiosity that has been atrophied since childhood.

Acquiring Creative Energy

The last segment of "Creativity" talks about enhancing personal creativity.  There are many suggestions.  The first is to overcome obstacles to have  incommitted attention to deal with novelty.  People who are too taxed and overworked can not be expected to learn a domain.  But often the obstacles are internal.  Too much energy defending the ego, too much energy centered on selfish goals. So the sick, hungry and cold need to spend all their energy on survival, the very rick and famous devote much of their time to getting more money and fame.  So one needs to divert some attention to the world around us on its own terms.

1.  Cultivate Curiosity and Interest

   a. Try to be surprised by something every day.  Experience this one thing for what it is, not what you think it is. " Be open to what the world is telling you. Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences--the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be."

2. Try to surprise at least one person every day.  Break a routine, express an opinion, experiment with your appearance.

3. Write down each day what suprised you and how you surprised others.  Keep a diary or notes. (Darwin and other intellectuals of his time kept journals of scientific thought.)  Keep it simple and it's fun to do. (I always lose my journal or notebook. Always. Sounds so easy, "keep a notebook and jot things down." Lost.)

Then try to look for patterns.

Avoiding Distractions

Many of these categories I realize have in inherent handicap for women.  Avoiding distractions suits a "mans world" much easier than a woman's.  But no excuses.  Just do the work.

Many of the peculiarieies attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process.  Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work.  The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it,  and the easier it is to get distracted...
Many of our respondents were thankful to their spouses for providing a buffer from exactly these kinds of distractions.  This was especially true of men; the women sometimes mentioned pointedly that they also would have liked to have had a wife to spare them from worries that interfered with their concentration on work.

Word.

Idling and simmering

from Creativity

Many artists interviewed in this book agree that it is important to let problems simmer below the threshold of consciousness for a time.  From the physicist Freeman Dyson

I am fooling around not doing anything, which probably means that this is a creative period, although of course you don't know until afterward.  I think that it is very important to b e idle.  I mean they always say that Shakespeare was idle between plays. I am not comparing myself to Shakespeare, but people who keep themselves busy all of the time are generally not creative.  So I am not ashamed of being idle.

Love what you do

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

(what schools need to do) is make us learn how to learn, to whet our appetite for knowledge, to teach us the delight of doing a job well and the excitement of creativity, to teach us to love what we do, and to help us to find what we love to do.

From Betrayal of the Self by Arno Gruen

Take your time

Not sure where this idea came from.  In something I was reading, if I find it I will give credit where it is due.  But the gist of it was that one artist/artisan said that when he was working on something challenging and complex, he would pretend he was in jail.  This sounds stark, but the point was that he would pretend that he had nothing else to do, and to take his time and not feel the pressure of a "due date."  I think this echoes a concept of savoring the process instead of the outcome.  The Bhagavad Gita says the same, not to be attached to the fruits of your labors.  But the idea of disengaging the time element of a project, and "pretending you're in jail" with nothing else to do,  could be quite powerful.

Update: Found the citation.  It is from a book called "Creativity" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (famous for his work on "flow.")

Jacob Rabinow uses an interesting mental techinique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition. 

 Yeah, there a trick I pull for this.  When I have a job to do like that, where you have to do something that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail.  Don't laugh.  And if I'm in jail, time is of no consequence.  In other works, if it takes a week to cut this, it'll take a week.  What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years.  See? This is a kind of mental trick...

Number of Failures is Irrelevant

"It doesn't matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once and then everyone can tell you that you are an overnight success."

from Mark Cuban, entrepreneur