Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- Embark on a transformative journey with Tina Seelig’s “Creativity Rules,” a book that not only demystifies the creative process but also empowers you to bring your ideas to life.
- Discover the keys to unlocking your creative potential and turning imagination into reality. Dive into the full article to gain insights and actionable strategies from “Creativity Rules” by Tina Seelig.
Creativity can feel hard to control and difficult to summon. Maybe you never know when your creative inspiration will show up, and you spend hours in front of your desk struggling with creative blocks. As a solution, Tina Seelig explains how to turn your creative impulses into a simple, accessible set of attitudes and actions. In this book summary, you’ll learn how you can put your creativity to work for your professional ambitions, your personal dreams, and your life.
Use these concrete steps to harness your creative power.
READ THIS BOOK SUMMARY IF YOU:
- Need a new strategy for productivity
- Want reliable plans to increase creative output
- Are curious about how the right attitudes can help you lead a more satisfying life
Introduction
Creativity can be tough to define and harness. Sometimes creativity seems like an erratic muse whose presence is sporadic at best. Other times, creativity can feel like a spark of genius that requires infinite coaxing. But creativity doesn’t need to feel fragile or fleeting; it can be reliable and concrete.
Tina Seelig explains that creativity can be a collection of skills and attitudes that you develop and improve the more you use them. By thinking of creativity as a reliable strategy, rather than a fickle muse, you can increase your creative energy and put it to work in service of your goals.
Seelig’s framework, which she calls the Invention Cycle, consists of four phases: imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Each successive phase builds on the one that came before it. More specifically, imagination produces creativity, creativity produces innovation, and innovation produces entrepreneurship.
Seelig illustrates this progression through the example of learning to talk. Infants begin the speech process by producing various babbling sounds. Babbling turns to words, words turn into sentences, and sentences turn into ideas. What begins as play and experimentation gradually develops into increasingly complex expressions and nuanced ideas.
The Invention Cycle begins the same way. Imagination is the “babbling” part of the process, where you get to try new things, ask questions, and play. It’s the phase where you envision realities that don’t yet exist and allow your mind to run free. It’s your day off from work when you seek new sources of inspiration in movies or books. It’s the unexpected situations that inspire fresh problem-solving.
The second phase, creativity, is the focused application of your imaginative power, the moment when you take all of these playful ideas, experiences, and dreams, and then apply them to a problem or situation. If imagination is the ammunition, creativity is the direct attack. Seelig uses the example of painting a landscape. If imagination is the pre-painting phase, where you observe the sea shore and dream up ways to capture it, creativity is when you pick up your brush and put paint on the canvas.
The third phase, innovation, is another intensification of your previous processes. If creativity is the phase in which you develop ideas that are new to you, innovation is the phase where you develop ideas that are new to the world. In other words, you’re not just making a new idea. You’re making a groundbreaking idea. You’re creating a landscape painting that will change the art world and forever shape how artists choose to paint seashores. Just as Vincent van Gogh changed how you see sunflowers and Steve Jobs changed how you think about phones, an innovative idea changes everything.
Finally, entrepreneurship is the phase in which your idea inspires other people. It restarts the Invention Cycle for someone else. Consider the iPhone: not only was it an innovative idea, it created new opportunities for other people to be creative. Because of the iPhone, other people invented apps that let them shoot movies, find true love, and track their money with their phones.
Each phase of the Invention Cycle includes a combination of attitudes and actions, which maintain a symbiotic dynamic. In other words, it’s impossible to use just creative attitudes in your Invention Cycle. Your creative attitude requires creative actions. In the sections that follow, this summary will explain how to cultivate and nurture the requisite attitudes and actions for each phase of the Invention Cycle.
Phase 1: Imagination
Imagination is a state of play. It’s the safe space in which you can dream up new ideas and devise wild plans for your life. But how does this fruitful experimentation get started? How do you get inspired when your imagination is feeling flat?
Getting inspired comes from having an engaged attitude. It requires a certain willingness and an open mind that’s receptive to new possibilities. Say you’re looking for a new purposeful outlet in your life. Perhaps you explore that impulse by getting a job in a restaurant. You’re not doing this because it’s your dream to be a server. You’re doing it because a new experience will open you up to new ideas. For instance, a restaurant job could inspire all kinds of dreams. Maybe you’ll become extremely interested in the farm-to-table movement, or you’ll discover how much you like to cook, or you’ll meet a fascinating patron who introduces you to their political circle and takes you in a completely different direction.
