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Failure is a necessary part of the creative and learning experience. Embrace it as such, and commit yourself to learning from your failures and your mistakes. This way, you'll grow to see every failure as an opportunity for improvement and innovation rather than an obstacle or a limit on your success. Sometimes we get ideas that seem to vanish before we've committed them to paper. Many thoughts are seemingly random and disconnected. Try drawing a mind map on a piece of paper. Now, because you can see your ideas, you might be able to understand them and their relationships better. List your seemingly random ideas. Pick some of your most intriguing ideas, and write them on various places on a sheet of paper. Place them according to how you think they are connected. Draw lines connecting ideas. Draw spur lines of important ideas and connect them to lesser ideas. Taking a little time to contemplate the world or to reflect on things will help expand your horizons. Spending time alone will also enable you to consider problems you've been trying to work through and find new solutions that you might not have thought about before. Having an open mind will enable you to think about problems that you might not have thought about before. You'll also be able to engage ides and ways of doing things that you were previously hesitant about. Part of this is accepting the position that there are often many ways to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Accept that there are many ways to view the world. Then you can see that there are many ways to be creative and solve problems. Understand that you don't know everything, and every activity is a learning experience. Consider unpopular or even "weird" ways of viewing things or solving problems. These unconventional ideas or views might just give you a creative spark. Actual creating is the best practice to train your brain for creativity. There are a number of things you can do to train your brain in this way: Drawing. If you enjoy drawing, draw. It does not really matter if you think you're good at it. Writing. If you enjoy writing, write. Actual writing (fiction or non-fiction) is the best way to hone and develop your thoughts and your creative impulse. Build. If you enjoy building things, whether it be abstract art or basic carpentry, you should build. This will stimulate your creative juices, and you might wind up building something really cool! Try to get outside of your comfort zone and the "box" you typically function within. Think about a problem you are trying to solve in different ways. Embrace different perspectives, and maybe try to view the problem as an opportunity. For example: If your goal is to build a fence, think about the purpose of building a fence. Then focus on what you hope to achieve by building a fence. If you're trying to keep deer from eating your prize flowers, maybe consider other options like spraying your flowers with organic soap to deter the deer. If you're trying to solve the problem of fuel efficiency in car, perhaps think about it as a transportation problem instead. Instead of just trying to build a more fuel efficiency engine, you can scale down the size of a car or even identify alternate modes of transportation for people. Don't fear starting all over if you think a line of inquiry or something you've been working on has failed you. Just start over and re-conceptualize. Remember, being productive and creative are different. You just need to judge for yourself when you need to be creative and when you need to achieve productivity, or both. Someone can be highly productive while not being creative at all. Creativity entails finding new ways to solve problems and making or creating things that are unique. Productivity entails producing something, but can often be done in a non-creative and workman-like way.
Embrace your failures. Make a mind map that will help you visualize your thoughts. Reserve some time alone so that you can think about stuff. Dedicate yourself to having an open mind. Work with your hands and/or your head to create new things. Re-conceptualize problems. Differentiate between creativity and productivity.