So if your creativity, like mine, sometimes needs a jump-start, here are a few thoughts I ve gleaned from both science and literature to help us see new possibilities in life. Explore a new paradigm Scientists define a paradigm as an established way of looking at things that keeps us from seeing them in any other way. Before Copernicus, most people saw the earth as flat. Sailing around the world was not an option because the world wasn t round. Make new associations Cognitive psychologists say that we all approach the world with a schema, a way of grouping things.
Creative people are able to associate ungrouped things and disassociate grouped ones.
Robert Fulton combined a steam engine with a sailing ship. Henry Ford separated the horse from its carriage. Then, place new things together and separate grouped ones. Authors who do this well write some of the best fiction, for ordinary life is really quite extraordinary. We, too, need the creativity to defamiliarize things, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.