5 Boring Ways to Become More Creative

Creative people don’t usually invent new, unique ideas – they renew the old.

Creative people often live interesting lives, and creative work can be surprising or exciting – but the creative process itself? Boring. Most creation turns out to be fairly pedestrian: The creator dusts off existing material or ideas and blends them with a new element or gives them a twist – such as when the writers of a timeworn story about drug dealing thought of making the main character a middle-aged white man, and voilà, Breaking Bad.

An essential skill for people who want to develop their creativity, this process – termed “divergent thinking” – accounts for almost all creative work. The creative process consists mainly of work, study and production – not inspiration or even, usually, inventing new things. And that means anyone can learn creativity and become good at it.

Create by adding value to existing ideas or elements, or to undervalued material.

To produce creative work, you’ll have to do more than just refresh familiar ideas or resuscitate old material – you need to ensure you’re adding...