Seelig argues that it’s the same mindset in the world of dating. If you’re the kind of person who deeply wants to get married, it’s not enough to sit inside your house and wait for your perfect spouse to knock on your door. You need to be willing to go on some dates. Will there be terrible dinners and failed relationships? Absolutely. But those experiences will teach you about what you really want in a relationship, and it’ll bring you closer to creating your ideal romantic partnership.
The moral of these examples? Try anything and everything when you’re attempting to jumpstart your imagination. New people, ideas, experiences, and problems will offer you all kinds of food for thought. Trying these new things requires an intentional decision to immerse yourself in the world. This is the attitude of engagement.
Remember that a creative life doesn’t usually include clear paths or straight shots. There’s no one answer that you need to find. Instead, throw yourself into something, anything. Start approaching the world with curious engagement, and see what those experiences inspire.
While imagination requires an engaging attitude, it also needs an action. This is the act of envisioning. When you envision, you connect your experiences to your ideas. You make a dream for yourself and see how the stuff of your life — your experiences and questions — can inform that dream.
Seelig regularly tells her students to practice their engagement by taking an hourlong walk and writing notes about everything they see and hear: every birdsong, every scrap of litter, every dilapidated house. She encourages them to ask questions about what they observe: What bird is this? Why is this neighborhood so full of garbage? Those questions and curiosities can become a playground for the imagination: What if you devised a Shazam-style app for recognizing birdsongs? Or assembled a group of neighbors to green up the neighborhood? Or started making eco-conscious sculptures out of the trash you collect on your street?
When you envision, you challenge yourself to expand the boundaries of what’s possible. And don’t rein yourself in, either. A vision can propel you forward, but if it’s too small or rigid, it can limit you, too. Make sure that your vision for your life and your world is expansive and flexible enough to accommodate the surprising throes of imagination.
Phase 2: Creativity
Creativity requires an attitude of inner motivation and motivation comes from what you love. When dreaming up new solutions to a given problem, make sure that those solutions resonate with you. For instance, the birdsongs on your neighborhood walk could lead to all kinds of ideas. You could take up bird-watching, take an interest in the sustainability of bird habitats, or build a birdsong app.
Whatever you choose, do it because you love it. Don’t just make a birdsong app because it feels like the most lucrative option. Don’t study bird habitats because you think you’d be good at it. Use your creativity in a way that feeds your soul and matters to you on a personal level. It is this intrinsic motivation that is the best key to success. Be honest with yourself about the things, ideas, and problems that truly motivate you.
Your motivated attitude will push you toward the act of experimentation. Experimentation means that you’ll engage in a process of trial and error. It means that you’ll come up with all kinds of ideas and test them in order to figure out which ones are most satisfying or successful.
As you participate in experimentation, remember that failure is normal and inevitable. If you’re going to carry out a series of experiments, it makes sense that not all of them will go as you plan or yield the desired results. Failure can be downright painful. It can make you feel worthless and it can make your inventive process seem pointless. That’s why it’s so important to have a strong, internal motivation. It’ll keep you going when failure begins to feel too burdensome.
Remember the dating example? Dating is full of failure. You’ve probably been on some terrible first dates and had some difficult breakups. After such trials, it’s easy to fall into despair and assume that the world is full of jerks and losers. It’s also easy to feel like there’s something wrong with you for being unable to lasso a perfect mate.
However, failure doesn’t have to be a source of discouragement. Failure can be a teacher. Maybe you dated a heavy-metal rocker, and it made you realize that what you really want is a partner who can share your love of opera. Maybe you dated a successful surgeon who didn’t have time to give you the kind of attention you needed. Or, maybe you dated someone who was beautiful and kind, but became volatile and violent during your arguments. While these experiences might feel like total failure, they also taught you about which qualities you want in a partner: someone who shares your interests, who spends quality time with you, and shows you respect even when you disagree.
In order to apply your imaginative power to given situation, you need to keep trying and retrying. Embrace your mistakes, gather your data, and then try again.
Phase 3: Innovation
It’s one thing to come up with an idea that’s new to you. It’s quite another to develop a revelatory idea that’s new to everybody else. This means taking your creativity to a new level.
To enter the innovation phase, you need an attitude that will help you make your creative edge even sharper. You need a focused attitude.
