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Thursday, September 15, 2016

Creativity Exercises

I've been listening to a lecture series on creativity. I'm not very far into it yet, but there's been one episode with an exercise in it and it was sort of interesting. Maybe not too helpful, though? I'm not sure about it.

The exercise was to use a random word generator and try to think on a different path, one guided by this unconnected word. The example the professor gave involved "Tadpole" and he showed how the person used that word to come up with a solution to a teacher shortage in a school system.

Okay, I can see how the solution this person came up with sort of fell into line with the word. Hmm, I thought. I found an online word generator and got my word. I did it again. And then a third time, this time requesting a word with more than one syllable.

Three times and I didn't find it particularly helpful, but I'm going to give it another shot. I was distracted while I was trying to use my words and that's not conducive to creativity.

Creativity is one of those skills that grows the more you use it and I think it stretches it further if you try to make your brain work in new ways. That's why I'm going to try that random word thing again and why I'll try any other exercises that come up in the lecture series because no matter how silly something might sound, you never know what paths it might open up. Brains can be strange things.