They Think Before They Act
It takes time to run through all that raw material in the brain. This is why creative people tend to think before they act. They play with the issue in their minds for a time, looking at a range of possibilities before choosing a direction. I see this when I work with creative people. When you give an average person a creative challenge, she tends immediately to try and come up with ideas. But because her mind is too focused on the issues of the challenge, her ideas are limited in scope as well. They are conventional, obvious ideas. The highly creative person, on the other hand, tends to turn the problem around in her head. She asks questions, thinks about it in various scenarios and brings seemingly unrelated information into her problem solving. For example, if you ask an averagely creative person to come up with ideas for things you could do with a big box (for example, the kind of box a new washing machine might be packaged in), she will immediately think of boxes and their usual uses: storage, children's toys, perhaps protection against the elements. A highly creative person would go further. She might think about using a box as a children's toy (as would most people), but she would also think about the kind of games children might play in a box. She might imagine climbing into the box and then wonder what it would be like. She might think about tearing apart the box and what to do with the pieces - perhaps use them for kindling for a fire or raw material for a sculpture. She might invert the box in her mind and climb on top of it. What would happen if she did that, she might wonder. All of these thoughts enable her to come up with many more ideas than the averagely creative person. But these thoughts all come from her mind. She is simply using more of her mind and its memories, thoughts and notions in order to construct ideas. Incidentally, the highly creative person does not focus on her left brain or right brain for a simple...
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