The Creativity Toolkit

Stifling Creativity

Children burst with creativity. For them, the world is a series of possibilities. Every moment is an opportunity to invent something. But what happens to children when they grow up and enter the world of business? Influenced by social or business conventions, they lose their creative knack. In reality, they have only buried their creativity; it is waiting just below the surface, as eager as ever to transform the world. Let it out. You do not lose your creativity as you grow older. You simply use it less, because you think it has no practical application. Like any other skill that isn’t practiced, it grows stale. The environment that you grow up in, first as an adolescent and then as a young professional, is largely to blame for stifling your creativity. But if you can recognize exactly how, you can start recovering one of your most precious resources.

The first enemy of creativity is education. When you are taught to memorize the right answers, use someone else’s solution, and collect other people’s knowledge, you are "un-taught" to find your own answers, solutions, and knowledge - or how to approach problems creatively. Likewise, when you enter...