THE CREATIVE PROCESS IS NOT RATIONAL

A major obstacle in the face of creativity is critiquing your ideas while you are coming up with them. When you are coming up with new ideas you want your imagination to go wild. You don’t want to apply rational thinking and hinder the creative process. No matter how unachievable, silly or impossible an idea may be, just go with the flow. Allow it to flourish till you exhaust your imagination. That’s where the magic happens.

After you exhaust your imagination and you are in the planning phase you can apply rational thinking and check whether your ideas make any sense. But if applied rational thinking during the creative phase you would be killing many great ideas before they are even born.

So if your imagination is telling you that your new business idea can take down giants like Google, or that your product will allow people to time travel, or that one day you will be riding elephants to the moon, just go with the flow. Later during the planning phase you can apply rational thinking and check whether your ideas make any sense.

This way of thinking could be applied to any new venture – a speech, an article, a business idea, a dance move, etc. Ernest Hemingway described this process in a very elegant and concise way when he said: Write drunk, edit sober.