How to Be More Creative Without Sacrificing Your Goals
Coffee Thoughts are short reflections on life direction, self-improvement, growth, and loosely formed general ideas that are designed to make you think. Subscribe and receive a new one every Saturday, along with a blog every Wednesday!
What’s the point of being creative? It’s about coming up with something new, unique, and original, usually associated with something artistic, like drawing, painting, or creating music.
But creativity is much more than that; it’s used in problem-solving and in coming up with new ideas, angles, and solutions to everyday obstacles, and when chasing a goal, there is no shortage of obstacles to overcome.
So, whether you're just trying to keep enough creativity alive to solve these problems or even to be “successful” within that creative pursuit itself, you’re going to run into a slight problem.
It’s no secret that success and achieving long-term goals are highly dependent on consistency, you repeat consistent actions to compound your returns until eventually, you succeed.
But consistency creates repetition, which creates routine, which creates predictability, which, unfortunately, kills creativity.
If the brain knows what’s coming, it switches off the parts of itself responsible for coming up with new ideas.
So how do we chase our goals and simultaneously keep our creativity alive? By using the mundane with a sprinkle of the unexpected, in other words, the 90/10 rule.
The idea is to spend 90% of your time building consistent action, repeating the stuff that has the biggest impact on your goals and allowing the compound effect to take full effect, and still make time and allow the completely unexpected to take over 10% of the time.
The truth is, I’ve made this up, not in a way that reduces its validity but in a way that the numbers and percentages are in no way set in stone and can be adjusted to whatever suits you best.
All you need to know is: Repetition, with a sprinkle of the unexpected.
If you never break routine, creativity dies, but if you constantly live in chaos, you’ll never build enough consistency that’s needed to succeed long term. Plus, live the unexpected for long enough, and it eventually becomes the expected anyway.
This is a reminder for habitual individuals to not let the occasional chaos completely unravel you. Routine is good, but it’s only good in relation to how often you abandon it for a day and just live.
Hit a creative rut? Do you want both creativity and long-term success? Then add a dash of the unexpected into your life every so often, and watch your ability to create and solve problems significantly improve.