Focus means that you give more time to your chosen endeavor. It means carving out extra time and energy to take your ideas to the next level. To do this, you may need to take a hard, critical look at your life and your priorities. Are you taking on too many assignments at work, or doing too many favors for friends? If your life is too full, you may need to rearrange your schedule in order to make time for what matters most to you.
Sometimes it’s tough to give up certain commitments because you’re used to a life of scarcity. For example, pretend you’re a freelance writer. Maybe you go through a dry spell where the assignments and the money just won’t show up. Even when you do find work again, you pile it on high, afraid that if you say no to one job, all of the assignments will dry up again.
Learn to recognize when your life shifts from scarcity to abundance. If you’re already working full time, maybe you don’t need to hold onto your weekend waitressing shifts. If your children have moved out of the house, maybe you have enough time to pursue your deferred dreams. Know when you can say no to certain burdens and open yourself to your own priorities.
As you try to come up with ideas that will change not only your life, but also the lives of others, remember to practice the act of reframing. Remember to look at your situation from a variety of perspectives in order to discern unseen obstacles. Maybe the surrounding freeway noise creates obstacles for your birdsong app. Maybe your phone’s microphone isn’t sensitive enough to pick up the necessary sounds. Remember, too, that these kinds of roadblocks are a blessing. They offer the opportunity to be even more creative. No matter your project, changing your frame of reference will help you grow.
Phase 4: Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship requires a persistent attitude. It means that you let your ideas continue to flow, even if you think you’ve found the perfect answer or hit an impossible wall. Entrepreneurship requires pushing further than you thought was possible.
A persistent attitude requires grit. Grit is the human capacity to set goals and overcome setbacks. It’s the force that makes you keep going even when the going gets tough. Seelig adds that grit, not talent, is the biggest indicator of success. She cites the example of Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group. While you may be familiar with the success of Virgin Records and Virgin Mobile, you might not know that Branson had his share of failures, too. Virgin Cola, Virgin Clothes, and Virgin Cars, as well as numerous other Virgin ventures, were complete and total flops. But because Branson had grit, he pushed on and achieved success.
A persistent attitude leads to acts of inspiration. Inspiration comes from telling your success story in a certain way. It’s how you broaden your appeal, expand your audience, and increase your sphere of influence.
The Ice Bucket Challenge is a perfect example of inspiration. Back in 2014, individuals made videos of themselves dumping buckets of ice water over their heads, then posted those videos to the internet, and tagged three friends. The tagged friends could either donate to the ALS Association, or do the same ice bucket dump. The videos went viral. People who had no idea what ALS even was began to get involved. The strategy garnered tons of public attention for ALS and raised millions of dollars.
Inspiration is an important way to increase your following, your customer base, and your allies. See if you can tell your story in a way that will touch other people and motivate them to action as well.
Summary
Creativity might feel difficult and complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead, creativity can be a concrete, replicable strategy for success.
By learning how your imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship feed on and support one another, you can treat your creative energy as a series of actions and attitudes, rather than a fickle muse. Remember that the phases of the Inventive Cycle require both interior and exterior work. They demand proper attitudes and proper actions. By cultivating productive attitudes and practicing fruitful actions, you can rely on your creativity as a trustworthy process and use it in service of your goals.
Tina Seelig has a doctorate in neuroscience. A Stanford professor, TED speaker, and bestselling author, Seelig’s published work focuses on maximizing creativity and supporting entrepreneurship.
Genres
Motivational, Business, Self Help, Design, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Personal Development, Language, Writing, Management, Business Decision Making, Decision-Making and Problem Solving, Creativity
Review
In “Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and into the World,” Tina Seelig explores the dynamics of creativity and offers insightful strategies to unleash one’s creative potential. Through a blend of real-world examples, engaging anecdotes, and practical exercises, Seelig guides readers on a journey to transform their ideas into tangible outcomes. The book emphasizes the importance of mindset, resilience, and a willingness to take risks in the creative process. Seelig’s approach is not only informative but also encourages a hands-on, action-oriented approach to nurturing creativity.
Tina Seelig’s “Creativity Rules” stands out as a compelling guide to fostering creativity. Her storytelling captivates the reader, making complex concepts accessible. The practical exercises and real-life examples provide a roadmap for unlocking creativity, making this book a valuable resource for both aspiring and seasoned creatives. Seelig’s emphasis on the iterative nature of the creative process, coupled with her insights into the role of failure in innovation, adds depth and authenticity to her narrative. “Creativity Rules” is not just a book; it’s a mentor that inspires and empowers readers to turn their ideas into reality.